Teenagers - by Darylynn Starr Rank
April, 2006

I was surfing the net today thinking about teenagers and what they’re like, who they’re supposed to be, what their problems are, and the issues parents have around raising them. 

This was a fairly stupid idea to begin with, I realized, as I waited for Google to do its job, because it starts off with the premise that teenagers are a ‘thing’. A group. An identifiable wholeness. It’s based on the idea that teenagers can be classified. And of course – they can’t. I can no more write a column describing teenagers than I can sit down and write a cohesive image on what the population of people in their twenties or forties or sixties are like. 

But I was still curious so I  kept googling to see what would pop up. There were sites devoted to parents dealing with teens, then decided it might be more informative to explore the topics that teens themselves are interested in. I found a site where teenagers discussed a variety of things they were interested in discussing among themselves. The first topic I encountered was labeled ‘bias’ in the media, and the first thing I did was make a mistake.  

Aha, I thought. Teenagers are pissed off about the image they have in the media. How they’re portrayed. How they’re stereotyped. Now that’s interesting, I thought. I’ll go take a peek.

Guess what? The discussion covered bias in the media, all right. But the biases they were talking about concerned racist tendencies, political leanings, reportage on terrorism, the war in Iraq, the genocide in the Sudan, the difference in news reporting on the same topic depending on which country’s news you were listening to.

Was I surprised? I admit I was. I’m pretty positive I could have googled dozens of different age groups, professions, nationalities, political or religious sites and come up with much the same discussions of similar topics.  

But teenagers were talking about them too.

Think honestly now. How often have you read or seen a news story on teenagers that portrayed them as having that kind of discussion among themselves? That portrayed them as individuals who were positive, interested, caring, politically concerned, angry about the state of the world?   

So perhaps my first thought on what the discussion was about, media bias about teenagers themselves, is also an important topic. All too often news stories are about what teenagers are doing wrong. The trouble they get in. 

At this point in the column I might normally list the kinds of portrayals we usually see. Describe the bias. Give examples of the typical stories about teenagers. But I find myself reluctant to contribute to that bias, to reiterate those stereotypes.

So instead I’ve decided to spend some time thinking about a few teenagers I know and what they’ve been doing lately.  In school, in the community, with their families and with their friends. Good things. Positive things. Including having discussions on the internet about important, current, caring issues going on in the world. And hold those images up to the stereotypes in the news about what teens are ‘really’ like. You might want to do the same.

My guess is most most teenagers are exactly like we are. Wonderful, caring, brave some of the time. And everything else as well.

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

Back to Article Index