You’re a teenager too…
AN ELDERLY man recently asked my 14-year-old friend: ‘Can you see?’ – genuinely concerned over the length of his hair. The way that people – especially the elderly – often see teenagers annoys me.
I’m concerned that many adults are becoming close-minded, and even prejudiced, against my age group, describing our promiscuity and fashion. It would be worth gaining a bit of perspective, and reminding you what you did during your oh-so innocent teenage years.
If you’re a baby boomer, and the sixties were your heyday, you experienced the first wave of adults telling you to ‘turn that down!’ Your record player or stereo systems were booming out the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; your taste in music and fashion decided your friends.
You were too busy on the dance floor to sit at home swotting up. Sound familiar?
Maybe you grew up in the seventies, struggling with the failing authority of parents and politicians. Jeans, pot, and imminent nuclear war were all ‘in’, as well as deep-rooted racism. Perhaps you joined in with protests and marches, fighting against social inequality. Actually, that sounds not so different to a ‘modern teenager’.
Kids on screens? Blame Atari and Commodore
64. Headphones in all the time? Started with the Walkman. Rejection of authority? Trace it back to Thatcher’s social austerity. The 1980s brought great tech into your lives, making it easier to communicate with your friends. Yet recession in Britain introduced that most persistent of problems: youth unemployment. All these problems pre-date my generation by 30 years.
Communism and the Wall were dead in the nineties – there was hope and optimism for the future. If you were a nineties kid then you experimented with the first internet, cell-phones and rolling TV. If you were a teenager in that decade, did you spend time enjoying the inter-connectivity, or did you focus on schoolwork? The nineties teenagers struggled with the same balancing act we do today.
Why shouldn’t teenagers behave just as you did all those tens of years ago? There’s no reason why the teens of the 2010s shouldn’t embrace the latest technology and fashions, or demand social justice – we’ve been doing that since the dawn of the (20th) century.
As a teen, did you sit in your room and play with a spinning top, or enjoy the best of what the world had; did you get angry at adults and old people who couldn’t understand you?
Teenagers haven’t changed – you have.