“Those darned teenagers…”

When I hear adults perpetrate stereotypes about teenagers (lazy, entitled, under-educated, etc) I realize that those adults must not know many teenagers.

The first step in understanding teenagers is acknowledging that you were never a teenager in the sense that they are. Their teenage experience bears little resemblance to your own. You faced different challenges than they do. That difference doesn’t make their experience wrong.

It’s easy to point at their devices and say, “See, this is what’s wrong with teenagers today. They are always on their phones.” When, in fact, we are all on our phones all the time.