Will I marry Stan Walker?

The short answer is no, your teenage daughter won’t be marrying Stan.

However, if you’ve got a teen dreaming afar about their favourite star, they are not completely deluded. The adolescent crush is an important development milestone that is an ‘early approximation of love’, according to Dr Carl Pickhardt of Psychology Today.

The young person projects idealised attributes onto the celebrity that they admire, and ‘attach strong positive feelings to the perfectly wonderful image that has been created,’ says Pickardt. ‘Crushes have more to do with fantasy than with reality, and they tell much more about the admirer than the admired.’

A celebrity crush is often a safe and first step to exploring feelings closer to home. Crushing on a classmate allows a young person to explore many new social experiences, such as anxiety about what the other person thinks of them, gossiping about ‘who likes who’—a maturing that indicates a separation from childhood, and the possibility of rejection. But most importantly, crushes pave the way for the future possibility of love.

There is also another type of crush felt with the same intensity: the identity crush. ‘[These] 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,’ says Pickhardt. This crush is equally all-encompassing, and the teen makes a great effort to be more like their crush. The identity crush can be very confusing because it may be on someone of the same gender. However, it’s not an indicator of sexual orientation.

Most crushes are fairly fleeting because they are based on a fantasy. But Pickardt says as a parent it’s important to take them seriously, since they provoke a lot of anxiety and teens will be exploring a lot of new emotional territory.

So, if your teen has a crush on Stan the Man, don’t worry. They’ll get over it in their own time, and it’s all just part of those confusing years that helps them become great adults.

By Ingrid Barratt (abridged from War Cry 15 June 2013, p9)