During the time of a celebrity crush, you migh find teens buying posters of the celebrity for their rooms and tee shirts or what ever they can find but this crush never last as there is no interpersonal contact with the crush.

 

Identity crushes are formed by finding someone they much admire, want to become like, and treat as a leader or model they are eager to imitate and follow.   The romantic crush is a bit different in that it is about someone that the teen finds very attractive and they want to spend a lot of time with and to be liked by them and to like them and the teen might be willing to do a lot to get that person's love.

 

Identity crushes sometimes cause problems as it focuses on using the model to shape their own womanly or manly growth. A teen can become so focus on another person that he or she might want to start doing things that this person does to gain acceptance and inclusion.

 

In these cases parents should get to know this admired person and if the things that he or she does are not in keeping with your morals or standards, you need to have that chat with your teen.  Be careful to be too hard on the teen as that might make them become resentful.

 

There is a great outbreak of romantic crushes and gossip about them (“Guess who likes who?”) in  school. By this time, early adolescence has caused young people to want to act more grown up, and sexual maturity from puberty has motivated them to act in more young manly and young womanly ways.

 

The Romantic crush can be of great concern since it is usually more about infatuation and it doesn’t require knowing another person very well.  It can also become a fixation where the teen day dreams and fantasises about this person.  This can lead to acting under the influence of the crush in self-endangering ways and sometimes the admired person can take the opportunity to exploit the teen.

 

Because a romantic crush is so intensely felt, parents must not take it lightly or make fun of it. An awakening of romantic feelings, it provokes a lot of anxiety because there are many problematic questions for the young person to answer. “What am I supposed to do with these feelings?” Should they just be kept secret, thus increasing the risk of obsessive preoccupation? “What if I tell close friends?” Suppose I get talked about and teased, thus increasing the risk of embarrassment. “What if I have to be around the other person who doesn’t know how I feel?” Now feeling nervous, there is more risk of doing or saying something awkward. “What do I tell this person about my crush?” To declare the crush to the person creates the risk of rejection. It’s not easy managing a crush.

 

Most romantic crushes don’t last very long because once the object of the crush becomes better known, magic of the other person soon wear off and the ideal falls away. “I can’t believe I felt he was so great! What was I thinking?” However, this kind of crush does have one lasting value. Having experienced an awakening of infatuated feelings, the adolescent has opened themselves up to the pleasure and possibility of romantic love.