Do Present Teenagers Care More About What Others Think?

The optimist and pessimist in me don’t seem to agree on the answer.

Image by Brigitte Werner

Expectations

I always expect young people — I mean very young, teenagers — to defy the norms imposed on them. I expect them not to care about what came before and be interested in what they will make happen next. I expect them to be indifferent to what others may think. Now, I am regularly confronted with dissonance: my expectations don’t match the reality I perceive. For instance, peer pressure seems brutal, much heavier than what I remember from my teenage years.

In fairness, expectations are always on the expecting subject. It is nobody’s fault but my own that I expect young people to be anything. It’s on me alone. My experience and imagination are solely responsible for putting specific ideas in my head about what young folk should be like. With that out of the way, let’s look at the issue.

Memories

I remember caring about what my friends thought about me. As kids, we face this horrible prospect of not being accepted. Children can be viciously cruel. Thus, fitting in is almost a survival instinct. The tribe offers safety. Being left out of the herd — becoming a renegade — is akin to receiving a death sentence as far as our social life…