Parents don’t see the point in getting to know their children, simply because they’re children. I’m a teenager, so I must be exactly the same as every other teenager on the planet. My problems don’t matter, because everyone else has had the same ones. My parents don’t want to hear it. I’m not old enough to count; I’m not even a person yet. I haven’t lived long enough to know anything, so I don’t have a say. I mustn’t know anything.

They’re so quick to lump us all together- the burnouts, the thinkers, the band geeks. We’re all hormone-crazed, emotionally unstable kids that are so unintelligent that we’re not even there. They’re constantly thinking that we won’t listen to them. These thoughts of theirs are so loud that they can’t hear us trying to talk to them. I conclude that they are the ones not listening to us. They discard this altogether because we’re just teenagers, and we don’t have anything to say that isn’t caddy or minute in its significance.

I think we’re smarter than half of the adult population. They grew up in a world where you could ride your bike down any street you want without fear of people with bad intentions. Mothers stayed home and raised their children; they didn’t work. They spoke to them about morals and religion. Daycare was the radical thing- and it was extremely uncommon. Front doors could remain unlocked well into the evening hours. MTV was for ages eighteen and up. Teachers loved their jobs and wanted their students to grow. Principals cared about more than just the football team and no one knew what heroin was. We are growing up in a world they couldn’t have fathomed. Thanks to their negligence, we know of evil people who will hurt us if we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Our mothers have to go to work, so attention often comes from negative sources. Doors are always locked, no matter what neighborhood you live in. We don’t need MTV to see formerly-censored behavior; we can see it basically anywhere on a Friday night. Our teachers don’t care, because we are all lost causes who probably wouldn’t listen to them, anyways. Older siblings sometimes do things that we can’t fully understand. Everyone knows someone who has done drugs, and because of this, it’s automatically assumed that we’ll experiment, too.

In conclusion, we have had to adapt to such things at a very young age. We’ve seen things that they never had to. Maybe we don’t know what year Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, but it doesn’t mean we don’t know other things. And if they would just open their ears and listen, maybe they would know them, too.