The stereotypical American teenage girl follows the entertainment industry as if it were her livelihood. She listens to pop, rap, and R&B. She goes shopping almost every weekend for the next midriff-baring fashion. Television is scheduled into her day as if the VCR had never been invented. She is on top of the trends, ready with plastic in hand for anything the market will push her way.
I am not your typical teenage girl. I like to see movies, but often put everything else ahead of going to a movie theatre and must catch up by watching several movies from the video store. When pop describes a genre of music rather than a carbonated beverage, I often find that I will know the words to an entire song without ever learning its title or artist. And there are certainly no skimpy clothes in my closet or drawers.
I feel as though I am looking from the outside in on the teenage world. Despite my being in this age group, I have never really been caught up in the group that has the most disposable income in the United States. I constantly observe a cycle of desire and consumption with nothing standing between teenagers and the latest fad. But how did this cycle start? How will it ever end? More importantly, is it even healthy?
The trends within the teenage market do not begin with the teens themselves. Rather, we are targeted as the group with disposable income, and a LOT of it. Most teenagers with summer jobs use the money to buy more "stuff": a car, an iPod, or a new outfit for the coming school year. This attitude towards money breeds irresponsibility. We are taught to spend, not to save. If we want something, we should buy it on impulse. Where are the parents in this cycle? They hand over the cash in the form of allowances, credit cards, and "love me" gifts. Among my friends, many kids who grew up in broken homes or double-income households receive money as gifts when the parents can't spend time with their kids. In essence, they were saying, "I don't have time for you, so here is some money; go buy something you want." Or so I have been told by teenagers in this situation. All this money being shoved at teenagers with no bills to pay leaves them with a wad of cash just begging to be spent.
Growing up in suburban Minnesota, I was surrounded by kids with money to burn, either from a summer job, allowances, or parents deciding to give them money. I always felt as though everyone had more than I did. The mentality that a teenager needs the next best thing to be socially acceptable begins in middle school. The blissful times of elementary school and recess are a distant memory in the reality of a Darwinian social system. Except this time it is not survival of the fittest: it is survival of the coolest. If you aren't wearing Abercrombie and Fitch or the latest in Gap fashion, you are dropped to the bottom of the social hierarchy. Even at the young age of twelve, we are taught to desire more than we have. We are meant to believe that somehow fulfilling these material desires will make us feel better about ourselves.
However, just the opposite is true. The consumerism cycle never ends. We can never achieve the satisfaction that is promised in that new pair of Gap jeans. Once we add the newest fad to our trendy closets, there is always something bigger and better out there on the market. How did I exit the loop while everyone else seems to be hopelessly caught inside it? My parents ripped me out.
When most teenagers ask, they always get a yes. A lot of parents today are pushovers. Not mine. When I came home in the seventh grade determined to get a pair of white Adidas tennis shoes with my choice of color stripes down the side, my heart sank with their response. "We aren't going to run out every weekend to get the next thing in fashion. And no, you can't have the Nikes with the three stripes." Nikes! I was astounded at their lack of trend know-how. I mean, seriously, how could you NOT know the difference between Adidas and Nike shoes?!? Their stubbornness did not stop at the fashion industry either. My father thought that teenagers spent too much time on the telephone, so he limited social calls for my brother and me to a mere twenty minutes. My dad said, "If you need to talk to them for more than twenty minutes, you can go over to talk to them in person." Teenagers are creative, though, and most of my friends by this time had caught on to the AOL Instant Messenger craze, but my father had a retort for that too. "Why talk to them online if you can talk on the phone?" Thus, I was never even allowed to have a screen name, let alone participate in lengthy chats. Oh, the agony I felt as my desires pulled me in the opposite direction of my parents' desires for me! At first I resisted, but then I began to change. It started to upset me that kids couldn't get to know who I was if I wasn't wearing the same clothes as they wore. I found friends who were equally grounded by parents determined not to lose their kids to the trendy crowd. I became an individual, I believe, much earlier than my peers.
As I started to pull away from the "crowd" mentality, my parents loosened up a bit. In the eighth grade, for Christmas I received a pair of Adidas shoes and appreciated them all the more for waiting. Two months ago, I participated in my first instant messenger chat a week or two before leaving for college. However, AIM is now a necessity for keeping in touch over great distances rather than a tool used to gossip about the cute boy in math class. My dad still frowns upon lengthy phone conversations and usually is ill-tempered if they last longer than thirty minutes. But unless someone has a problem or an elaborate story to tell, most calls that long are trivial anyway. My parents made sure we grew up and away from the crowd, to be individuals and to know where we stood. As I was growing up, it didn't always seem fun, and I was often the subject of ridicule, but in the long run, who is really better off? The kids who followed the crowd and didn't learn how to make independent decisions or the ones whose parents made them think about why they made their decisions?
My friends today still say my parents are way too strict. But I think it's just the opposite: most parents aren't strict enough. It used to be that a child's primary role models were their parents, but today many parents leave the childrearing up to day care centers, summer camps, and after-school activities. Our generation's priorities are skewed. Even as we head off to college, most parents readily foot the bill for kids to "find themselves" while they are there. Why don't we know who we are yet? We have been following a cycle of group mentality since the sixth grade. We have been taught to value conformity over individuality, but the conformity is cleverly disguised as being "unique" and "trendy" or even "ahead of the crowd." In reality, we are in the middle of the crowd, following everyone else blindly. Then we arrive at college where we are expected to go our separate ways and become individuals. In college is it really that much different from middle and high school? I don't think so. We continue our pursuit of social acceptance and happiness. Many kids try to fit in socially by drinking and partying - the college "cool" standard.
Where does the cycle end? How do we step out of this teenage virtual reality and step into the real world? I don't think we ever completely can. The habits and attitudes we develop in this period of our lives affect our spending and social habits throughout adulthood. There is so much credit card debt and fiscal irresponsibility among young people today, due, I think, to the fact that our first experience with money was to spend it on whatever we wanted. What about individuality? Many people do find their niche in college and begin to express themselves as unique, but we still feel we need to get the next best thing. It makes us feel better about ourselves, even though we still want more. It is not healthy to base social acceptance on materialism. People do ridiculous things to feel that they belong. Why do we need to conform? Can't we just accept people as they are and celebrate all the things that make us unique, rather than identical? Or is there really no room left to go against the flow? |