Teens are generally seen in a bad light. Maybe most of these stereotypes come from the social media that we are all exposed to, which portrays teens as kids who rebel against their parents and the law. But do us teenagers all follow social media so easily, in every way? Most adults dread their child’s teen years, picturing heated arguments resulting in the teen stomping out of the house. They picture the teen lying about things from where they are going to what they did last night. They picture the teen doing drugs at a party in a big, rich house in the middle of the night, filled with loud music and drunk high school students, sneaking off to have sex or get high. They might picture their kid joining a group of teens to skip classes, rob a store, or find a drug dealer. What’s worse, they believe that their teen will face a huge but simple dynamic of popularity where if their teen doesn’t do the above things, they are not part of the in crowd at school. There are tons of stereotypes about teenagers that are, for the large part, untrue, not to mention unfair, and teens constantly face these stereotypes.

Let me give you an example. After school, I went to a nearby grocery store with a guy to get something to drink. The display of drinks was in the last aisle of the store. The aisle was pretty narrow, and we had to sort of press ourselves against the shelf to let someone go by. We were standing next to each other after letting someone go by when a lady and passed by the aisle, looked at us, and said to her friend, “kids these days are so eager to make out that they’ll do it in a grocery store”. We ignored her comment, and shortly later another one of our friends came to get a drink, saw us, and started a conversation. As he was talking, he was putting a piece of paper that was in his hand into his backpack. As we left the aisle, a worker in the store almost yelled at our friend, telling him to get out of the store, and said, “you too!” to my friend and I, despite our confused expressions. As I walked by the worker, I overheard him say to his onlooking co-worker that “the b****h was stealing some drinks, I saw him”. Not only did he assume that the guy was stealing, but he also assumed that my own friend and I were stealing along with him. And the fact that we were all crammed in a small aisle in the back of the store, and the worker happened to “see” our friend stealing, just shows that he likely already had his eye on us because of our age alone.

One day, I was at a Thanksgiving dinner with family and family friends. I was 16 and everyone else, besides my little sister, were adults. There was a cooler with bottles of sparkling soda and wine. I took a bottle of sparkling apple cider, opened it, and poured it into a glass, filling it to the brim. The host of the Thanksgiving dinner, an old man, came up to me and said, “a little buzz?”
At first I was confused--I had no idea what he was referring to. After a few seconds he glanced at the glass, and it all made sense. I explained to him that it was only apple cider, and we briefly laughed, but I was annoyed. For him, it was natural to believe that I got drunk because of my age. He also thought I drank alcohol at any chance I had, even at a Thanksgiving dinner full of adults!

Another experience was completely unexpected, and came from my own father. My parents, my sister, and I were all eating dinner, and after I was full I asked to be excused. My mother said yes, but my father looked angrily at the few scraps left on my plate and said, “yeah right, she’s just going to throw the food away and then go throw it up.”
I was appalled. My mouth dropped open in surprise and disbelief. I had never heard something like this from him. He was probably thinking that all teens were so easily affected by social media that he actually accused me of being bulimic, all because I said I was full--something I have said many times before in my life without accusation like this. The point is, while social media may affect teens across the nation, it doesn’t mean that every teen affected by it takes its meaning to the extreme.

Us teens all see adult family and adult family friends at least a few times a year, whether it be at gatherings, funerals, birthday parties, holidays, dinners, or just visits. It is a common experience at such events for an adult to come up to us, exclaiming how much we’ve grown since the last time they saw us, and then turn to our parents or guardians and make jokes about how hard it must be for them to raise a teenager. Or they might say something like, “it’s one thing when they turn 5, but it’s another when they turn 15!” They may express these things as jokes, but we know that the idea of teen disobedience comes from their actual stereotypes about teenagers. This happens to me often and it hurts my feelings every time, because stereotypes like this are far from the truth of how I actually am, and it hurts that all the adults around me, including my own parents, believe that I fulfill many of these stereotypes.