Why no teen builds a resilient identity alone - Daily Maverick

Who are you when you grow up feeling hungry, unsafe and excluded from opportunity? Who do you trust, and who do you turn to? Just how far does self-motivation take you in Tembisa, Umlazi or Nyanga?

Abigail Wood works in communications and research at Hold My Hand and is currently completing her MSc Mental Health Psychology through The University of Liverpool. Linda Theron is a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, University of Pretoria, and an HPCSA-registered educational and research psychologist.

South African townships are diverse communities, shaped by apartheid, migration and spatial planning policies. Many, particularly those on the outskirts of cities, are a mix of formal houses and informal settlements, where public services are inadequate, poverty is often intergenerational, and criminals prey on the vulnerable.

For young people in these communities, pathways to opportunity are often limited and can rarely be found through grit alone. They need ecosystems of support to build coherent identities – an idea backed by evidence but not yet widely embedded in national policies and state-led interventions. Herein lies a policy gap in how we understand and support adolescent identity formation.

To a layperson, the notion of identity formation may sound like an entirely personal, intimate or insular experience – outside the realm of public policy and not something the government should be concerned about.

On the contrary, evidence shows that coherent and resilient identities are constructed by young people and the systems around them – systems enabled by various levels of government: local, provincial and national.

Identity is about more than young people knowing who they are, demonstrating agency or having a sense of purpose. It is also about knowing who to turn to for support and trusting that seeking help will make a positive difference.

Many may not realise that the building blocks of identity: agency, tenacity, self-worth and other so-called personal strengths, develop through, and are sustained by, interactions with caring people and supportive services. As these identity resources develop, they encourage the growth of a stable identity – a coherent sense of who you are and what your purpose is.

This sense of self is accompanied by the security of knowing that with the continued support of the systems around you, life’s curveballs are not insurmountable. This resilience can act as a buffer for young people when conditions become challenging. It encourages young people to maintain their hopes for the future, make healthier choices and continue to build and sustain positive connections.

South African resilience studies show that when young people with high stress exposure rely solely on their own sense of agency, tenacity or self-worth, they remain vulnerable to psychological distress, risky behaviour and other negative outcomes. However, when these identity resources are matched by supportive family and peer connections, and welcoming spaces, young people are more likely to feel at ease in their own skin.

By perpetuating the idea that a coherent identity comes only from within, society sets adolescents up to blame themselves for lacking the tenacity to endure hardships. Where they battle to be purposeful or demonstrate agency, their apparent lack of grit or willpower becomes the scapegoat, while the underresourced and failing support systems around them are overlooked.

The identity development of most South African teens is impeded as they contend with a litany of compounding challenges that constrain their growth: crime, violence and hostile city environments, poverty, substance abuse, street life and gangsterism, academic pressure and exclusion from education or employment. These social, economic and environmental variables are linked to the deterioration in adolescent mental health, which has worsened since the Covid-19 pandemic.

If political leaders and policymakers fully understood the role teen identity plays in maintaining and protecting the wellbeing of young people, they would prioritise policies and interventions designed to support identity development.

Conversations of this sort were mostly happening at a civil society level and not on a public policy level, until Cabinet’s approval of the National Strategy to Accelerate Action for Children (NSAAC) in late 2025. Building adolescent identity, agency and connectedness is named as one of the NSAAC’s top 10 priorities.

Hold My Hand, a public campaign promoting the goals of the NSAAC, is urging a whole-of-society approach to protecting and promoting adolescent identity development, recognising the central role played by the people and systems connected to them. Put simply, teens can reach for a better future knowing that other people have their backs. DM