“Kids These Days”: A Lesson in Stereotypes about Teenagers

I can't tell you how many movies I've seen that show the stereotypical bitter, old man that runs out of his dilapidated house yelling "those dang kids"! The vision of the typical teenager is one that runs deep in our society, that stems from a deep generational gap as old as time. But, as we all know, stereotypes are harmful, and rarely true. Here are some time-old stereotypes about us teens that need a good look.

“Teenagers do nothing but stare at their phones”

Do I look at my phone a lot? Yes, yes I do. I think I check my phone about 10x as often as my parents check their email. But am I a lemming destined to be a digital junkie? No, but too often, this is the view that our parents and other adults have of today’s teens.

Phones, and the technological age we live in now, are new to a vast majority of adults today. We are one of the first generations to grow up with the internet and handheld computers and many other things that we don’t even think twice about. As teenagers, we recognize that lots of adults don’t truly understand the role that technology plays in our lives, simply because it hasn’t been around for very long. We understand the generational gap to some extent, but what perpetuates this stereotype is a lack of understanding done by the adults.

The problem with this stereotype is that adults and “experts” assume that me looking at my phone is me aimlessly wasting my life away in front of a screen. (And while this can be true when we spend our online time binge-watching shows on Netflix, how is that any different than sitting in front of a TV for hours, something that has been around for decades?)

Yes, our lives are on phones. They are literally on our phones. Our social lives, while very intact in person, and also very online. The internet is the way we talk to people, the way we share ideas, and the way we learn what’s going on in the world, both globally and within our high school.  And while many people-primarily older adults- argue that our social skills are impacted by our screen time, I would beg to differ. Our social skills are there, they are merely different from the ones used by previous generations. Are they less personal? Someone who grew up calling instead of texting, or driving cross-country instead of FaceTiming might definitely see it that way.

                But unlike how this comic portrays us, it’s not as if we have given up communication completely. We’ve simply rearranged how it works and made it more efficient. We have larger social networks, a larger worldview, and a larger sense of what the crowd thinks that any generation has before, and all of that is on our devices, quite literally in the palm of our hands.

The world is changing, and the people and how we interact are changing with it. It’s time we get rid of the idea that teenagers are zombies following a virtual mob mentality that rarely look up long enough to talk to a real person. As a teenager myself, I can speak to the fact that, thanks to the little screen in my pocket, I’ve made friends from Germany to Indiana, and learned about issues that either do or will affect me. Mindless? Don’t think so.

“Teenagers do nothing except sleep until 2pm”

I remember when I was younger, my aunt and cousin came to stay, and I waited until 2pm for my then 15-year-old cousin to make his way downstairs. “How could someone sleep so long?”, I thought. And when my aunt and parents laughed and made jokes about him being a teenager, I was mystified at the fact that when I turned 13, I was to turn into the Walking Dead impression that was my cousin.

Well, now I’m 16. And sleeping is my favorite thing to do. In fact, this comic strip displays most of my feelings about sleep and mornings in general in one picture.

However, this increase in sleepiness actually has a biological factor. I won’t bore you with details, because thanks to the renewed debate over high school start times, we’ve all heard the “Teenagers should get at least 9 hours of sleep” factoid over and over again. 

Beyond that, here’s a fact that many of us don’t know, or don’t acknowledge the meaning of: our Circadian cycle changes as we grow and as we age. Our Circadian cycle, for those of us who don’t actively try to prove teen sleep deprivation, is the process in your brain that determines when you get tired, and when you would naturally wake up. As we go into our teen years, this cycle shifts. Our natural body clock starts wanting to stay up later and going to sleep later (Source), and asking a teenager to get up at 7am is the same as asking an adult to get up at 3am. This is the same phenomenon as being jetlagged. I couldn't convince many adults to do Calculus at 7:30am when they feel jetlagged, so why do I have to do it?

So we’re not being lazy by not wanting to get up early. We’re not being bums. Our bodies literally do not want to get out of bed before 9am. It’s simply not natural, and just that fact alone could send me on a lovely rant about school start times that I’ll save for another blog post.

Questions? Comments? kateriwswc@gmail.com