As children get older, parents worry about the lengths their child might go to in order to fit in.

Adolescents are especially susceptible to peer pressure. They are battling social anxieties and navigating fraught peer interactions. The developing teenage brain, which is preoccupied with what others are thinking of them, responds differently to emotional stimuli than the adult brain.

But we don’t age out of the human need to be accepted by members of a group.

Belongingness is a fundamental emotional need. People desire to be a part of something greater than themselves, to feel understood and seen. This meaningful bonding is crucial to our well-being. We may find it among peers, co-workers, family, friends, co-religionists or through some other association or mutual interest.

A friend recently posted a Facebook status in which she described an ice-breaker from a training session.

“We all introduced ourselves with our names and three groups of ‘our people’ -- the people we feel most at home with,” she wrote. The person running the session offered concrete affiliations -- fans of her college basketball team, for one. My friend’s answer was, “I’m Judy, and my people are journalists, nerds and people who grew up poor.”

The exercise is a clever way to get people to reveal more about themselves in a less threatening way. The question really asks: With whom are you most likely to feel at home? With whom are you most likely to feel immediate commonality?

In Judy’s groups, there is a common thread: She identifies with outsiders. Journalists observe the events they cover without participating, and nerds and poor folk also understand what it’s like to be on the outside. Each are immigrants in their own country in a way, she explained to me.

I considered her question carefully. My tribe is comprised of storytellers; doers and givers; and people who are both funny and empathetic. Again, there are commonalities among these groups. Storytellers are also keen observers and listeners. Telling a good story is a way of reaffirming human connections and making the listener, viewer or reader feel something.

Doers and givers have an inherent optimism and selflessness that guides their behavior. I am drawn to the resilience of people who have overcome difficult circumstances. Their courage is just as contagious as fear.

Funny, empathetic people are often self-deprecating, comfortable in their own skin and easy to be around. We all want to be around people who are authentic, genuine and sincere.

I asked my husband to tell me about “his people.” He named doers, underdogs and music lovers.

The overlap in our answers explains why we were drawn together in the first place.

Whether the point of connection is a shared passion for a particular sport or type of art, or a shared life experience such as growing up poor or running a marathon, we feel at ease with people in whom we recognize something about ourselves.

To some extent, our tribes describe how we see ourselves. But they also describe what we want to be.

Just like we caution our children as they grow up, it’s helpful to remind ourselves when we are older and the demands on our time are ever greater: Merely fitting in with a group is not the same as belonging. A sense of belonging comes from being accepted and supported.

Humans are multidimensional and often contradictory, so subsets of “our people” will likely complement different aspects of our personalities. I appreciated the chance to think about the sort of people I consider my tribe because it gave me insight into who I should prioritize spending my precious free time with.

It’s a revealing question: Who are your people?

Jennifer was preparing to take an accounting exam when she saw a report on the business center’s television that would change her life.

Jennifer, who is being identified by her first name because of concerns for her family’s safety, is a senior and accounting major at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her mother brought her to the United States from Honduras when she was 7 years old. Her mother had left to find work in America when Jennifer was 3 years old.

“I just knew that I was finally going to be with my mom,” she said.

A bright and studious kid, she adjusted and did well in school in Ballwin, Missouri. In her sophomore year of high school, she asked her mother for her social security number so she could apply for an internship. Her mother told her she didn’t have legal papers; she was undocumented.

“That’s when I found out I was very limited in what I could do. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t work legally,” Jennifer said.

All of a sudden, the country she had grown up in wasn’t hers anymore. The place she knew as her home, where she had dreams to go to college, became a place she had to hide who she was. She couldn’t even tell her closest friends.

The next year, President Barack Obama signed DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) into law after waiting for Congress to act on behalf of young children who had been brought to and raised in America without legal documents. What is a small child supposed to do when their parent moves them to another country? How do you tear a young person away from their family and home to deport them to a country where they have no connections, no family and may not even speak the language? Especially if they weren’t even responsible for coming here illegally in the first place?

Jennifer immediately filed for the legal protection DACA offered. She gave all her information, paid the fee and passed a background check. Even though there was no path to becoming a citizen, it allowed her to stay, study and work here legally. It had to be renewed every two years. It gave her a measure of her dignity back.

“I was no longer hiding a part of myself,” she said.

Jennifer graduated from high school and got accepted into the Honors College at UMSL. She works two jobs to help pay for her education. She will be graduating in May and planned to attend networking events with accounting firms to find a job.

Then she saw the news that President Donald Trump had rescinded DACA, effective in six months. Trump has asked Congress to handle the issue. If they are unable to pass legislation, students like Jennifer face deportation by the federal agencies they gave their personal information and fingerprints to in good faith.

Even though she had prepared herself, she was still in shock when she watched Attorney General Jeff Sessions make the announcement. For a second, she felt a flash of anger and resentment toward her mother. Why put her in this situation?

Immediately, she let it go.

“I’m not a mother. I can only imagine the struggle she went through,” she said. “It wasn’t the best decision, but it was the only option she had at that point. I can’t blame her for being a mother and wanting to protect me and for wanting to give me a better future. I can’t blame her for that.”

She had to pull herself together and take her accounting exam.

“I’m just scared,” she said. There are months ahead of just waiting while her entire future, all her hard work, hangs in the balance.

Even worse than the fear of losing her future is the pain of feeling like she isn’t wanted in the country she loves and considers her home.

“I’ve never in my life felt like I was less than a person,” she said. “Now, it’s like I’m not worth staying here.”

After she finished her exam, she drove back home to Ballwin.

Then she cried.

The morning after my hometown started drowning, I tried to divert myself from the images that were filling me with dread. Helplessness is the feeling I’m least equipped to handle, and the worst kind of helplessness is watching someone you love being hurt or in danger and being unable to do anything.

So I joined a few friends and went to an international festival in St. Louis. It was a gorgeous day here. The sun was shining. Everything was dry. It felt completely surreal.

I was glued to the updates on my phone. My social media feeds filled with pleas for help and dire alerts that things were only going to get worse. When I received texts that my parents were in their kitchen pantry taking shelter from a possible tornado in their Houston neighborhood, I left the festival immediately.

There were two different worlds that day: a normal -- dry -- life around me, and the one hundreds of miles away where my parents, relatives and childhood friends could be submerged under water at any moment. When a catastrophe unfolds in a place you’ve lived, when the people being rescued are your relatives and friends, when you’ve driven down all the roads that have turned into rivers, your heartbreak and disbelief are commingled with fear and guilt.

Those who have lived through a natural disaster know how hard it is to make sense of what is happening around you. One minute your house is there; the next minute, it’s uninhabitable.

It was impossible to tear myself away from the crisis unfolding 800 miles away.

I watched videos on Facebook of my friend and her newborn being rescued by good Samaritans on kayaks. I posted on Twitter when a relative and her two children were trapped in her home with rising water. First responders from the sheriff’s department got them to safety. Another friend swam out of her house and down her street with her children in life jackets.

And the rain wouldn’t relent.

“Now I have an idea of how Noah felt when everything drowned in front of him,” a friend posted.

When so many people you know have lost so much, where do you begin to help? Besides the scale of devastation in our country’s fourth-largest city, the prolonged sense of crisis sets this storm apart. Harvey dumped nearly a year’s worth of rain in a matter of days over the city, and each day, new threats emerged -- whether it was tornado warnings or reservoirs overflowing or power failures. People were being told to evacuate without any clear idea of how to do so, when so many roads and highways were impassable.

We watched on live television as millions of Americans remained trapped and desperate for help for so long.

All we could do from afar was make donations to organizations helping on the ground, share that information and encourage others to do the same. The constant sense of urgency during those days made it even more infuriating to read tone-deaf, heartless tweets while so many struggled to survive.

Those idiotic tweets were overshadowed by the countless ordinary people who performed heroic acts of courage to save strangers. Thousands of lives were saved by people who rushed toward rising waters to save someone in trouble.

The best of humanity reveals itself in our darkest moments.

Reports suggest that more than 80 percent of the homeowners affected by the floods in Texas do not have flood insurance. Among those who lost everything will be some who lived through the same nightmare 12 years ago in Hurricane Katrina. Most people will need to rebuild their lives with very little.

The rest of us may have felt our hands tied during this epic catastrophic disaster. But now the cleanup begins.

It’s time to get all hands on deck.

Want to help Hurricane Harvey’s flood victims? Here are some reputable organizations:

-- The Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund: ghcf.org/hurricane-relief

-- The Houston Food Bank: houstonfoodbank.org

-- The Coastal Bend Disaster Recovery Group: CoastalBendCan.org/CBDRG

-- The Texas Diaper Bank: texasdiaperbank.org

-- The Coalition for the Homeless: homelesshouston.org

-- Portlight: portlight.org