WHAT DOES YOUR TEEN THINK? A Teen's View on Today's World

You have to admit, the state of the world today looks pretty bleak.  I don't know about you, but it worries me...everyday.  But have you ever wondered what your teenager thinks about what's happening in the world today? The growing debt?Terrorist? Their future?  Is he/she worried? Scared? Does he/she even care?  Today, I am honored to have guest teen blogger, Monique, from RadicalParenting.com,  who gives an inside look into an American teenagers view of the world. 

As a teenager, I feel as if I have two different sets of eyes. People make the misconception that we don’t care about what is going on in our country and in the world. However, that is far from true. I honestly do not want to care, but there are moments in my life where the anxiety that the world gives off creeps up and swallows me whole. I don’t want to care, but I have to care. This is my future that these politicians and leaders have dangling by their fingers. Even though I just want to be this carefree teenager, the economy, president, and the rest of the world won’t let me. 

If you listen to the news, you know that people are losing their jobs left and right, gas prices are going up, and families are having to take extreme cuts in their budgets. There is no doubt that we are all suffering in this economic situation. It has always been hard for teenagers to get a job, but now the difficulty has almost doubled. Businesses are laying off adult workers. Why would they hire an inexperienced teenager over the adult they just fired? We have nothing to offer businesses but the desire to make money. Speaking of money, we don’t exactly have a lot of it, and it’s kind of important...especially for gas. We need gas to go to school, to see friends, and maybe even our job (if we can get one). Did you know in some, states gas prices have reached four dollars a gallon? That would be $56.00 for a 14-gallon car. That is $56.00 that we or our parents have to come up with, without a job. However, not only is this affecting us, but it’s also affecting the people we love the most. I live in a pretty well off family, and one day I asked my mom if I could go and get something to snack on at the gas station. Her response was, “I’m sorry Monique, but we just don’t have any money right now.” Do you know how scary that is to hear as an adolescent? I just remember going to bed that night and thinking, “What are we supposed to do? What if this gets really bad? It can’t be that bad”. The horrible thing is, we just don’t have as much income as usual. I know friends whose parents are losing their jobs, losing their homes, and having trouble putting food on the table. It’s a scary thought already and, sadly, teenagers are actually experiencing this with their families. 

War is another issue that scares many teenagers today. My father always told me, “No one should ever want war. War is bad. However, war is sometimes necessary.” I have always taken his words very seriously and evaluated situations like these around them. The war we are heading into seems to be created around greed and religion. Two things I honestly believe should never start a war. We are already, economically, in a bad place and a war will do nothing but worsen it. The media paints a picture that we are defending our nation against terrorism. I have no doubt that we are. We fear terrorism and yet we are sending good, honest men into countries to terrorize other good, honest men. It doesn’t make sense. I’m scared for our troops fighting overseas, and I’m also scared for us in the United States. I’m scared we are going to suffer because our government thought it was the right thing to do. I’m not someone to sing, “kumbaya,” when it comes to issues like this, however, I think we need to give peace a chance. I believe we need to stop before this turns into a nuclear World War III over religion and oil. 

This has been the smallest glimpse into my mind I could possibly give you in the hopes that adults know that we teens DO care about what is going on around us. We may not know all the technical stuff; but we do hear what is going on in the world around us and are just as frightened as any American should be. 

Monique is a teen writer for Radical Parenting.com, a parenting website written from the kid's perspective with 82 teen interns! She is a sixteen year old girl living in Louisiana. She is a writer, dancer, and actress who enjoys playing video games and learning about others. Her favorite subjects are English, History, and Science; she plans to attend college and get a PhD in a related field. For more articles by teens please check out RadicalParenting.com.

photo credit: rocketjim54 from Flickr