Busted! 5 Myths About Teenagers Everyone Should Know

12 Nov Busted! 5 Myths About Teenagers Everyone Should Know

There are a few myths floating around about parenting teenagers (and teenagers, in general) that need to be debunked. Myths that, once debunked, might just make parenting your teen (or, at the very least, understanding your teen) a whole lot easier. Here are 5 myths about parenting teenagers that every parent should stop believing, according to users of Australian casino online.

There have always been teenagers.

Of course there have always been people aged between 13 and 19. But the word ‘teen’ didn’t appear until 1899, and the use of ‘teenager’ was almost unheard of before the 1950s. But we love putting people into pigeon holes. As soon as ‘teenager’ had been invented, it was seized on by all kinds of 20+ experts – and we’ve been stuck with it ever since.

Teenage behaviour is the same the world over.

True, young people tend to be more open, straightforward and impetuous than older ones. Does this mean all of them – or even the majority – behave the same way? Of course not.cTake two extreme examples: a middle-class American student, with little serious responsibility other than for their high school and college grades, and a Saudi Arabian Bedouin married at 14 and parent of three children by the age of 18. The lifestyles and attitudes of these two teenagers couldn’t be further apart.

Being a teenager is ‘just a phase’.

We’re back at that pigeon-holing business again. Ever since Shakespeare made one of his characters divide human life into seven ages, so-called experts have been dreaming up categories to slot us into. The reality is that life’s a roller coaster – up and down, backwards and forwards, with everyone moving at different speeds. Never heard a boy called a ‘little old man’ or seen an adult behaving childishly?

Teenagers are selfish.

Teenagers are no more selfish than anyone else. If some do behave selfishly, it’s probably because they’re spoilt. And why does that happen? Because in our society everything is judged by its cash value. Children are their parents’ biggest investment: the cost of a child from birth to graduation is now reckoned to be £227,000 (Centre for Economic and Business Research, 2014). That makes two children more expensive than the house and car combined, courtesy of https://www.fronlinecasino.lv/machines-a-sous/.

Teenagers are promiscuous.

Three points here. One, surveys suggest young people are more critical of ‘cheating’ (ie moral) than older ones. Two, those who criticise teenage sexual behaviour often do so out of jealousy! Three, teenagers behave as society allows – eg the private lives of teenagers in Manchester don’t have much in common with those in Malaysia or Manchuria.