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If she has not had such experiences, the female's normal adolescent degree of indecision will be compounded.

She may well be incapacitated by it when she is confronted with present and future alternatives -- e.g., whether to prepare primarily for a career or for the role of a homemaker ; ;

whether to stay financially dependent on her parents or help support herself while attending school ; ;

whether to pursue a college education or a job after high school ; ;

and whether to attend this or that college and to follow this or that course of study.

Erikson has noted that, as this indecision mounts, it may result in a `` paralysis of workmanship ''.

This paralysis may be expressed in the female's starting -- and never completing -- many jobs, tasks, and courses of study ; ;

and in the fact that she bases her decisions about work, college, carreer, and studies on what others are doing, rather than on her own sense of identity with given skills, abilities, likes, and dislikes.

The absence, during her childhood and early adolescence, of experiences in developing the self-discipline to complete tasks within her ability -- experiences that would have been subsequent sources of anticipation of achievement -- and her lack of childhood opportunities to practice autonomy and initiative in play and expression, both tend in her adolescence to deprive her of the freedoms to role-experiment and to fail occasionally in experimenting.