I 3 Social Self - Discrepancy Theory and Loneliness During Childhood and Adolescence

found that spending time alone or feeling comfortable alone is correlated with worse, rather than better, adjustment in adulthood (Larson, 1990; Larson & Lee, 1996). In adulthood, as in childhood, aloneness appears to be more like a deficit state. Of course, these findings may be due to many other factors in adults lives being unmarried, job factors, and misanthropy that are confounded with aloneness and obscure underlying relationships. However, I believe that aloneness becomes less significant in adulthood because healthy adults achieve a synthesis of their private and public selves and thus have less need for a private sanctuary to sort out new and untried thoughts and feelings (Larson, 1990). Time alone may also be less functional for adolescents outside the European American samples I have studied thus far. The opportunity to withdraw into solitude is a luxury not available to most adolescents in the world, whose homes are often smaller and families larger. Among adolescents living in inner cities, feelings of danger when alone (Bhana, 1995) may also prevent solitude from being used constructively. Also, irrespective of whether the opportunity to be alone is present or not, aloneness may have little value apart from the cultural tradition of individualism it may be just lonely. My argument, then, is that it might only be within the Western individualistic tradition that the loneliness of being alone is tolerable, in limited doses, and can provide a context for adolescents' reflexive project of constructing the much-valued personal self. Under these conditions loneliness may be useful.