True Identity

The identity of an adult is determined by his or her early childhood and adolescence. The components that determine who he or she is as a person include the child's physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development. An understanding is also required of the mental and physical health professionals, teachers, and, of course parents, about what a child is experiencing at any point in time throughout their life. Recognizing the basics of what and how a child grows, thinks, and understands are all aspects of acknowledging and honoring the child's needs. There also must be an understanding on how he or she forms certain attachments or relationships with others. Children's capacity to think, understand, interact with others, and form their own self image is based on their back and forth interactions with adults.

Middle childhood is when a child makes the most significant changes in their actual physical development. For instance, the child will be refining his or her motor skills, language acquisition, and physical capabilities. The adolescence and young adulthood is when a child makes the most remarkable collective developmental changes. An example of the collective development would be the intellectual, social, and emotional change. This stage is also the point at which the individual is making decisions regarding his or her personal identity, independence, special interests, experimentation, and the execution of future plans in terms of education and training.

While the adolescent is developing into an adult, he or she develops relationships that evolve into lifetime friendships or relationships that have temporary interaction. For example, he or she will recall back to their high school love interest, when they last spoke to someone they knew in junior high school, or even if they still have a relationship of any kind with people they knew during their adolescent years. Such relationships are continued because of extended family, a particular community, or religious involvement.

Cook, Herman, Phillips, and Settersten (2002) conducted research into the ways in which schools, neighborhoods, nuclear families, and friendship groups jointly contribute to how a person changes and forms relationships during adolescence. They explain that the majority of research hypothesis have supported the idea that "quality friendship groups stress the extent to which members identify with social goals that most adults interpret as conventional" (pp. 1284). Such a system is what can help the individual child in avoiding "delinquent or otherwise appositional peers" (pp. 1284).

A response to the child's parents, whether positive or negative, is certainly a key consideration in terms of how the child forms relationships with others. However, Beam, Chen, and Greenberger (2002) make special note of the important role played by non-parental adults in terms of how adolescents develop relationships. They explain that even though "parents are arguably the most important adults in the lives of most children" (pp. 305), children are definitely known to naturally "come into contact with a broader array of adults and develop increasingly important relationships with their peers" (pp. 305). Such contact with teachers, community or religious leaders, family or extended family members