Do you think teenagers do not take part in social and cultural activities ?

[Liveurlife]

[Dawn Zombie]

A lot of teenagers doesnt, and i can understand why
Everyone has their own freedom of choice

[Kayla]

no

[unknown]

quite the opposite.. most of them are social

[Rickey]

ugh... we're into political stuff, foreign policy, the economy, gay rights, marijuana legalization, blah blah blah... it's just that we can't do anything since we're teens.

[Abbeymeister]

As a teenager, I can tell you that we don't! And I can also tell you why:

First off, we are often overloaded with work. No, it's not the same kind of work as an adult, but we have teachers piling homework on us (most of it's just busy work that they don't even bother to check, but fail us if we don't do it anyway). We never have time to just hang out with our family and friends and attend social/cultural activites. We also have social problems going on---friends, boyfriends/girlfriends, parents/siblings, etc. And because of the massive ammounts of hormones in our bodies, everything automatically becomes a million times worse in our minds than it really is.

Second, this is the age when we are trying to figure ourselves out. We are trying to find what talents we are good at, so we are piling on extracurricular activiteis and becomeing overinvolved. Many teens at this age are also trying to figure out what they believe religiously. This is the age when we are beginning to form concious opinions and beliefs of our own that might be different from our parents' views. At this point in life, teens often just want time alone, away from the world, to figure things out and turn things over in their minds. We need time to work out our emotions and find meaning in our lives. It is very important for everyone to be social and have people they can go talk to, but espcially teens need time alone to just think.

Lastly, in our day-in-age, social networking is becoming a huge barrier for our youth. To many, it seems like a benefit because we can talk to people we might otherwise not be able to communicate with. In some cases, that is a good thing. But too often, people pull up facebook or twitter in order to talk to people rather than grabbing the phone and having an actual conversation or actually meeting the people in person. This negatively effects our abilities to communicate (not just teens, but everyone) because we are not learning to have a face-to-face conversation. Our minds are being trained to not answer immedietly. If I want to, I don't have to respond to an awkward situation and I can just put it out of my life, but people need to learn to deal with such situations. People are also becoming much less personal. Although teens do need to be alone sometimes, they also need to be able to communicate their feelings to other people so they can get help should they need it. I strongly believe that suicides, drugs, premarital sex, and alcohol within our youth these days is a direct result of the increased social networking.

[Kiwi]

We don't but that's because the media is a very important source of information for us and all we hear about is death, destruction, prosecution, elections, group/minority rights, and internal destruction. While all of that is going on, there's a hopelessness. A feeling of not being able to do anything because we're belittled as lazy and antisocial.