Everything After - A 9.11 Youth Circle - What's wrong with people our age?

I personally think what's wrong with people our age is there is a lack of morals, parental supervision, parental involvement, and maturity. I'm not saying everyone our age is lacking these but it seems like most are. The divorce rate is sooo high that most kids are living in a single parent home and that single parent must work therefor leaving the kid(s) home alone and they do what they want and when they want to. There's also alot of immature kids our age, I know people my age(17) who are very immature and do stuff like 12 year olds do. I've also noticed that some kids our age do things for attention 'cause their parents aren't around enough. I've been told I'm only 17 going on 47 though, I guess that would be 'cause I'm an only child I dunno. I've always been close to both my parents and now that my dad died I'm even closer to my mom.

i think these are all valid points but what do u expect from kids our age(14-18) i think it has a lot to do with parental involvment but things grow as time goes on. I also think society has a lot to do with this, and what it teaches us. i.e tv shows, role models. etc etc. one specific example of this is professional sports, what kind of role models are these atheltes. they make millions of dollars, usually do not give much of it back to the community they grew up in or communities in general. a lot of they get caught doing drugs etc. it just so happens that in society these these athletes get "targeted" as role models, people that kids should look up to. and i dont even want to get into politicians, cuase that is just too too long.

I think parental involvement can be good, but like that's assuming your parents are awesome. If your parents are abusive or negative in some way then good riddance... thank goodness they work 15 hour days. Get a mentor or something, a good one. Someone who's not their occupation or paycheck, someone with more important qualifications like compassion. I think it's important to have people around you that support and understand you, that make you feel like you have a place in the world, that you have a right to be who you are and do exactly what makes you happy. I think this culture puts way too much emphasis on status and money.

I don't think there's anything wrong with us. I actually think the more dysfunctional we are the more healthy we are on some level because it's this culture that has issues. Look at the messages we receive daily? Look at what it tells us we should look forward to. I think when kids rebel or they're apathetic it's partly cuz they're not feeling what they see. And maybe we could work on learning to do something about it, and seeing how much power we have, but who's teaching us that? Who's telling us we can change the world? I mean really. I've mostly gotten messages that told me to mold myself to fit the last couple of acceptable cookie cutter designs.

I know adults think there's a lot wrong with us though. Adults are afraid of us. The media is racist and classist and it doesn't like kids. So you're just really screwed if you happen to be poor, pigmented, and young. People are literally afraid. People believe their TVs. Even The New York Times has been accused of being biased towards youth like in a number of ways including the number of articles in which they portray youth in a positive light, you guys this is considered the most legitimate news source in the world or something. It only goes down hill from there and people believe all kinds of things cuz they don't see anything to the contrary. I mean even all these teen movies that are like marketed towards us are really disturbing you know? Among other misrepresentations the way they portray us as being so shallow and cruel, I don't think we came up with that all by ourselves. People make money off our shallowness, and ignorance, they totally encourage it.

I think we're an oppressed population. I mean we don't have much power or money, we're told what to do (including with our power and money), and we mostly do it. We could easily make the world one we want to live in, in the future, like what if we refused to go to war and rejected anything related to it. Who would fight? Who would keep it going? What would happen? Long post I know I know.