Essay on Adolescent Development in Mean Girls

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Adolescent development in Mean Girls

The movie Mean Girls is filled with characters that are easy to relate with, quotable lines, and a hilarious but realistic plot line. One other major thing that the movie has is concepts of the development that occurs during late adolescences including social, emotional, and cognitive development. Mean Girls is about a girl named Cady that is attending a public high school for the first time after being home schooled in Africa for all of her life. She knows nothing of the American teenage culture or customs or about the public school system. During her first week of school Cady becomes friends with two people in one of her classes named Janis and Damien, who unbeknownst to her are a part of the …show more content…
This is an example of a personal fable because she thinks that her party getting busted and her parents finding out would never happen to her even though it is a very common occurrence.
At the school talent show Damien begins singing the song “Beautiful” and is ridiculed and teased. Audience members begin throwing objects at him and start booing which eventually causes him to get removed from the stage. The ridicule and booing was most likely started by one person and than others followed suit as a result of peer pressure. Adolescents are more likely to subsume to peer pressure than children are (Santrock 397).
Another main thing that is identified in this movie is the problem of cliques and the peer pressure that comes along with these cliques during high school as well as the effect that ones peers have on their development. The start of high school is when peer pressure has the biggest impact on adolescences and the choices that they make. It has been found that the adolescence that conform to their peers the most are the ones that have self-esteem issues (Santrock 398). During adolescence the roles that the cliques and crowds that someone is associated with plays a greater role than they did during childhood. Cliques are normally contain by 2-12 members that are of the same sex, around the same age and are formed because of similar interests of mutual friendships. Throughout the entire movie you see examples of what cliques are present
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