The identity struggle of adolescents begins with learning what aspects of identity are valued. Girls are taught that above all else, their physical appearance is most important. We can rationally and logically say that is not so, but that's what American society is teaching them. This has an unimaginable ripple effect on a girls forming identity. She may be good at math and like to play volleyball, valuable skills, but her environment is affectively discouraging these skills. So we have the classical external voices vs internal voices here. The difference for younger girls (6-12) is they don't yet realize that the external voice could be wrong. They take the expectations at face value. They can't yet separate their identity from what others think of them, so they can't differentiate what in them is valuable from what the world says is valuable. This begins to shift at the 11-15 stage they can begin in question and wrestle with the standards and how they fit into the standard. .
Perception of identity is often a reflection of something else. Meaning, a girl may see her friend be praised and rewarded by her mother for getting a good grade. The girl may recognize this as a desirable outcome and try to replicate it. She will do so by attempting to recreate the positive identity she saw in her friend. "He defined role confusion as the trying on of many identities, often "over identifying" with media figures and other unrealistic role models" (Bergen, 19).This is where girls over-idolize celebrities they see. They get attached to what they see Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears as and try to replicate it. "The child also begins to. . . identify with people whose work or whose purpose he can understand and appreciate." (Evans/ Erikson, 107) This is also an interesting relational thing, they see and try to replicate celebrities because the celebrity is getting attention, and they want attention.
