Cognitive Development Cognitive development is defined as ones individualization, it is the development of the distinct personality of an individual in regards as a persisting entity in a particular stage of life in which individual characteristics are possessed and by which a person is recognized or known. This process defines individuals to others as well as themselves. Pieces of the person's actual identity include …show more content…
Each of the conflicts arises at a certain point in life and must be successfully resolved for progression to the next of the eight stages. The particular stage relevant to identity formation takes place during adolescence, called "Identity versus Role Confusion. (Sigelman and Rider 2012) In the movie Mean Girls the main character Kady had a sense of her own identity. As Mean Girls opens up, Kady’s dad is telling her, “Here’s your lunch, there’s a dollar in it to buy some milk, you can ask one of the big kids where to do that.” This sounds more like a dad talking to his kindergartner on the first day of school, not a sixteen year old. Since Kady is an only child she may tend to be babied by her mom and dad. It seems to me that Kady up to this point had been delayed in cognitive development in her identity formation due to the lack of her experiences. …show more content…
She made references in the movie that most thought of her as the “jungle girl” and that sometimes the life of an American teenager was the same as the animals in Africa. She had not been raised to be around people who where shallow and looked down on others as well as themselves. In one part of the movie Kady goes to the house of the leader of the “plastics” and Kady’s friends are standing in front of a mirror saying things like “My hairline is so weird” and “my pores are huge.” When they look for Kady to talk about herself she has nothing to say negative. This is a learned behavior in our society, and when not learned the teen has a higher sense of self esteem. Kady had not experienced some of these behaviors that are common in American