The 5 Most Interesting Things About Being a Teenager

            The teenage years are undoubtedly marked with young love, self-discovery, and a bit of experimental wildness. For some, those four years are too short, for others too long. Some go through countless trial and error trying to find a solid group of friends and others struggle to keep that summer fling afloat into the school year. As teenagers transition from childhood to adulthood, many develop and confirm their desired personalities, opinions, and career interests. Though adults smirk and belittle teenagers and their dramatic lives, those four years are a critical period of development for adolescents as many will leave home and learn to live, study, and work on their own after graduation.

            One of the most exciting and unpredictable things about high school for teenagers is experiencing that first relationship. Teachers love to joke about high school students and their raging hormones—and frankly, they are correct! Teenagers love having summer flings and love trying to make shoddy and shallow relationships last. As a result, everyone gets a fair share of drama during high school—no matter if they are the popular jocks and cheerleaders, or the more reserved debate geeks.

            In the midst of finding friends and studying to get into a good college, the four years of high school are truly a time of self-discovery. Since high school students are typically more mature than they were in middle school, they learn to think more for themselves. From there, teenagers experiment with friend groups, music genres, and clothing style to find what interests them most and where they feel where they belong the most. According to Marlene Lenthang, a Whitney Young senior, “figuring out [one’s] place in the world” is one interesting thing about being a teenager. It is debatable whether teenagers experiment with personalities and styles to impress others or to feel accepted, but without a doubt, everyone struggles and strives to “realize who they are” and learn to “act on that knowledge” as Antonio Romo, a teenager, describes it.

            Not only are adolescents experimenting with where their identity thrives, they also experiment with how many buttons they can push and how much they can get away with. As a result, many mistakes are made and regrets created during teen years but as Angela Leung, a seventeen year old student at Whitney Young, describes it, these years are “the only times [when] making mistakes is acceptable.” Principals constantly reprimand students for underage drinking and parents routinely ground their teenage kids and take the car keys back. And even through all this, teenagers still continue their wild and rowdy ways.

            As teenagers graduate from childhood, the teen years are also conveniently placed to prepare them for adulthood. Eighteenth birthdays and college acceptances are probably the hallmarks of teenage life that adolescents look forward to most. As teens grow older and mature, it is no doubt that they often face discrimination and belittling from older counterparts. Many teens spend their high school years striving to prove their intellect and competence to reach the point when, according to Leyah Williams, a high school senior, “adults begin respecting [them] as young [adults]” rather than “treating [them] like [children].” It is usually not until when teenagers are forced to leave the security of their homes and learn to live by themselves in college or in the working world that many realize they are no longer children.

            Lastly, aside from focusing on themselves, another interesting aspect about the teenage life, as Logan McClure, a resident of Chicago, states, is teenagers “being able to observe what all the people [they] know grow up to be.” Not only do teenagers learn from their own mistakes, they also learn from watching their peers succeed and fail. Looking at how their friends have grown and matured often forces adolescents to analyze where they are in life and assess if they have been as successful as they would like to be in comparison to their friends.

            If the home was a nest, childhood years the hatching, and adulthood years the takeoff, then the teenage years would be the ‘learning to fly’ part of life. Most remember their teenage years to be filled with mistakes and regrets, but the fun memories and preparation of those years into adulthood seem to make it all worth it.