The New Set of Teenage Problems

"Saturday Climbing"

Our parent’s once had their own set of similar problems that teenagers today have to deal with, but teenagers now have a new set of troubles that our parent’s cannot compare to. Although our parent’s might have had their similarities with us, be it relationships with males or females, fights at school or bullying, our technological age has struck the teenage society in both a positive and negative way. The positive side isn’t the matter of the issue now, but rather it’s the negative’s that makes us differentiate between our parent’s generation and our teenage generation today. Some of those problems include: cyber bullying, sex and love addictions, as well as body image.

To start off, Cyber bullying is when technological communication is used to deliberately hurt or harm another’s feelings through the internet. Note, hurt is not referred to physical pain but refers to internally harming another person’s feelings, typically teenagers. For instance, a normal 16 year old girl goes home, finishes her home work and heads onto the computer. She open up her msn and logs into Facebook. Just yesterday, she posted up a decent frontal picture of her face as a profile picture on her Facebook profile. Today she logs on, and gets multiple notifications saying how ugly she is, that her acne is horrible, that she looks so alienish and so forth. Cyber bullying can be compared to alienation, except that they’re being alienated online which can later lead to isolation at school. Our parent’s might have had the internet, but it wasn’t as popular as now, almost everyone has an msn account or facebook, and it’s hard to say if a teenager can survive without internet. Since the general teenage population has internet (and facebook, msn etc.), they are all potential victims of cyber bullying.

To further my point, there is also something called sex and love addiction. Of course, this existed even back in our parent’s generation, but the severity and freedom that our teenagers risk today is dangerous, and even potentially fatal. For example, teenagers in Guyana wouldn’t be able to loiter around where ever they want, and even if they could, they’d have a certain time limit, and even if the time limit is obeyed, they can’t be caught with another girl, especially during school! What I’m trying to say is that our teenage society has so much more freedom than before to go anywhere they want. They can go meet a girl, rent a room and have sexual intercourse anywhere that shows signs of privacy. And if they’re above 18, they legally have the right to be out before midnight. There are some cases where a parent would call the police because their child is not listening to them when they say don’t go out, say home tonight, but the cop proceeds with the child’s rights that he can be anywhere within the district, as long as he/she comes home before midnight! But that’s not all; we also have a lot more diseases and illnesses like AIDS, and different types of HIV’S. Add AIDS to the equation of freedom and you have a lot more teenager putting their lives at risk compared to our parents generation.

Lastly, in our parents generation there were overweight people, but not as many as today. Also, they were not that many advertisements being displayed on physical body image. So everyone was pretty much “mmeh” about how nice their body looked. Now-a-days, we have more obese teenagers than healthy teens and a ton more advertisements on body imaging than advertisements on helping the poor! This is bad, because this puts a lot more pressure on the people who want to lose weight, but they can’t because it’s too hard! So they give up and just live their whole life with a subconscious thought in the back of their heads of how disgusting they look. Obesity isn’t the only problem though, they are also teenagers that are malnourished, and even some that are bulimic. Matters have gone so far, that there are some cases where an unhealthy teen might have died or committed suicide due to his “unappealing” body condition. To clarify on one point though, some teenagers might find their body appealing, but in reality they’re actually malnourished, and so die from starvation thinking they were thin and beautiful.

In conclusion, our parent’s generation didn’t have to deal with some of the problems teens today have to deal with. They didn’t have to worry as much about cyber bullying, sex and love addictions, as well as body image. And these are obstacles that our parent’s couldn’t find as an obstacle in their generation, but we teenagers have to face today.