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The truth about teens

Fact one: Adolescents experience more intense emotions than adults, reporting self-consciousness and embarrassment three times more than their parents. And, in spite of their youthful bodies and less harried lives they also report feeling bored, tired and listless. In short, they are experiencing a different emotional reality from their parents. Adolescent lives have more rugged emotional terrain with higher highs and lower lows.

Fact two: Skip back a couple of hundred years and you’ll find the time and energies of young people were tied up with family duties. They worked on the farm or helped in the house. Secondary education changed everything. Adolescents were no longer tied to the family unit. Their time is now spent with peers of same age, so ‘peer group’ has a massive influence. Youth culture has sprung up, often with styles and values that are opposite to those of the family. Indeed, in some instances, gangs have replaced family.

So where does this leave the ‘innocence of youth’?

For illustrative purposes, let’s transpose Enid Blyton’s 1950s wholesome ‘Famous Five’ to the streets of 2015 Britain. I’m guessing that Julian would be more or less nocturnal, forever taking the rise out of poor ‘Aunt Fanny’ and his bro ‘Dick Head’. At 14, Dick himself would smoke an occasional dodgy cigarette and be far too busy accessing explicit internet sites to go outside and explore Kirrin Island.

Ann comes out as the biggest loser of the group. In the books Ann is portrayed as a girly girl and a worrier. In the modern world it’s likely she’d be being bullied on Facebook and would be one of the burgeoning number of teenagers on anti-depressants.

But folks, there is a clear winner; ‘George’. There’d be no more hiding it. She’d be queen of cool as the toughest lesbian in school.

Yes, I agree. My re-imagining of the Famous Five probably isn’t very funny. But there is a point.

 

As teenagers have become free from family duties, they are now burdened with major life changes at an earlier age. They have less defined roles and responsibilities and, dare I say, a lack of purpose. Adolescents develop abstract and critical reasoning skills and although these skills represent psychological growth they actually heighten children’s sensitivity to life. These advanced reasoning skills allow the teenager, for the first time, to see beneath the surface of situations and envision hidden threats to their wellbeing. In plain simple English, they begin to imagine what peers think about them. There is evidence to suggest that this is heightened for adolescent girls.

So, our plea is to go easy on them. Teenagers have a thinner epidermis so we’ve written a user-manual for them. Aunt Fanny would have loved it.