I don’t have any teenagers. I have three years until I enter that realm. I used to be scared. Now I’m scared and excited. And then scared again.
I came home from a scouts meeting a couple of weeks ago, and I sat down and browsed through facebook. Probably never a wholly safe endeavor haha. But I came across an article in a teen magazine that I found incredibly disturbing. To be honest, it left me reeling for days. I’m still a bit shaken by it.
I don’t want to publicize the magazine (we don’t need to give it a single extra view than it already has,) but after reading about the article in it, I went on their facebook page to check out what was there.
Talk about a rabbit hole.
There were articles trying to normalizing abortion – actually an article about a group of women that was trying to make abortion fun and funny. You know lighten things up a bit. There was another article about how to perform oral sex. Written by adult women for young teenagers.
And then there were the dozens of articles about how to look this way or how to stop looking that way or how to make him like you or how to tell if he likes you or how to any number of things that really aren’t bad but also really aren’t the only things that teenage girls are interested in.
It reminded me of a conversation I had with one of my daughters. She said recently, “I don’t want to become a teenager!” When I asked her why, she said it was because teenagers are ditzy and mean to each other and their parents and only care about boys and what they look like.
This really took me back. First, she really had the typical media presentation of teenagers down pat. Second, my daughters don’t watch that kind of media. They aren’t allowed to watch most tween shows specifically because of those presentations. I make sure the books they read are wholesome. We don’t read tween magazines. Ever. We don’t watch those movies.
So how did these stereotypes get into their brains?
I guess it’s something in the water.
Some of those messages are harmful and go directly against our values. Others aren’t necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but they fail to recognize the wholeness of person in our children. They reduce real, whole, beautiful girls into what they look like and what people think of them.
Is that what we want them to hear?
What if we told our kids, especially our girls, that being a teenager is about exploration? It’s about learning who she is? It’s about learning all about her world and its history and its trajectory so that she can find her place in it? That it’s about starting to stand up for her beliefs? It’s about growing in her faith? It’s about increasing emotional intelligence and increasingly deeper friendships? It is sometimes about boys, but not just what they think of her. Rather it’s about what she thinks of them and what type of man she eventually wants to marry and raise her children with? That it’s about serving others? It’s about developing herself? It’s about taking leaps while still protected in the security of your youth? What if we told her that being a teenager isn’t about what other people think of her? That it’s rather about becoming the person she was created to be and the person she wants to be?
I joked earlier about these messages being something in the water, but it’s something deeper than that. Something more pervasive. Those messages are everywhere. They are on billboards. They are in secondary characters in otherwise harmless books. They are in advertisements. They are in movie previews. They are in conversations with peers. They are in our unspoken assumptions.
But we, as their parents and educators and guides, have the power to question those assumptions. We have the power to present them with alternative role models. We can prompt them to search for something deeper.
And it’s not something we merely can do. I think it’s something we must do. For our girls. For our future women. They deserve better. And only we can give it to them.