Sunday, February 16, 2014

"A Tangle of Discourses"

Reflection:

This article talks about the five main discourses of a teenager. They are listed as: storm, becoming, at-risk, social problem, and pleasurable consumption. The article takes each one and goes into detail about how the term relates to teenagers as they grow and develop in the world. I found this article to be pretty interesting. Some points I agreed with but others reminded me of being in class and discussing how people talk about teenagers as being “those crazy teens.” One thing that I do agree on falls under the “at risk” category (I really don’t like this heading). I agree that teens are more prone to experience “risk-full” situation such as experiencing with drugs, alcohol, relationships, eating issues, etc. but only because they are being influenced by their surroundings, peers/media/society and because they have not yet tried these things so they are curious. Everyone who tries something new does it because they are curious about the particular interest. So why classify teens as being “risk-takers” when technically all of us who try something new could be called this. I think that teens are just trying to live and grow and in order to do this they have to do a little experimenting. The negative experiments of teens are always talked about but teens are also experiencing with positive things as well. Teenagers learn at a young age that sometimes only negative things are worth being talked about and all positive and helpful things that happen while growing up are seen as, for lack of terms, “not worthy.” This made me think of Christensen's article and how kids are being blinded for my negative stereotypes and the secret education but maybe it is a good thing after all because it is protecting us from so much negativity. I think parents are too hard on teenagers, not because they mean to be, but because they know what they were doing as a teenager. My big thing with this is that teens are going to be influenced by other people and factors but how they are raised and the home life they come from determines a lot about their characteristics and need to experiment. My parents were always involved with what I was doing, who I was with, when I would be coming home, and all of these things factored into the kind of teenage years I had. Growing up, especially during my teenage years, I often fought with my parents over little things because I thought they were too involved in my business (seriously though what business did I really have at that age!?) but looking back at it now, I’m happy they were always involved because they helped me make good decisions. 


5 comments:

  1. I really like your picture :)
    I also agree with what you said about how the title of being at "risk" is one you dont like. i also mentioned in my blog that teenagers are not the only ones who go through life and experience life and im glad you pointed out how teenagers also experience positive events. it seems those go unnoticed all too often

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  2. I agree that we shouldn't have to classify teenagers as being the "risk takers" because I believe we are being risk takers throughout our lives...(before teenage years and after teenage years!) We are always trying new and different things.

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  3. I also feel as though our parents have lived a longer life than us, and can give much better advice. It is also nice that their advice is from an outside perspective.

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  4. I think that you can look at the label "at-risk" in a different way. Teens are an at-risk group, not because they're all crazy risk takers, but because they are impressionable. For example, you can say someone is at risk for a disease not because they're destroying their body with bad things, but because they have genetic factors or environmental factors that put them in danger of developing something. So, I think this label can actually be used to make teens out to be the vulnerable ones who are easily influenced by their environment and peers.

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  5. I like how you said it reminded you of the class discussion where teenagers are "those crazy ones" i think the article does in some ways refer them to being crazy and out of control. I do think that doing drugs/ alcohol is influenced greatly by the media and our everyday surroundings and are curious in ways because of how the media is presenting these things to be cool or in.

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