MacGyver totally counts! :sneaky:
Not really joking, either.
Fair warning... the anthropologist side of me is about to step out :p
The thing is, if you want to see what children without role models become? Check out the “feral children” studies. That’s what happens when there is literally no one to pattern off of. It’s heartbreaking.
If you want to see what children whose only real / ongoing role models are other children? It’s harder to find pure examples, because they usually band together in the wake of disaster (wars, plagues, natural disaster), so there were prior role models. Or intermittent exposure to adults. Even so? You’ll mostly be looking a child gangs (even if near totally isolated, not trying to scrape out an existence in an adult world, children are violent as f*ck. Add in an adult world? It actually gets worse. Lord of the Flies was written during a time when there were a lot more groups of children raising each other from the Blitz onward)... but not always, especially not if there’s a war on. Groups of kids banding together trying to stay out of the way of armies tend to be a lot more peaceful -group dynamic wise- than kids raising themselves following, say, a natural disaster. Child soldiers fall under an entirely different paradigm, because they’re not patterning after each other, but after what the adults want them to be.
To have singular type role models you’re talking about kids raised in small families (even small clans give a wide range of role models) with no contact with the outside world. Castaways would be the best example, although there are isolated examples by choice. This is also where children raised in remote orphanages with only a small handful of adults to supervise. Eastern Europe & SE Asia still have some of these, but they’re mostly vanishing. Not the remote orphanages themselves, but their isolation from the rest of the world. Books, News, TV, phones, Internet have been creeping in at a fairly steady rate for decades right along with the aid workers or government workers or new priests, etc., who first bring them with them.
The next step up would be the small clans/tribes of people who have no contact with the outside world, or only a few members have contact. So there are a lot of different personality types to emulate, but their ideology is usually pretty uniform. Whilst the extremist groups & cults get most of the press, there are tens of thousands of tiny communities of less than 50 people... and of those a percentage either deliberately cut themselves (and their kids) off from contact news of the outside world, or technology just doesn’t go that far.
A slight jog to the right would be the clans of people driven together for a certain purpose. The child soldiers would fit into this group. So would a few other subgroups.
As soon as one moves into contact with the outside world? Countless role models to pursue. Both real and fictional. Even in the tiny communities, or far flung family units. And that’s before taking into account face to face interactions that happen in larger communities of villages with schools & teachers, sports & coaches, places of worship, friends and their families, local leaders, jobs, doctors, etc. Even if someone lives on a ranch, with just their own family? If they go away to school, they’re surrounded by face to face interaction & influence.
