Chapter 10: Concluding Remarks

⁰¹³³ shows the ideal man thinking about his life; it was drawn by a boy from Ghana.

The capacity to think about one’s life and imagine possible futures is characteristic of adolescent thinking, which Piaget (1969, p. 33) described as “a new mode of reasoning, one that is no longer limited exclusively to dealing with objects or directly representable realities, but also employs ‘hypotheses.’” In our study young adolescents from 20 countries or regions described themselves and imagined possibilities. They revealed their ideas about their futures through their descriptions of the ideal woman and man, their choices of future activities and occupations, and their interpretations of the responses of their peers.