Life drives teens insane
Cartoon by Macy Linton
March 5, 2010 • written by Ashley Fowler
Filed under Opinions
Enough with the horror stories already!
Teens get sick of hearing adults go on and on about how hard their lives were growing up. Just because we have advanced technology that crashes from time to time, cell phones that constantly lose service, and cars instead of horses, most adults are convinced that our lives are carefree. However, they could not be more wrong.
“Parents are always complaining about how easy we have it because they had to work so hard for everything that they have,” senior Sean Haley said. “What they fail to realize is that we go through a lot of things, too.”
Along with the truck loads of work that teachers give us, we teens also have to deal with negative influences and peer pressure that other teens, as well as the media, place on them.
“This topic is really difficult, but for the most part, teens do not have it easier than we did,” Principal Mac Hawkins said. “Nowadays, society forces most teens to be adults right now, but we never really had to deal with that.”
Unfortunately, every adult does not feel this way. To some, every part of our lives is easier than their lives were, including the school work.
“When we were assigned research papers, we had to go to the library and spread out 25 books on a table,” Spanish teacher Patricia Teas said. “If we wanted to find information, we had to read all of those books. We could not Google it like teenagers can now.”
However, it is not our fault that engineers are constantly coming up with new and improved gadgets. Because of their everlasting imaginations, teens now have the ability to surf the Internet no matter their location. Teens who own high-tech cell phones can also shop, pay bills, access their bank accounts and send text messages while they are having a conversation.
Not only that, teens now have the ability to forward text messages, e-mails, and pictures at the touch of a button. To some, especially those who lived during a time where one of the only forms of communications were letters, methods like this have become a huge convenience. Others might despise it due to personal pictures and/or messages being exposed.
Of course, these pleasures did not exist back in the old days, and maybe that is why our lifestyles are so different than our elders’ lifestyles were.
“In my day, home life was more important, and people valued quality family time,” U.S. History teacher Glen Stewart said. “Teens would rather shop and go to parties instead of having dinner with their families. The attitude that teenagers have towards learning is different than it used to be, and I think that it has a lot to do with the parents.”
In a way our lives are not necessarily easier: our lives are just different and a bit more advanced.
So, before parents say that teenagers take everything for granted and that our lives are “easy,” maybe they should try going a day in a teenager’s shoes. It would not take long before they realize what we really have to deal with on a daily basis.
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“Teens get sick of hearing adults go on and on about how hard their lives were growing up. Just because we have advanced technology that crashes from time to time, cell phones that constantly lose service, and cars instead of horses, most adults are convinced that our lives are carefree. However, they could not be more wrong.”
- Parents are right, most of what we do is carefree, we don’t have any major obligations to attened to, if you look around school you’ll find teens texting than anything else.
“So, before parents say that teenagers take everything for granted and that our lives are “easy,” maybe they should try going a day in a teenager’s shoes. It would not take long before they realize what we really have to deal with on a daily basis.”
- Well, they already have. They were once teenagers, they went to high school too.
“In a way our lives are not necessarily easier: our lives are just different and a bit more advanced.”
- How advanced? I’m sure texting or working on a computer doensn’t require much skill.