Adolescent Development and Film Breakfast Club Essay

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Adolescence is an especially critical development stage for any individual. At this stage, individuals not only experience biological changes, but also become more aware of gender roles and expectations and experience cognitive development. Family and school become social incubators that trigger changes and psychosocial responses in adolescents. The film The Breakfast Club shows how a group of five adolescents go through critical changes in this stage of their life. This paper will highlight the developmental markers observed in one character depicted the film, Claire. Clare will be used as a case study to explore developmental issues related to gender, biology, and cognition. The paper also highlights various socialization agents (specifically school and family) and how they impact the individual’s self-concept, identity, and social role.



The Breakfast Club features five teenagers detained all day at Shermer High School. Several developmental markers are evident in the film. One of the markers is gender. Gender essentially refers to the social classification of male and female, and is totally different from biological sex. As adolescents grow, they gain familiarity with gender norms, roles, and expectations. They become more aware of what it means to be a male or a female as well as the behavioral and psychological differences between males and females. Girls like Clare are starting to internalize the gender norms given to them by their family and their peer group.



Whereas Allison shuns gender norms of beauty until the end of the film, Clare realizes that a woman is defined by factors such as sexuality, physical appearance, and occupational roles. In The Breakfast Club, the element of gender is crucial for Claire’s development. She is depicted as a beautiful, virgin girl, who believes that her virginity is a marker of her purity and power in the social group. Yet in detention with a new group of peers, Claire faces pressure to explore her sexuality. She eventually kisses Bender, partly as a means of undoing the perception that she is a virgin. Clare’s behavior and attitudes towards sexuality reveal the double standard established for women, in that they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

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Another developmental marker of adolescence is biology. When Clare mentions that she has never even been “felt up” before, she is referring to her budding boobs. She proudly displays those boobs in a humorous fashion, when she performs the party trick of putting on her lipstick by holding the stick between her breasts. At puberty, all individuals undergo rapid changes in their anatomy, physiology, and physical appearance. Some of the changes include sexual maturation, leading to hormonal changes in the body as well as to physical markers like breasts. Clare’s breasts become a marker of her gender, as well as her sexuality, but the film functions within a hetero-normative, cis-gender framework in which biological sex equal gender, and gender equals heterosexual orientation. In other words, there is never any doubt that Clare is heterosexual. Likewise, the Breakfast Club completely ignores issues related to race, presenting a world in which white culture is normative. Clare does not question her power or privilege as young wealthy and white. However, Bender does reveal to Clare the relevance of class, and how her socioeconomic class status has become an invisible marker of her power and privilege. Prior to detention, Clare had never considered the ways her power created a self-concept that isolated her from people outside of her in-group.



Adolescents also undergo cognitive changes. Cognition basically encompasses thinking processes, problem solving, as well as memory capacity and attention. Significant changes in cognition are experienced in adolescence. Adolescent cognitions is not just related to their academic performance in school. In fact, adolescent cognitive processes have a strong bearing on their development of self-concept, and their social interactions. Also at this stage, individuals start to become more aware of their thinking processes and to think critically and scientifically. In the film, assistant principal Richard Vernon instructs the students to write a….....

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Bibliography

The Breakfast Club (1985)

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