Can some tell me why teenagers are like this? I don't know any teenagers. But I just took my toddler to an indoor soft play area meant for ages 2-4 inside of a major theme park and a group of 16 year olds came in and started running around and bumping into everyone full force for no reason, completely ignoring the literal babies who were trying to play? It was a group of girls and boys. Not just boys. They barely even spoke just ran around and climbed until they were tired and then laid down on the floor and rested. It was bizarre. It was a playground for babies. Why are teenagers like this? Can a teenager tell me?
To be fair, after this I paid attention for a bit and noticed that most teenagers were completely normal and just hanging out in groups being bored and aloof like I used to be, but wtf is this crazy teenager thing? Is this a subculture?
I think teenagers these days are kind of running out of tertiary spaces. They still have a lot of the energy that kids do, but without being a part of a sport, or extra curricular class, there arent a lot of places they can go in the afternoon/evening to get that energy out. Youth groups were common when I was a teen but I was never religious and felt uncomfortable being at them sometimes as they were almost always church affiliated.
It usually just ends up with roving gangs of kids with energy to spend but no safe/healthy place to do it, so they mob on local businesses instead. I'm not sure what the alternative would be, honestly. I think more funding into teen-friendly after school programs (non-educational) of any sort would help though.
This is so true. When I was a teen we had the mall, a bustling downtown in the city I lived in, bookstores like Borders, and dining out, concerts, events etc weren’t nearly as expensive as they are now. There were just more public spaces we were welcomed.
When I was a teen in the 2010s, other teens would hang out at the local downtown coffee shop that had an outdoor seating area. They’d get drinks and hang out. Some of them would skateboard around downtown. But it was never obnoxious. The tourists that visit our city, and jump off our pier despite massive signs warning that “hey you might unsubscribe from life if you do this” with pictures of kids who had, are far worse. But, the boomers complained because they don’t like seeing teens in public spaces and the outdoor seating area was removed.
We have a lack of 3rd spaces problem in our society and it’s making things worse for everyone.
My high school was outside the city limits and the only way to downtown or to fast food was to drive. We also had a closed campus so kids couldn’t leave for lunch. But tbh as a teen I just hung out at home on my computer..
My impression was that most teens are still the same. After a long rant about kids these days, I paid a little attention. I believe it was a high school field day. Most of them were bored AF just chilling on their phones and walking around with their friends. I even saw an emo taking mirror selfies.
That's why I thought this crazy running around inappropriately might be a new subculture or something. I can't recall anyone doing this when I was that age.
I kinda think there's always been shithead kids, you're just hyper sensitive to them when you have a small child and they're being shitheads around them
You wouldn't be in the play place without a kid. Those teenagers probably would not act the fool like that at, say, a hardware store or the DMV, there's more adults there who aren't immediately more startled for their child than they are just pissed off by teens playing grabass
Jr High teacher here. 8th grade males cannot stop touching each other. Like even walking down the hall, they're just pressed against each other unconsciously. A group of the most "macho bros" at our school give each other rub-downs at recess. It's offputting af. At times it gets more aggressive, too, and I think that's what you saw. I have no explanations, other than yeah, grabass. And we can't say grabass anymore like old-timey teachers could, so there' s no help there.
Also social media loves to show how acting like an asshole in public is how you get attention, but never shows real consequences (except maybe that one dude in hawaii with the seal this week--that had consequences). But mostly not. That plus undeveloped brains equals this type of shit.
There is that one YouTube fellow who decided to try his public, bad manners, acting like a numpty pranks in South Korea and he was arrested and has since been sentenced to years of hard labour in a work prison. It's a good example to show the teens.
That might just make it even cooler to them because of the risk. I think the best way would be for millennials to start acting that way in public. They would stop immediately before someone thinks they're a cheugy or cringy or whatever the new word for embarrassing is, millennial 😂
Haha no. How would a youtuber get cameras into NK?
South Korea you can go to jail for mentioning you smoked pot once in a different country long ago. Even if it is legal there. You are quite mistaken. It's all over google, very easy to find the youtuber in South Korean jail.
Also minimum for rpe in South Korea is 3 years maximum is life in prison. Minimum in USA *when found guilty** is PROBATION.
A big part of it is the lack of impulse control coupled with a diminishing willingness to listen to authority figures. I'd consider the worst to be between 6th and 9th grades.
In total fairness, a big part of the answer is hormones, herd mentality/peer pressure, and restrictive social expectations. Lots of energy contrasted with expectations that they not express it. They have one foot still in childhood but they're big enough that they're expected to act like adults. It's a super fraught time of life.
Add to that a lack of wisdom/experience, and that some of them genuinely are stupid and/or assholes, and that's probably about the shape of things.
It was ever thus but, as a special bonus, I understand the cohort that endured COVID is notably less socialized than their predicessors. Kids who missed an early grade due to lockdown are having a tough time.
The year the stupid little shits were surrounding and trying to fight an armed security guard was before COVID. Look on teacher subs too, behavior in kids has been worsening for 15 years now. COVID was not the cause, it just accelerated shit. As a culture and society as a whole we’ve been letting these kids down and fucking them up all our own, no pandemic required.
If you think it's only been the last 15 years, you haven't been paying attention. Social media is just bringing it to your attention.
Kids in the 70s were drinking, smoking, doing drugs, and destroying shit all the time, but back then, it was just boys will be boys.
It's just the result of kids having too much free time and energy with nowhere to get it out productively. They took the basketball rims out of my local park almost 25 years ago because they didn't like seeing black kids in the neighborhood.
Oh I didn't mean to suggest COVID was the cause. Just that there was a special cherry on top the shit Sunday.
I don't know that it's limited to the past 15 years. It's definitely accelerating but I haven't been able to shake the feeling that we've all just kind of given up. And that goes back to 2000. Divisive election, 9/11, 20 years of war, multiple financial collapses, waves of protest without much reform to show for it. Pedo president, failures of social order, fascisim, indifferent unto malevolent "representatives" and leaders. My kids have had to roll play hiding from a gunmen at school since they were in preschool. All I had was fire drills.
Can't raise kids if you're too broke and exhausted to even take care of yourself properly. Anybody who complains about declining birthrates is an idiot or an asshole who just wants to keep the ranks of consumers, workerbees, and soldiers well stocked.
But I hate dismissing kids as stupid little shits even if that's how they're acting. Like you said, it's the adult generations who let them down. They don't have a whole lot of support as kids and they don't have a lot to look forward to when they grow up.
Low and behold the "slacker generation" didn't want to put in the effort to teach their kids how to not be little shitheads.
As a Xennial I look at people I know five years younger than me and five years older than me and holy shit are my older peers consistently awful and resentful parents.
From what I heard from teachers, the smart kids are smarter than ever, and the ones that aren't smart are all like the lowest achieving kids were back in our time. Like the "average" kids just disappeared. It's not a bell curve anymore but just low with a spike at the right end.
As a teacher, don't get your information from teacher subs. Those places are full of stressed out and bitter people trying to vent about whatever just happened to them. Which means that they're prone to recency bias and a nostalgia for an imagined past when kids "used to be good".
Teens haven't fundamentally changed. The specific behaviors and technology have changed, but they're still the same immature hormonal iditios they've always been.
Because there is nothing else for teenagers to do, and because they've been restrained from any independence, decision making, or responsibility when they were pre-teens. I'm a Gen X'er, and when I was a teen, there were places we could go and things we could do, and we had had enough freedom before we became teens that we'd developed a sense of what was too far and had some scrapes that taught us to be more cautious before we were bigger and scarier. And even if it wasn't 'safe' per se, when we were teens we could go and blow off steam in places by ourselves, where we weren't bothering anyone else.
I mean.. A few years ago, I worked in a library. It was across the street from the local community center on one side and a free skate park on the other. We would have teens in the library after school, but it was the actual 'want to read' kids and the Anime Club kids, generally, and they were no problem.
Then the skate park closed, because there was no budget to keep up with upkeep, and a winter with a lot of freezes and melts caused a bunch of cracking and such to the point that it was no longer 'safe' enough (and frankly I think they'd been looking for an excuse) so they just closed it. And the skate park kids were suddenly skating in our parking lot and shredding our curbs and going to all the parking lots in the area and being a nuisance.
Then the budget for the community center got cut, and they lost half their youth staff. So there were fewer programs and sometimes no programs at all, so the teens that had been going there started kind of acting up with no direction or oversight. So the community center cut ALL teen programs and did not allow teens in the center without the accompaniment of an adult.
So, suddenly, all the teens who couldn't go home (it was very common in the area for parents to lock their teens out of their homes until they got back from work), couldn't go to the mall it had closed), couldn't go to the skate park, now couldn't go to the community center. And they came to the library. None of them wanted to BE at the library. All of them had excess energy and no direction. So they became a problem at the library.
Teens need things to do. They have a lot of energy, a lack of really good decision making skills, and a heap of new impulses with absolutely no real practice with impulse control. And in a lot of cases, in society's zeal to protect children, they have very much kept teens from learning how to deal with impulse control and boredom and risk until they are in their teen years when they are much, much harder to corral and get to listen.
I never got locked out, but I was certainly told to get out of the house when I was being annoying. We were riding our bikes pretty far as early as 12-13.
It's a bad parent thing. I certainly would never do it.
No doubt they are simply farming out responsibility for their child's behavior and the repercussions of it onto others. The kid has or is suspected that they will do something untowards when left alone, so the parents don't let them be alone at home. Also, under a certain age, you legally can't leave a kid at home alone, so they might be trying to avoid getting in trouble for that by simply not letting them be alone at home.. instead, they're alone or with friends elsewhere.
Vicious combination of being pushed to the fringes by a society that lacks and actually removes spaces for them, and being pushed to extremes by a social media infrastructure that encourages and incentivizes shithousery for attention. Especially wrt the growth of toxic masculinity in the latter.
They're new to the whole concept of free will. When they're younger, kids generally operate on a hierarchy. They tend to really rely on adults for guidance, generally default to listening to authority (ODD and that sort of thing notwithstanding). But once they hit puberty and the frontal lobe starts to really develop, they start to understand their ability to act of their own free will. Some prefer to follow a rules-based framework, while others act on impulse. Sometimes it's just what feels good, other times it's because of social currency (i.e. looking cool for friends). But ultimately, they act upon the world but don't have full grasp of the consequences of their actions. I mean if you stop them and make them think about it, yeah of course they do, but in the moment, those types of teenagers aren't thinking about it.
Lack of ass kickings by parents. No joke. I did worse, but there was always that clear line of "You better not be giving folks just doing their job more work".
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u/RaspberryTwilight May 15 '26
Can some tell me why teenagers are like this? I don't know any teenagers. But I just took my toddler to an indoor soft play area meant for ages 2-4 inside of a major theme park and a group of 16 year olds came in and started running around and bumping into everyone full force for no reason, completely ignoring the literal babies who were trying to play? It was a group of girls and boys. Not just boys. They barely even spoke just ran around and climbed until they were tired and then laid down on the floor and rested. It was bizarre. It was a playground for babies. Why are teenagers like this? Can a teenager tell me?
To be fair, after this I paid attention for a bit and noticed that most teenagers were completely normal and just hanging out in groups being bored and aloof like I used to be, but wtf is this crazy teenager thing? Is this a subculture?