Where You Come From Is a Strength to Explore, Not a Trait to Hide

My parents did not plan to start over. They were traveling in Buenos Aires with my father's quartet, Los Llopis, when Castro's revolution took the Cuba they knew out of reach. They had to begin again with what they had.

What they had was more than what fit in their luggage. They carried where they came from, and they built on it. I think about that whenever I see a young person learn to sand down their family story so it doesn't stand out.

That sanding is common, and it usually starts early. A teen notices which parts of their background draw questions, and quietly decides to stop offering them. The research on adolescent identity suggests that editing themselves this way costs more than it seems, and that exploring where you come from is one of the first ways a young person starts to know their own mind.

Exploring Comes Before Knowing

Adriana Umaña-Taylor, now at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, developed a school curriculum called the Identity Project. It guides teenagers to explore their ethnic and cultural background and what it means to them. She and her colleagues tested it in a small randomized trial with 215 U.S. high school students, average age 15. As they wrote in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, "The program led to increases in exploration, subsequent increases in resolution." In plain terms, students explored their background more, and more exploration was followed by a clearer sense of what that background meant to them. That clarity in turn predicted higher self-esteem and better grades a year later.

One honest qualifier. The first step, more exploration, was a randomized effect of the program. The later links to self-esteem and grades come from a statistical model of how the changes unfolded. They describe a pathway that fits the data, not a proven cause.

The order still matters to me. Exploration came first and clarity second. A young person can't come to terms with something they were never invited to look at.

A Smaller Result in Italy, and the Clue Inside It

Good research reports its weaker results too. When Chiara Ceccon and colleagues at the University of Padova adapted the program for Italy and tested it in a preregistered randomized trial with 747 tenth graders in 45 classrooms, a study Umaña-Taylor co-authored, exploration rose only modestly, with an effect size of .18, and there was no effect on resolution. A few weeks of classroom lessons, in that setting, did not carry teens all the way to clarity.

I take that seriously, and I also see a clue in the original U.S. data. In a 2021 follow-up analysis of the same trial, led by Michael Sladek with Umaña-Taylor, gains in exploration were larger for teens whose families already talked with them more about their heritage. The school opened a door, and the family conversation made it easier to walk through.

Francesca De Lise and Elisabetta Crocetti of the University of Bologna, working with Koen Luyckx of KU Leuven, found a related pattern without any program at all. Following 1,396 adolescents in northern Italian high schools across four waves over a year, they found that firmer identity commitments and well-being predicted each other over time. The link between commitment to an educational path and well-being was especially relevant for teens with a migrant background. This was a correlational study, but it points the same way: knowing what you are committed to and feeling well tend to travel together.

When Adults Call a Background a Strength

Mesmin Destin of Northwestern University and his colleagues, in work led by David Silverman, have studied what happens when adults frame a student's background as an asset. In a randomized experiment with 276 university students, those who read a lecture excerpt describing lower-income backgrounds as sources of strength showed more motivation and persistence, particularly students from lower-income families. Their own beliefs about their backgrounds helped explain the change. These were college students rather than teens, so I hold the result loosely. But the lesson for parents is plain enough. The story adults tell about where a young person comes from becomes part of the story the young person tells about themselves.

I have seen this in my own life. The immigrant lens my parents gave me became the way I see opportunity. I first put it into words in Adopt an Immigrant Mindset to Advance Your Career, which I wrote for Harvard Business Review in 2012, and I came back to it in Lead Like an Immigrant. It was never something to hide. It was where my conviction began.

Bringing the Family Story Back to the Table

Tell your teen the story, including the hard parts. The losses and the starting over are where the strengths were formed.

Ask what they see in it that belongs to them. Exploring is their work, and they may take something from it you didn't expect.

Make room for questions and even pushback. Reconsidering is part of how a commitment becomes theirs instead of yours.

Name the specific strengths your family's background gave them, the way they treat people, the way they work, the way they recover. General pride is pleasant. Specific strengths are useful.

And remember that heritage and individuality are partners, a theme I explored in Identity and Family Were Never Meant to Compete.

You can lose a place and still keep what it made you, and what it made you is often the strongest thing you own.

My parents could not bring Cuba with them. They brought everything it had taught them, and that was enough to begin again. I want every teenager to know their own story can travel with them the same way.

Research cited

Umaña-Taylor, A. J., Kornienko, O., Douglass Bayless, S., et al. (2018). A universal intervention program increases ethnic-racial identity exploration and resolution to predict adolescent psychosocial functioning one year later. Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Ceccon, C., Schachner, M. K., Lionetti, F., et al. (2023). Efficacy of a cultural adaptation of the Identity Project intervention among adolescents attending multiethnic classrooms in Italy: A randomized controlled trial. Child Development.

Sladek, M. R., Umaña-Taylor, A. J., Wantchekon, K. A., et al. (2021). Contextual moderators of a school-based ethnic-racial identity intervention: The roles of family ethnic socialization and ethnic-racial background. Prevention Science.

De Lise, F., Luyckx, K., & Crocetti, E. (2024). Identity matters for well-being: The longitudinal associations between identity processes and well-being in adolescents with different cultural backgrounds. Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Silverman, D. M., Hernandez, I. A., & Destin, M. (2023). Educators' beliefs about students' socioeconomic backgrounds as a pathway for supporting motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.