Teenage angst drives trends

Ranjan Yumnam *

Teenage angst drives trends :: Pix - TSE

The joke is on us. Why did the teenager get into a fight with their parents over their clothes ? Because their parents just didn’t understand that ripped jeans are a fashion statement, not a laundry accident ! Such is the generational gap that creates misunderstandings between parents and their new-fangled kids. What GenX consider as cool is an anathema to the taste and rules familiar to the older generation.

What seems like an appropriate funeral dress may revolt a teenager as if it were a sartorial hangover from ancient times. Daddy wants more vegetables; the kids want the taste that excites the palate such as spicy everything: KFC, pizza, beef steaks and a hot singju. “Because they think we are cavemen and do not know BTS members’ birthdays,” commented a friend on Facebook in the context of the parent-teen gap in taste.

MAIN THEORIES

Many reasons have been proffered for the diametrically opposite tastes, prefe- rences, and motivations of parents and their teenage wards. One psychological reason is that by rebelling against the prevailing norms, teenagers are asserting their identity to break away from the yoke of mommy’s mollycoddling.

Carl Jung termed teenhood as the Individuation stage. Neurological studies state that their prefrontal cortex is still in development, and their brains' brakes, gears, and accelerators are not properly synchronised. A renowned psychiatrist at NIMHANS, Bangalore once told me colourfully that a teenager’s underdeveloped brain is an unfinished car engine which by itself is barely able to regulate the brakes, gears and accelerators in tandem.

Teenagers misuse accelerators when they should be hitting brakes, sometimes gears instead of accelerators. As an online friend commented on my Facebook post and rightly said, “It’s the sudden rush of hormones that comes with age.”

Yes, hormones, pheromones and all the strange bodily fluids and chemicals transform teenagers into tinderboxes of unpredictable bombs that can explode at any time. So, you will relate to this joke that goes: Why did the teenager's mood swings get invited to all the parties? Because they always brought a lot of… unexpected energy!

Then the biological churnings inside the body leading to puberty is a bloody period of confusion and anxiety for a teenager. The girls are awkward with the changes in their bodies, and the boys are bewildered at their own groggy voices. Not yet a woman and not yet an alpha man. Are they impostors thrust into the wrong place and time ?

“If only we knew. It is ironic that though we have passed the same stage, we are still groping in the dark, trying to understand the whys of that teen period,” a distinguished Editor commented on my Facebook post, which asked this question: “Why do teenagers rebel? Are they trying to be cool?”

UNIVERSAL EDUCATION

The roots of the teenage rebellion may be traced to the introduction of school education for children. Compulsory kindergarten and public high schools opened teenagers’ floodgates to freedom from the household environment. In schools, peers socialise and learn the rules of engagement in real-time, and parental rules diminish in value.

Away from the oversight of their parents, teena- gers create, test run and compete with new ideas among themselves. A teenage subculture is thus created. This sub-culture contrasts with the old values and cultural trends that exist in the dining room at home.

The teenage subculture has traditionally thrived on technology. Before smart-phones and social media emerged, the Sony Walk-man, sports bikes, and flashy cars were the gadgets of choice for teenagers. By merely sharing the playlist and humming the lyrics among them, they catapult little-known songs to the top of the billboard and set the standards of popularity.

Acknowledging their clout, manufacturers study teenagers’ reactions to prototype automobile designs and machines before rolling them out in the market. Teenagers are also the barometer of niche technological products. They often are the first adopters of new gizmos, and the product's success or failure depends on their judgement. In fact, all the popular consumer products have passed the initial screening of young minds and fingers.

The cool factor is thus the invention of the teenagers. When the adults are just beginning to notice the cool things curated by the teenagers, the young and restless minds would have moved on to the next embryonic iPhone. In many ways, teenagers exercise an outsized power to shape the cultural trends of the times. Today’s Nintendo game is tomorrow’s blockbuster game.

The funny Korean hairstyle became a craze once adopted and worn by the popular kids on the school campus. The TV models we watch, the version of the car we drive, and the type of breakfast we eat are dictated by teenagers in a household.

TOO MUCH LEISURE

If school freed them from their parents’ clutches, the decline of a labour-intensive agrarian economy and the rise of the service sector, and with the Government banning child labour, adolescents have constituted a demographic with an abundant supply of leisure time. They are itching to tinker with whatever is within their reach: TVs, remotes, movies, cars, consumer items, food, and fashion.

What they don't have is the money to spend on their radical ideas and brands. Money is a bone of contention–one that ignites bargaining between parent and their young kids.

What they lack in resources, the youth has enthusiasm and creativity to the brim, unfettered by any notions of conventional ideas. With their blank slate of a brain, they reinvent many aspects of our lives without referring to a manual. For them, the adults’ rules are illegitimate unless they are proven otherwise. It’s no wonder then that their denim trousers fall below their waist and expose cleavages of all kinds.

The result of their inchoate thought process is that teenagers are forever pushing the frontiers of knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, taste buds, clothing and cultural trends. This appetite for novelty and excitement also spills into society’s key issues.

Young people have led and acted as catalysts for social reformation and revolutions that toppled Govts, brought social changes and influenced environmental policies. Young activists have played a large role in pushing for climate change reforms on a global scale. Greta Thun-berg and our own Lycipriya are living examples.

CENTRE OF THE FAMILY

All this youth-centric ethos eventually emanates from the family unit and beyond. Teenagers’ sphere of influence grows as the family size shrinks in the modern service economy, making them important decision-makers in the family. More and more couples decide to have fewer kids, and the one or two who are lucky to come into the world are pampered like princes and princesses.

When they merely point their fingers at something they want, parents go the extra mile to get it. Instead of sibling rivalry fighting for limited attention from their parents, the kids are showered with attention and kisses.

Slowly without much ado, teenagers have come to monopolise the emotional, cultural and economic clout in the family first, extending it to the larger society. They have increasingly become the arbiters of favourite brands, logos and fads, transforming obscure cultural products into mainstream heavyweights.

Coming back to why teenagers rebel, the usual textbook explanations from psychology, biology, and neuroscience are not satisfactory and sufficient. There are other factors at play, especially the availability of leisure with the advent of post-agrarian and post-industrial work and family structure. Second, teenagers and their hordes have hogged the attention and instant gratification within a family.

From being the apple of the eye, they have become the Apple iPhones of our whole existence. Third, they have little to lose when they break rules, and this behaviour is expected due to the cultural stereotypes we hold of them.

Whereas adults have experienced a lot, derived patterns of actions and reactions and are comfortable in the status quo that has worked for them, teenagers tend to challenge the established authority with impunity.

GUIDANCE FOR TEENS

If teenagers are bubbling with new ideas, their defects keep the parents awake at night. These precocious minds are impulsive, and they take risks like they have extra lives, as in the video games they are obsessed with. In order to look cool, they sometimes go overboard and end up testing the limits of social and legal acceptability.

Bullying, for instance, is an extreme mechanism to mark one’s identity and selfhood, sometimes camouflaging the weaknesses of a bully. The teenagers’ proclivity for experimenting, acting without thinking, lack of patience, and blindness to consequences is a matter of folk psychology. So, what should we do with them?

The obvious culprits of teenage problems are the immature brain, raging hormones, lack of life experience, and temporal blindness. “They don’t have ideas of life. Occupy them with works and studies and more day-to-day work,” says a successful father who is also an eminent Editor of an evening newspaper published in Imphal.

The key message here is to make them so busy that they do not wander and to confine their attention to productive and less dangerous pursuits. When left to their own devices, teenagers are glued to their mobile screens, immersed in Facebook, Instagram and TikTok reels which cause mental health issues and low self-esteem.

Electronic devices are so ubiquitous and have encouraged addictive doom scrolling through endless social media posts, a result of which is having to constantly compare themselves to airbrushed images of peers to internalise unrealistic physical ideals, body shaming, bulimia and depression.

One solution is to keep the attention of the teenagers shepherded in a line. We become what we give our attention to, and this holds true for teenagers. The use of social media and neglect of real-world experiences divides the teens’ attention and atomises teens’ engagement with topics that demand depth.

The teenage years should be spent sampling the diverse fields of human expertise and experience, allowing them to zoom in on one area that aligns with their natural aptitude and passion. The richer and more diverse a teenager’s exposure to a tapestry of experiences and intellectual horizons, the greater the chance for a teenager to find her calling and, through it, the meaning and purpose of life.

In other words, our attempt should not be to cut the wings of the teenagers but to guide them to an expansive canvas for them to explore and choose an activity, be it art or science, architecture, engineering, writing, music, sport, academics, etc in which they can actualise their potential. We should partner with them to discover things that matter to them for life.

Tell them not to waste time on worthless distractions. That multi-tasking is a myth. That once a teenager, she is an adult in making, and time flies. A teenager should carve a seamless path to adulthood and follow the time-tested advice: be young at heart; be wise in your actions. Which is to say, they should channel their bountiful nervous energy to laser focus on areas where they can shine and make a mark.

Summing up, the main responsibility of parents is to provide a wide breadth of engagement with ideas and real-life experiences, including both formal education and extracurricular activities, so that they can sample them and decide what makes them tick. To do this, parents must limit the targeted distractions consuming the young minds and inspire in them the value of deep focused work.