Kate C. McLean & Monisha Pasupathi 
Narrative Development in Adolescence 
Creating the Storied Self

Monisha Pasupathi and Kate C. Mc Lean Where Have You Been, Where Are You Going? Narrative Identity in Adolescence How can we help youth move from childhood to adulthood in the most effective and positive way possible? This is a question that parents, educators, researchers, and policy makers engage with every day. In this book, we explore the potential power of the stories that youth construct as one route for such movement. Our emphasis is on how those stories serve to build a sense of identity for youth and how the kinds of stories youth tell are informed by their broader contexts – from parents and friends to nationalities and history. Identity development, and in part- ular narrative identity development, concerns the ways in which adolescents must integrate their past and present and articulate and anticipate their futures (Erikson, 1968). Viewed in this way, identity development is not only unique to adol- cence (and emergent adulthood), but also intimately linked to childhood and to adulthood. The title for this chapter, borrowed from the Joyce Carol Oates story, highlights the precarious position of adolescence in relation to the construction of identity. In this story, the protagonist, poised between childhood and adulthood, navigates a series of encounters with relatively little awareness of either her childhood past or her potential adult futures. Her choices are risky and her future, at the end, looks dark.

Table of Content

Self-Continuity Across Developmental Change in and of Repeated Life Narratives.- Emerging Identities: Narrative and Self from Early Childhood to Early Adolescence.- Patterns of Family Narrative Co-construction in Relation to Adolescent Identity and Well-Being.- Autonomy, Identity, and Narrative Construction with Parents and Friends.- What He Said to Me Stuck: Adolescents’ Narratives of Grandparents and Their Identity Development in Emerging Adulthood.- Life Stories of Troubled Youth: Meanings for a Mentor and a Scholarly Stranger.- Re-storying the Lives of At-Risk Youth: A Case Study Approach.- Constructing Resilience: Adolescent Motherhood and the Process of Self-Transformation.- Negotiating the Meanings of Adolescent Motherhood Through the Medium of Identity Collages.- How Violent Youth Offenders and Typically Developing Adolescents Construct Moral Agency in Narratives About Doing Harm.- Critical Narrating by Adolescents Growing Up in War: Case Study Across the Former Yugoslavia.

About the author

Kate C. Mc Lean is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. She completed her Ph.D in Developmental Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2004.
Monisha Pasupathi is an associate professor of developmental psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah. She completed her Ph.D. in Personality Psychology at Stanford University in 1997, and subsequently served as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, until 1999.