The two-year report on the condition of children and adolescents in Italy of 1997 is the follow-up to the report published a year earlier. However, this time the analyses and statistical data help identify not so much the critical situations involving children and adolescents, but rather the “normal”situations of life in which the children’s process of growth occurs. 

The construction process of the self is not always easy in a complex society such as the one we live in. Moreover, in this process the original identity of each child is not adequately protected and promoted and it risks being superimposed by a mask, i.e. replaced by a false identity.