ABSTRACT
In the natural history of development, most adolescents find their way into meaningful relationships with real-world adults. They may be coaches, neighbors, youth ministers, or employers. The relationship may be personal and friendly. It may be functional and even impersonal, experienced as only an incidental involvement outside the family orbit. There may be one such relationship, cherished deeply, or there may be many, none of which stands out as singularly important. The point is that these relationships, these contacts with real-world adults, are a critical part of the process of disembedding from the family field of childhood. This has generally been the case historically and in primitive cultures, where it has been the adult members of the tribe, not the parents, who initiate and carry out the rites of passage and transformation. Through these relationships, the individual learns how to tap the world beyond the family for resources of guidance, modeling, and confirmation and, in the process, to stand differently in the world, to take the self seriously and become a citizen beyond the family. When the adolescent is disembedding from the family, in other words, he is also moving into a wider world of potential involvements and support.
