Some breaking news from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today: teens are still doing all of the typical things we’ve always expected them to do.
Such behaviors include drinking, having sometimes-unsafe sex, and being reckless drivers, according to the CDC’s latest survey for the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System — an entity which has apparently been keeping a close eye on the youth since 1990.
Like the generations before them, today’s teens are subjected to relentless media scrutiny analyzing and often sensationalizing their every move, habit, and social media trend. According to the latest findings, today’s teens are only using condoms about half the time, occasionally forgoing seatbelts, texting while driving, and — because each generation is entitled to add their own unique delinquency to the canon of bad teen behavior — vaping.
In other words, teens are pretty much just being teens, much like the teens before them who then grew up to study and shame those exact same teen behaviors, plus one or two new ones.
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Interestingly, teens seem to be cursed with the unique ability to attract shock and outrage even when their behavior isn’t particularly shocking and outrageous, often specifically because it’s not as shocking and outrageous as we want it to be.
The CDC’s latest fearmongery findings about the harrowing dangers of risky teen behavior follow several reports in recent years claiming that today’s teens are not, in fact, being as fast and loose as previous generations. Reports that teens today are actually having less sex, drinking less and doing fewer drugs than the teens before them have only been met with more handwringing and finger wagging from older generations who blame teens’ supposed lack of interest in risky and/or illegal behaviors on their alleged social media addictions, iPhones, TikTok, etc.
Essentially, if teens are doing the sex, drugs and rock and roll, they’re shocking and bad, and if they aren’t, they’re missing out on some kind of integral teen experience. Either way, older generations are going to find some way to shame the youth for whatever it is they are or aren’t doing, because back in their day, they were or were not doing it, but they did or didn’t do it the right way.
To summarize: the teens are fine. Just leave them alone.
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