Self-esteem and socialization in secondary school adolescents

The school environment, especially at the secondary level, serves as a place where adolescents break away from the family routine and build capacities for autonomy, relationships, and personality. Thus, school fosters significant social expansion and the need to establish relationships of various kinds: positive, such as friendship, or negative, such as peer pressure and the formation of social status. This, coupled with academic commitment and the recurrent comparisons in the classroom, affects young people's perception of their skills and abilities and clouds their self-image, concept, and esteem.

Therefore, building strong self-esteem means more than a protective shield against social and educational difficulties; it also functions as a driver in the development of communication and leadership skills and competencies. Therefore, diminished self-esteem emerges as a driving force that leads adolescents to a space of isolation and vulnerability, characterized by key factors such as shyness and social exclusion. This significantly affects the individual's emotional well-being and academic performance and generally spreads to other spheres of the adolescent's life, other than school. Addressing issues such as these facilitates their understanding and thus allows them to be addressed in a more assertive and confident manner, even more so in this era of technological revolution in which today's youth are developing, and in which digital relationships are equally relevant.

This work offers a much more specific and detailed view of these topics, addressing self-esteem from its conceptual and defining foundations to other key factors that comprise it and more specific dimensions. Other theoretical aspects, such as Erickson's identity theory, will also be integrated into this work. as well as the processes of socialization, family and school dynamics, and some theoretical and practical aspects related to these topics with the aim of understanding these phenomena and reflecting on strategies to strengthen self-esteem in the educational environment.