The formation of self-awareness

The process of formation of self-consciousness significantly changes the nature of a teenager’s relations with people around him, both adults and peers, leading to a noticeable restructuring of institutions, mechanisms and methods of socialization.

The adolescent manifests a rather distinctly expressed desire for independence, emancipation, autonomy from adults, expressed in heightened criticality towards adults, parents, teachers, and heightened conflict with adults. This desire for autonomy from an adult is not by accident. In a similar way, the consciousness and self-awareness that is actively being formed in the adolescent is “protected” from the inspiring influence of adults, from those unresponsive mechanisms of socialization that still played a leading role in the social adaptation of the child.
At the same time, a teenager has a no less insistent striving towards a peer society, heightened attention to their opinion, an increased need for communication, self-affirmation.

In essence, these two phenomena, which characterize the restructuring of relations with adults and peers, are consequences of the same process of active formation of self-awareness, which, as is well known, is difficult without communication, without interacting with their own kind, as L. S . Vygotsky. Thus, the reference group of peers, focusing on its norms and values ​​play a decisive role in the socialization of the adolescent, in the assimilation of certain social experience and the formation of internal behavioral regulators, the inner plane of consciousness.
The conclusion about the particular importance that relationships with peers acquire in the social development of adolescents came also from leading researchers of adolescence abroad.

The psychological process of awareness of one’s personality takes place in the form of internal identification with a specific reference group. In adolescence, this group consists of peers. “Contact with peers for a teenager is just as important as communication with a mother for an infant. Each teenager seeks, in essence, to achieve the same goal - personal self-affirmation. The means of achieving it are mutual representations of the members of the group about each other. ”