For a very long while, I have felt that teenagers are one of most misunderstood people on earth. How often have adults made the assumption that we have behaved irresponsibly? You would also think teenagers are troublesome, lazy and disrespectful. We need to be respected. We should not be treated this way. We will change these stereotypes about us and we will stop you from misjudging us.
Many adults make the conclusion to us that we are a disruption to society. For instance, we like to go out with friends. However, adults think that we are in “gangs”, want to “vandalize property”, “disrupt the public” and “annoy the people”. When we usually play football or basketball, adults think that we are like wild animals. But in reality, we are just having fun, enjoying our time as teenagers and communicating with friends. We do care what people think about us because we do have feelings; but people still think of us as immature, lazy and disrespectful.
Why do adults think of us in this way? We should never be treated like this. We have to react, because if we do not do anything about it, it will get worse. Do you remember your teenage years? To be realistic, we may show attitude towards people, but there is an acceptable reason for this. Our hormones rise up. And you might think we are grumpy and lazy but really, we have mood swings because of the way our body’s function. This is a natural thing that all of us have to go through.
Teenagers have a lot of stress and pressure with school. When an individual does something, they should get a detention, but it is not like that. For one person that does something, everyone gets the punishment; and it is unfair right? What adds on are our GCSEs as well. For example, GCSE and mock exams are one of the most difficult and stressing times for us teens. Most of the teachers say, ‘the options’ you are choosing will be with you for the rest of your life” or “it is the most important test you’ll ever have”, which only adds more pressure to teenagers. Many of us really do not like to be stressed out and if you carry on talking about GCSEs as very difficult exams, then how are we supposed to get a decent grade if you are putting pressure on us?
Friends are another massive problem for us. If a pupil wears something you normally don’t expect, other people would say,”You have no swag!” or “you’re a neek!” which will demotivate the pupil. And that’s a struggle for us, because soon after it can lead to bullying; there won’t be a good response from the student.
Ashamed, alone and afraid. This is how I felt during my life of being a teenager. How cruel right? And the word ‘bully’ always scares me. Always attacking me. Always putting me down as well as other teenagers. I would always have nightmares, because of the bullies. My heart would always pump. I would start to sweat when I headed to school because of these bullies always mistreating me, hurting me and putting me down. How would you like to be bullied every single day? Do you remember being bullied by those bullies? Do you remember when you were scared to go to school and pretended to be sick? Do you remember those bad dreams you have, because of those bullies? Adults think that every teenager is just lazy and don’t want to go to school. However, in reality, we teens are afraid, ashamed and alone because of the bullies treating us like we’re nothing.
We are wrongly judged as teenagers and we are fed up with it. Yes some of us are what you think we are but nobody takes the time to talk to us and actually find out what we are really like. It’s like a new teacher in class; we don’t judge you based on what your wearing or what you look like. We base you on our first impressions, by how you treat us, then we make our decision on how to react towards you and behave. Personally I think that’s fair and us teenagers would really appreciate it if you tried the same thing with us and not just see us and label us as rude, lazy and disrespectful.
React!