"I'll always be that awkward one": How mothers and adolescents jointly construct adolescent selves in conversation

Identity issues are a major concern in adolescence. Self-views inform and shape identity. Self views are negotiated through conversation about life events with important others. In this study, I analyze mother-teen conversations about identity confirming and identity challenging events from 92 adolescents, age 11, 14-15, and 17-18 years. Results indicate that mothers and teens are constructing ability based, and increasingly with age, trait based self-conceptions. Mothers' contributions to children's self-concepts tend to be more positive than children's contributions in the context of talking about difficult events, and when negative statements are made, partners are likely to explore those statements with elaborative responses. Older children make more self-related statements than younger children, and mothers appear to adjust their responses to children's statements based on children's age, gender, and the type of event (identity challenging versus identity confirming) under discussion. Taken together, results suggest a picture of mothers as nuanced scaffolders of children's selves in ways that are responsive both to children's changing narrative abilities, and to contextual demands.