Hurray for teenagers
Why are people so negative about teenagers, asks Louisa Young, when most of them are adorable, funny, interesting, imaginative, brave, generous, loyal, hard-working and helpful?
- Louisa Young
- The Guardian, Saturday 5 December 2009
What is worse, most adults think that teenagers deserve the bad press they get. I don't, so I am going to upend the negative generalisations and announce my own: that teenagers are, in general, adorable, funny, energetic, very hard-working, beautiful, interesting, imaginative, generous, loyal, vulnerable, brave, charming, helpful, clever, well-dressed and very good cooks. (And I'm not just talking about my own. I'm writer in residence at two inner London secondary schools.)
Consider these teenagers. Eighteen-year-old soldiers William Aldridge, Joseph Murphy and James Backhouse, died in July in Afghanistan trying to save the lives of their brothers in arms. Andrew Dalton, 17, from Wirral, saved two small children from a fire. Mike Perham, 17, sailed round the world alone. Fifteen-year-old Tom Daley is a world champion diver. Milan Karki, 18, in Nepal, has invented a new kind of solar panel using human hair. Welsh 15-year-olds Leighton Griffiths and Tyler Hulpin saved six children from the burning house next door in May. Leighton went back in three times and ended up in hospital himself.
Of course, not every teenager gets the opportunity to be that kind of hero. But in my experience they are not lazy sods who never get out of bed. Isabel, a 16-year-old London A-level student about whom I can say nothing because she is my own daughter, worked out an average teenage schoolday for me: "Up at 6.30am, leave at 7.45am for school at 8.30am; out again at 4pm, extra curricular stuff till 5pm, home 5.45pm, three hours of homework, say, takes you to 8.45pm, by which time, if you're to get the recommended nine and a half hours' sleep, you should go to bed."
But they also need to eat (family meals round the table, five vegetables a day!); to exercise (obesity!); to wash (dirty!); to maintain their beauty (munter!). They must do chores (spoilt!); get out of the house (couch potato!) but not hang out in public places (threatening! antisocial! Or, er, dangerous!) And perhaps they might also be allowed a bit of social life ...
How on earth can they fit it all in? Teenagers do, physically, need around nine and half hours sleep a night, during which new brain cells are wired, thus increasing intelligence, self-awareness and performance. They get on average about seven hours, whereupon they often become cranky, slower-witted and resentful.
Russell Foster, chair of circadian neuroscience at Brasenose College, Oxford, has shown that teenagers' brains work better during the afternoon. They're not lazy, they're biologically programmed. There are simple reasons why they never clean up. First, they haven't the time. Second, nobody clears up as much as someone else might want them to. Third, they aren't usually as good at it as adults. They haven't had the practice.
But these are petty annoyances, compared with the big moans. And these are the ones where we really do them injustice. For example, drinking. If they do drink like fish, where did they get the idea? Who makes the booze? And who makes the money out of it? Not teenagers. A society that drinks as much as we do and still advertises alcohol even after the British Medical Association has told us not to, is a society that might benefit from doing one of those alcohol-awareness questionnaires. Shouting at teenagers for getting drunk is a simple projection of our own faults on to people we feel we can boss around.
Teenagers are told, on the one hand, to control themselves, and, on the other, carted off on booze-company-sponsored nightclub crawls as part of freshers' week at universities. "And no one," says Isabel, "publishes a picture labelled 'Look! It's Kate Winslet! She's not drunk and she's got all her clothes on!'" Of course teenagers get confused by these contradictions.
The drink issue is further charged by the fact that parents tend to infantilise their children in pursuit of their own immortality. To let them grow up, we have to grow up and even, God forbid, get old and die. Yet many of us are under the impression that we are the bright young things. Do we not occasionally thrill vicariously to our offsprings' misdemeanours? Are we not sometimes jealous of them?
Alongside this are the parents (the Duchess of York, for example) who think that they are "best friends" with their teenagers. No, you're not. They've got loads of friends and only one or two parents. This is, of course, no reason not to be friendly. At the same time, we can be scared for them and not trust them to go out and learn to operate maturely in the actual world. Because we have created a terrifying world, and we feel guilty, we keep them home and let them watch TV all day, whereupon they get fat from lack of movement, and succumb to the horrible fantasy world of advertising, where clever people make fortunes deluding us into spending money we don't have on things we don't need. Which is much more dangerous.
And then we start castigating them for being greedy little label-mad consumerists. But how could they not be, surrounded by advertisements telling them that "Impatience is a Virtue", and "Feed (Your) Addiction", "because you're worth it"? I trained Isabel from an early age to recognise adverts and what they were trying to do, and to mute the TV when they came on. Now, she says: "It was the single best thing you ever did for me."
Not knowing your own worth, particularly among girls (at whom most of these ads are aimed) is a fundamental contributor to promiscuity. The image of promiscuous teenagers is another at which too many adults gawp in combined envy and horror. But they grow, as Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi poet, said, in the garden in which they are planted. They imitate adults, and look to what they see glorified, and lo, they think nothing is more glamorous than falling in and out of cabs with their knickers showing, though this goes against the inner natural reserve of many, which is not honoured in anything they see around them. Instead, they see quasi-pornography in adverts and real pornography on the internet, and think threesomes and bald pudenda are normal, and they become confused as to what is required of them.
Here and now, behaving badly is recognised as a mass-marketable commodity. Fulham mothers wear leather trousers; The X Factor wheels out marketing-lite versions of a different youth tribe every week. Primary-school children are playing at snorting sherbet and ground up Love Hearts in the playground. Rebelling has become conforming. How can teenagers not be confused?
No wonder, perhaps, that adults are scared of them. But, as organisations such as Kids Company know, the really scary ones are the really scared ones. The best thing an adult can do is find a way past the scary behaviour to the scared kid. You don't have to hug the hoodies lurking in your street, but you could try saying, "Evening, lads."
I asked some teenagers if they were badly behaved. "Everyone expects you to rebel," says Kehinde, a 6ft, 16-year-old karate black belt with the voice of an angel and a cute afro, "so people go along with it because if you don't, other teenagers reject you, because they are scared of being rejected."
Everybody wants to fit in; everybody wants to stand out. "The worst thing," says Ruby, 17, an art scholar, is that "some of us act exactly how we want because we are teenagers, but others feel as if they should act a certain way to be a teenager."
"It's a vicious circle," agrees Sindri, 16. "People say, 'Oh, she's weird', to make themselves look not weird. To look bigger by putting someone else down. I hate it."
If they do want to be good, they get rounded on again. My nephew Remel, 13, a London schoolboy who has directed an award-winning film against knife crime, (The Circle of Resentment), says: "Once a year you see all these late-teens achieving amazing GCSE results, but for most of the time teenagers are portrayed in a bad light by the media. Stabbings, shootings. They seem to miss out that not all teenagers are carrying around knives and thinking they own the place. Yet when there is a chance for the good majority of the teenage population to be shown, we are portrayed as generally terrible."
Then when teenagers do get good results – well, the standards have fallen, haven't they?
Meanwhile, another nephew, Archie, 17, who wants to do well at school, finds himself stuck in one of the lowest echelons of secondary school society – that of the "social outcast", "rebel", "goth" or, to blanket all terms, "geek". The logic is, if you're clever, you'd better pierce yourself all over if you don't want to be scorned by your peers, whereupon adults will start crossing the road to avoid you.
Possibly the rudest thing adults do to teenagers is to assume they are always trying to steal from shops. Some are and, of course, they shouldn't. But can we bear in mind that they are constantly being told that particular items are "must haves" and led to believe that possession is the source of all joy? Everyone I've spoken to for this article has been followed round a shop by the store detective at least once.
Melanie, 16, a charming Quaker, was followed out of Superdrug: "He thought I'd stolen some paracetamol, which was pointless and annoying."
Kehinde was taken for a bag lady at Heathrow. Flora, 15, who lives in the country and feels this rather disqualifies her from being a teenager at all, given their public image, says: "I actually really enjoy the suspicious looks. I find it absolutely hilarious that anyone could find me intimidating or think that I'm dangerous in any way."
Bertie likes to "put my hood up and act shifty and then go to the till and put on my poshest voice and stare right into their eyes until they realise this is just a silly game and we both burst into laughter."
You see? How irresponsible! But they're not. Tash, 16, is quite clear: The people we should blame are the teenagers themselves who give us an awful reputation."
Meaghan, 18, agrees: "The few teenagers who are actually bastards leave a longer impression than those who work hard, which almost makes you think there's no point trying because no one will think any higher of you than of your peers who call everyone 'blud' and shout at people on the street."
I think there is an insidious tendency to moan about our own children in order not to appear smug. It may be part of the great female self-deprecation habit, whereby no woman will admit to being even passably good-looking. If this is the case, we are making a big error: our children are not us. Would we belittle our friends? I think not. Husbands and partners? Maybe, but when people do that in public don't you wish they wouldn't?
Our teenagers still, more than ever, on that long journey from childhood to adulthood, want, need and deserve our encouragement and admiration. Two images of teendom stick in my mind. One is young Joe McElderry's rendition of Dance with my Father at the beginning of this year's X Factor – a gorgeous, sentimental love song from offspring to adult. The other was when I first asked Kehinde if teenagers were given a bum deal: she said yes, look at those poor Afghan boys in Calais in September, after the "jungle" camp was bulldozed. She didn't even think I was talking about her. She was thinking about them.
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