In citizenship education, tensions exist between pedagogical goals and students' perspectives. This article investigates the discrepancies and commonalities between the theoretical positions and young people's lived citizenship, especially concerning their conceptual and social foundations. Two theoretical positions on democratic citizenship development and one Dutch student's sense of his civic self are compared. Our findings indicate that the theoretical positions are less suitable to detect and appreciate more subtle ways in which young people already do contribute to democracy in their everyday lives. Secondly, they indicate that democratic citizenship education needs to attend more to students' perceptions of a need to contribute and to develop their citizenship identities. Two complementary approaches are suggested: investigating more subtle ways in which students already do contribute, and raising student's awareness of democratic deficits.