Exploring Adolescent Development in the Breakfast Club

Adolescent Development in “The Breakfast Club”

High school is a fundamental time of adolescent development as morality changes along with physical appearance and personality. Because of this, “The Breakfast Club” offers psychological insight into the changes that teens suffer during high school years as well as the relationship between home life and daily life. The five characters that attend detention are all relatable in one way or another to the various types of adolescent personalities and behaviors. Personally, Brian is the easiest to identify with because he has a lot of the traits of the typical intellectual teen met with the pressures of parental expectations and socialization struggles.

From the first scene, Brian is introduced as being close to his family. At the same time, it becomes obvious that he feels pressured by his parents to exceed in everything that he does. It is apparent, as time passes, that he is a shy character who does not talk much about anything that he is not familiar with, and he also lacks an aspect of socialization outside of his particular clique of smart kids. He makes good grades and values his education, but with further insight into his home life, he reveals that this value has been instilled from his parents. He constantly feels pressured to get good grades, which can hinder his social life as well as his interests in anything that is not school related. The pressure that he feels weighs down on him and any form of failure, or even average achievement, makes him nervous, sad, and maybe even scared of his parents’ opinions.

As a result of his below average grade in shop class, Brian begins to feel as if he is not good enough. He is overcome by feelings of depression that would be otherwise unnecessary if the natural occurrence of failure had been made known to him by his parents during his childhood. However, because this concept was never instilled, he becomes depressed due to his grades and feels like the only relief is to kill himself. He receives detention because of this, as he brings a gun to school — although a flare gun may not have done any sort of damage to himself in the first place — and the gun goes off in his locker. This rebellion originates due to the stress of expectations and the unusual feeling that rule-followers can take from doing things that are against the rules. In the same way, he participates in multiple instances of misbehavior during his day of detention such as escaping from the library without permission and doing drugs. In a way, this makes him feel like less of an outcast with the four other students because the rebellious acts bring them all together in a strange way.

Compared to the other four students who attend the detention, Brian is relatively unchanged by his experience. Circumstantially, his life is the same with the constant pressure from his family. Mentally though, he does not feel like he is abnormal. He learns that it is okay to be different and that people’s differences and imperfections make them identifiable in the world. He learns the importance of failure in the path of one’s life and that without it no one learns. He also discovers a bit of insight on the mindsets and morality of other people within different cliques. For example, the popular kids may feel the pressure from their friends that he feels from his parents; the rebels like Bender use delinquent behaviors to combat a terrible home life; and strange personality types like Allison may just be looking for a place to belong. In essence, he learns that everyone has their problems and those shape each person into who they are and who they will become.

Brian is the most identifiable character because he reveals the stress that can occur when parents have high expectations of their child’s performance and the dejection that often comes with failure. Through a serious of bad decisions due to depression and social isolation, he is sent to detention. There he befriends four very different people who pull him out of his comfort zone and into their own shoes. Over the course of his day in detention, he learns that people are different and that it is okay to fit in differently than others as long as you are satisfied with the way you live your life and accepting of failures and struggles that occur along the way.