“Experience in adolescence may also provide turning points that deflect earlier behavioral trajectories, and the unfolding of adolescence may allow for the accumulation of prior life advantages and risks that send young people on divergent paths into and through adulthood.”
As an aspiring ENL teacher, I often read articles thinking in terms of how this information could apply to immigrants and/or English language learners. So, in the case of this article, I was wondering, if the adolescent years have the potential to shape a person’s future, what does that mean for people who immigrate to a new country and learn a new language/culture as an adolescent? If the child, adolescent, and adult phases of life are all connected, what does that mean for a person that spends their childhood in one place, moves to a very different place during adolescence, and is then likely to spend a large portion, if not all of, their adulthood in this new place?
My partner (who was kind enough to allow me to share a part of his story), came to the United States from Ecuador when he was 16 years old; he became a US citizen at 21 and he is now 26, and he has mentioned going through a sort of identity crisis. He has explained to me that sometimes, instead of feeling both Ecuadorean and American, he feels like he is neither. He says he doesn’t always know what to tell people when they ask him where he is from. More than 10 years after immigrating to the United States during his adolescence, he finds that this major turning point in his life still impacts how he views his own identity.
I’ve done a lot of reading about how teachers can try to prevent this type of identity crisis from happening, but I don’t know that teachers actually have much ability to do this. My partner told me about all the presentations he made in school about being Ecuadorean and how his teachers emphasized that everyone should feel proud of where they came from, but it still didn’t make him feel confident in his identity in adulthood. So, how can people feel like they belong to two (or more) countries, instead of feeling like they don’t belong anywhere? What kind of impact does being exposed to a new language and culture during adolescence have on one’s later years?
Thanks so much for sharing Melissa. I think that is an excellent question to ask and I really appreciated the thoughtfulness of your post. I can’t imagine being raised in two different cultures. And I think about how often even without ever leaving a country young people are raised within two separate cultural entities – societal culture of home country and family culture (if family is recent immigrant). I also wonder why there is this pressure to identify with one thing – whether that thing is culture, country, sports team or gender? Especially in adolescence this pressure to be one thing or pick one side is monumental during a period of identity definition. If we let go of black and white , one sidedness would things be different?