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Second Step® Insights

Why Self-Awareness Is Essential for Teenage Students

September 4, 2024 | By: The Second Step® Team

A group of students and an adult talking in a circle in a library.

Ask any educator how much teenage students change over a school year, or even within a single month, and they will point out plenty of notable shifts—from growth spurts to new friendships, attitude changes to leaps in literacy.

Amid these dizzying changes, one notable shift in adolescence is an increased sense of self and a desire to establish a clearer personal identity. A study on the development of self and identity observes, “During adolescence, youth seek autonomy, particularly from parents, along with increased commitments to social aspects of identity and greater needs for connection with peers. . . . Adolescents also frequently report greater self-consciousness, and are more concerned with and interested in others’ perceptions of self.”

In other words, it’s natural for teenagers to become more conscious of themselves. From a social-emotional standpoint, however, becoming more self-conscious is not the same as growing in self-awareness, which is considered a foundational social-emotional competency.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines self-awareness as “the abilities to understand one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior across contexts.” The benefits of authentic self-awareness are many, including an increased ability to perceive and understand others, show self-control, be creative, and experience self-esteem. For teens, self-awareness is an essential social-emotional competency, out of which many other vital skills can grow.

Self-awareness and self-consciousness

Self-awareness is the umbrella under which self-consciousness sits. Self-awareness encompasses the ability to understand your own emotions, thoughts, and values, as well as how they influence behavior across contexts.

Self-consciousness takes self-awareness into account but adds a distressing or emotional connotation. Self-consciousness is undue or excessive attention to yourself. Self-awareness, on the other hand, is warranted, healthy attention to yourself and to your relationship to others.

With this distinction in mind, what does it mean for a teenager to be self-aware, and why is it such an essential social-emotional competency for them to have? According to a 2017 report by the American Institutes for Research, essential qualities of self-awareness in adolescence are related to emotion identification and management, self-esteem, and identity development.

Emotion management

Teenage students have a lot of feelings. These emotions are completely normal for teenagers, but identifying, understanding, and managing them can be incredibly difficult for teens in this developmental stage.

This is where self-awareness becomes crucial. If you don’t know what you’re thinking, feeling, and doing, it’s very difficult to know who you are and why you are the way you are. It’s also almost impossible to identify goals and ways you want to grow if you don’t understand where you are in the first place.

Self-awareness functions as a stable foundation upon which teenagers can remain grounded as they experience the inevitable emotional ups and downs of their daily lives. It allows them to say “I know who I am” in a variety of environments and “I know how I feel” amidst their complex experiences.

Knowledge of positive qualities builds self-esteem

Teens with self-awareness have a conscious knowledge of their own positive qualities, which can lead to healthy self-esteem and confidence. Through their experiences, relationships, and personal reflections, they have come to recognize many of their unique strengths. They are aware, in other words, of what they have going for them. This is a huge social-emotional asset that can benefit them throughout their teen years and well into adulthood.

For many teens, though, this awareness of positive qualities doesn’t come easily. It’s one thing for a student-athlete to know they’re a talented sprinter after winning the 60-meter dash, or for a student who’s always excelled in math to feel confident they’ll excel in trigonometry. It’s quite another thing for a teen to recognize their unique social-emotional strengths—such as how they put others at ease with their sense of humor, advocate for themselves in the classroom, or ask thoughtful questions of their friends.

It can take time—and a lot of ups and downs—for a teenager to realize the positive qualities that make them the one-of-a-kind person they are. But realizing their own positive qualities can be the root of an authentic sense of self-esteem, which can lead to growth in many other ways.

Self-image and other positive qualities

Self-awareness is considered a foundational social-emotional competency because it’s essential to building other vital competencies, such as emotional understanding, growth mindset, self-efficacy, and positive self-image. All these things, in some way, stem from a teen’s ability to accurately perceive themselves in relation to the world around them.

Self-awareness is the “homeroom” of social-emotional learning

Again, think of self-awareness as a foundation. To put this in secondary school terms, self-awareness is like a homeroom where teen students can find their social-emotional bearings. In homeroom, students can see themselves a little more clearly. In homeroom, they have space to think about who they are, how they’ve grown, and who they want to become. Like homeroom, a healthy self-awareness is a base for teenage students to orient themselves and a foundation on which they can build and practice other competencies.

Second Step® programs, including our middle school and high school programs, prioritize self-awareness as a fundamental social-emotional competency that can empower teens to grow in impactful ways.

Visit Our Programs page to learn more about how Second Step programs can help K–12 students grow their self-awareness and other life skills.