One day, while escapadeing on a long pinterest spree, I ran across a quote
that really struck me. It basically asked, "Why are teenagers treated like
children, but expected to act like adults?"
During an average child's first ten to twelve years of life,
everything is like fairy land. No bills to pay, no job to work, no school to
cram, no drama to maneuver through, the list is endless! The most pressing of
your concerns is when you'll have to go to bed. Nothing ever goes wrong, nor
ever feels terribly wrong either.
Then you hit your teenage years, when your body begins to act
like an unpredictable, explosive, casino machine. All the sudden your physical
appearance goes from a solid five to a negative six, and shoots around down
there every five minutes. Worst part about this, is that as soon as your body
pulls out the braces, acne, growth spurts, glasses, and fields of sprouting
hair, you emerge from childhood and suddenly find that you actually care about
your appearance, just as all of the awkward gifts of puberty hit in unison. Not
only is there basically nothing you can do about the obvious changes happening,
(besides wait six years for when your body derails from the roller coaster it
has just jumped onto), but you find your brain is holding its own assault
against you in the same room.
Being a female, I can go on for hours about the horrific
chemical mountains I've had to climb up and then promptly hurl myself from. On
an average day, I can jump from happy to angry to sad to ultra-depressed and
then finish off as a malicious evil villain, who laughs insanely at everything
within a ten mile radius. You might wonder if anything brings about these
dramatic changes in emotion. Well,
NO.
In the quick succession of a few
minutes I can hit rock bottom, and shoot to the zenith of happiness, all while
sitting alone in a bare room with only a chair for entertainment. Just to put
things into perspective, picture yourself, (as a female) on an occasion when
you find yourself in a room full of other teenage girls. While looking around you
suddenly have this mini heart attack as you realize you've just landed yourself
into a pool of fellow, half-crazed-demons, who could decide they love or hate
you by just your appearance. Instead of doing the most rational thing and
dialing 911, you find yourself sitting down and conversing with these ticking
time bombs as though the situation made you feel at ease. You tread carefully,
but as you glance around the room you see that others haven’t been so meticulous
in their movements, and within a few minutes the room is vibrating with the
sound of explosions and cracking timbers.
So, in retrospect of the many alarming changes which have
labeled teens as mentally disabled throughout mental studies, everyone above
and below the adolescent years has paranoid notions about those who are. One of
the funniest things I find about being a teen, is that everyone who doesn't
want to try and change you, wants to hide you away somewhere where you can't
plan terrorist attacks on their houses in the future. The image of teens
blowing things up and setting things on fire seems to have obscured the view of
many older people, to the point some will downright shoot you paranoid glances
across the street.
On the flip side of their caution
however, it seems that older people can’t get enough of placing responsibility
on teenagers shoulders. Everything ends up falling onto our laps at one point
or another.
Being older than the younger kids,
we know how- and can do, a lot more; mirroring that, since we are younger than
the adults we have less liberties to say no when we don't want to do something.
We get to take care of the kids, make dinner, clean the house, get jobs, make
HUGE life decisions about our future, keep perfect grades and social life, and
then figure out who we are on the side lines.
The injustice of the situation is
astounding. How can someone who treats the very word ‘teenager’ like a rotten
fruit, feel okay piling work onto their shoulders?
Why are teenagers treated differently than everyone else and yet expected to
function as adults?
The simple answer in my mind is
perspective. All humans view things, the way they want to. Though not ready to address
the growing age of adolescence, most recognize the ability to work when they
see it, and therefore utilize this. Though I’m sure there are many other
reasons at work in the odd placement teenagers have been set in, the most vital
one is the one we use most often. What we see most often holds less value than
what we’ve labeled in our minds.
(Side excursion.) You might have noticed that I pointedly didn’t
address the problems of teenage boys. Since I am not a male, I don’t feel I’m
very qualified to sit here and describe their emotional state, other than the
sad dislocation of the mental ability to understand what’s stupid, and okay to
do. So, despite what you guessed. No, I didn't forget about them, just chose to glaze over that part).
