The Breakfast Club Essay

Kareemah Jackson

Paper 2

Dynamics of Personality Introduction: Who am I? This is a common question many teenagers ask themselves throughout the period of adolescence. Adolescence can be defined as an extent of time in the life course between when puberty starts, and adulthood begins. Development and growth are key aspects of adolescence that are inevitable and beneficial to the changes that are made. The movie “The Breakfast Club '' shows essential elements in the development of adolescence that are common to most and educate all ages on what transformations appear during this stage. In the movie, we visit the lives of five characters that are high school students who are all attending detention on a Saturday for various reasons. In the

A motley crew of students in Saturday detention become unlikely fast friends in this classic 1980s drama, however, and Claire eventually opens up to the other characters about her life that is far from prodigious. Claire’s parents are on the verge of a nasty divorce and both use her as a way to exact revenge on the other while neglecting to consider the detriment of their words and actions on Claire’s emotional stability. Additionally, and as with any great flick, Claire finds herself falling in love with another boy in detention, but she must first face internal and external challenges related to how she views herself in terms of pubertal changes. Therefore, the following inquiry will focus on the emotional and social development of Claire’s dramatis persona, specifically as shaped by ongoing conflict with parents, & and also on physical changes of puberty. Moreover, an exploration of the character will, most importantly of all, demonstrate how physical, emotional and social development of teenagers are processes for which success clearly relies upon the ability to establish and maintain mutually beneficial and fulfilling friendships as seen

Like younger children, adolescents typically remain within the family, and most of them attend school. Also, certain issues develop that were not present or as problematic in previous life stages. Among them, studies show that conflicts with parents increase sharply in frequency and severity during early adolescence as compared to middle childhood years. This increased level of conflict often remains high for several years before finally declining in late adolescence (Arnett, 2012). For many teenagers, parental conflicts are usually related to safety in terms of burgeoning sexuality, illicit substance use/abuse, and unsafe driving as parents restrict freedom in efforts to mitigate the inherent risks of adolescence. At a time when adolescents are just learning about the benefits of thinking independently and making their own decisions, they feel especially restricted by their parents’ newly found angst over safety (Arnett, 2012). While these conflicts are universal in Western cultures, other developing trends in Western culture are contributing to the disputes as well, such as increasing divorce rates. In Claire’s own life, her parents’ pending divorce is causing her strife. Claire is made to feel trapped by her parents’ behaviors, and so she desires to live with her brother instead of her parents just to escape the