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Entry tags:
- advice,
- age,
- me,
- social justice,
- tumblr
Thoughts on not becoming a teen-hating adult
Inspired by this post:
This is SUCH a thing. It was kind of horrifying watching my friends fall prey to it.
My advice as a 38 year old who has been moderately successful in not doing this: Don’t start around 30. Start as early as possible. I’ve been working on the broader problem of people treating those younger then themselves as Not People since I was six, with moderate success.
Below the cut is the approach I've taken, because I haven't seen many other people really talk about specifics. My general approach for dealing with other sorts of cultural/POV etc differences is pretty similar. It may not work for everyone, and probably doesn't work as well for me as I think it does.
Basically: every time I encounter an age related attitude conflict with someone older I make a mental note, starting with “This is what it feels like to be a six year old picked on my twelve year olds for childish ignorance” and continuing on to “this is what it feels like to be a 38 year old being talked down to by a sixty year old”. I try to untangle what the older person is thinking. What are their motivations? How do they see me? How is it true and untrue? Can I look past our differences to connect with and understand their point of view? I don't remember the specifics of all 32 years of these interactions, but it sets up the right mental framework to see people of all ages as people.
If you discount the inner life of older people then you won’t connect your own behaviour to theirs when you get to that age, because you have understandable motivations while they were just being awful for no reason. If you think old people are inherently awful as a teen then the only way to like yourself as an older person is to throw away your teen values entirely, and from what I've seen this generally results in just flipping who gets to be awful and who gets to be a person.
Every time I interact with people younger than me, I try to see things from their point of view, and remember how I felt when I was their age. I push back against nostalgia and defensiveness, which constantly try to paint my past in simplistic, rosy colours and blame any conflicting points of view on The Young People Being Wrong. Which is not to say that I don't ever disagree with Young People's Opinions These Days (haaa), but I work from the assumption that there's always some justification beyond immaturity and ignorance.
And I accept that teens are naturally kind of annoying to me as an adult? Sorry teens. Like, they have their own byzantine and fast-changing social norms and ideas of coolness that I’m never going to satisfy or fully understand, and I have to accept and respect that instead of going MAYBE THEIR IDEA OF COOL IS DUMB AND I AM ACTUALLY COOLER THAN THEM. They are inclined to think in black and white terms, dismiss us older generations, and think they know everything, which is really frustrating. But we are inclined to dismiss them and think we know everything too, and history would suggest that we're just as wrong about that as they are. So I roll my eyes a little but try to keep an open mind to their ideas (and I suggest teens do the same thing when interacting with smug adults). Also they tend to be very emotionally sensitive and desperate for adult approval under all the bravado, and so I’m always aware of the possibility of inadvertently emotionally destroying them, which is stressful. This doesn’t mean I can’t have positive interactions with teenagers, but I found it much easier to let the frustrations roll off my back once I accepted them as a natural consequence of the age gap instead of a sign that these specific young people were terrible.
Which is not to say I support the “teens are the unpleasant larval form of adults and just don’t realise how awful they are” approach (especially from teens themselves. LOVE YOURSELVES, TEENS). For a start, teenagers are people, and have the same variety and potential for good and bad as everyone else. But they also have positive qualities as a group: they are inclined to be extra energetic and inventive and full of righteous enthusiasm for changing the world. The trick is to admire and support this energy without envying it or fetishising it in that weird “Ohhh being an adult is so terrible I wish I were young again” way. "Both ways of being are different but equally valid", as a teenager's pastel coloured tumblr post would say ;)
I also think it can be helpful to interact with people of a wide variety of ages, though there's complicated power issues that come up there, and also just different ways of thinking that can make any sort of genuine friendship difficult past a certain point. I find fandom useful for this, there's always people of all sorts of ages around, and even if we don't connect super deeply I can still keep on eye on what the 15 year olds and 65 year olds are saying and doing and try to engage with them with an open, accepting mind. This results in some cool experiences! The nice thing about remembering that teens (and everyone else) are people instead of ignorant monsters, is it lets you live in a world with a whole bunch more people and a whole lot less monsters.
I've concentrated on teens in this post because that was the original topic, but the same approach works with kids as well. I don't spend much time around kids these days but get along with them pretty well when our paths cross, and I think that's in part because I treat them like people, which most adults don't.
Also! While I have no interest in Sounding Like A Teen it is easier to understand and communicate with people if you can figure out the way they use language and adapt to suit it. This applies even more to children, who communicate and think very differently to adults, and it's much easier for us to adapt to them than vice versa. Unfortunately, while kids tend to be ok with this idea, teenagers tend to hate anything they read as condescension or fakery, but also react badly to being talked to exactly like adults, since they find this mode of conversation unpleasant and confusing(*). Back when I worked with teenagers and it was important they respond well to me, I developed a semi-effective synthesis of my natural conversation style with the way teens talked at the time that didn't pretend not to be Grownup but was less alienating. These days I just try to make sure I can understand them, and accept that they'll mostly find me pompous and old fashioned (especially since plenty of people my own age feel that way too)
(and yes, I was an odd six year old to respond to being picked on by older kids with an eternal vow to remember how young people feel that I am still following 32 years later. But hey, it worked :))
(*)[I had a thing here about adults who deliberately make their language appealing to teenagers in a creepy, manipulative way, but I was overgeneralising way too much. So I have taken it out and am pondering a more precise way of describing the problem]
the whole “i used to be a teen who hated authority only to grow up to become the authority that hates teens” is a bad bad thing that practically every other generation has fallen into and we all need to make an extremely conscious effort not to repeat the fucking pattern.
Studies have shown that the shift starts to happen around age 30. If you’re close to that, make a conscious effort to be open to and accepting of younger people. I’m 31 and paying close attention to how I react to young people and new trends and shit and trying to keep myself from developing those thought patterns.
This is SUCH a thing. It was kind of horrifying watching my friends fall prey to it.
My advice as a 38 year old who has been moderately successful in not doing this: Don’t start around 30. Start as early as possible. I’ve been working on the broader problem of people treating those younger then themselves as Not People since I was six, with moderate success.
Below the cut is the approach I've taken, because I haven't seen many other people really talk about specifics. My general approach for dealing with other sorts of cultural/POV etc differences is pretty similar. It may not work for everyone, and probably doesn't work as well for me as I think it does.
Basically: every time I encounter an age related attitude conflict with someone older I make a mental note, starting with “This is what it feels like to be a six year old picked on my twelve year olds for childish ignorance” and continuing on to “this is what it feels like to be a 38 year old being talked down to by a sixty year old”. I try to untangle what the older person is thinking. What are their motivations? How do they see me? How is it true and untrue? Can I look past our differences to connect with and understand their point of view? I don't remember the specifics of all 32 years of these interactions, but it sets up the right mental framework to see people of all ages as people.
If you discount the inner life of older people then you won’t connect your own behaviour to theirs when you get to that age, because you have understandable motivations while they were just being awful for no reason. If you think old people are inherently awful as a teen then the only way to like yourself as an older person is to throw away your teen values entirely, and from what I've seen this generally results in just flipping who gets to be awful and who gets to be a person.
Every time I interact with people younger than me, I try to see things from their point of view, and remember how I felt when I was their age. I push back against nostalgia and defensiveness, which constantly try to paint my past in simplistic, rosy colours and blame any conflicting points of view on The Young People Being Wrong. Which is not to say that I don't ever disagree with Young People's Opinions These Days (haaa), but I work from the assumption that there's always some justification beyond immaturity and ignorance.
And I accept that teens are naturally kind of annoying to me as an adult? Sorry teens. Like, they have their own byzantine and fast-changing social norms and ideas of coolness that I’m never going to satisfy or fully understand, and I have to accept and respect that instead of going MAYBE THEIR IDEA OF COOL IS DUMB AND I AM ACTUALLY COOLER THAN THEM. They are inclined to think in black and white terms, dismiss us older generations, and think they know everything, which is really frustrating. But we are inclined to dismiss them and think we know everything too, and history would suggest that we're just as wrong about that as they are. So I roll my eyes a little but try to keep an open mind to their ideas (and I suggest teens do the same thing when interacting with smug adults). Also they tend to be very emotionally sensitive and desperate for adult approval under all the bravado, and so I’m always aware of the possibility of inadvertently emotionally destroying them, which is stressful. This doesn’t mean I can’t have positive interactions with teenagers, but I found it much easier to let the frustrations roll off my back once I accepted them as a natural consequence of the age gap instead of a sign that these specific young people were terrible.
Which is not to say I support the “teens are the unpleasant larval form of adults and just don’t realise how awful they are” approach (especially from teens themselves. LOVE YOURSELVES, TEENS). For a start, teenagers are people, and have the same variety and potential for good and bad as everyone else. But they also have positive qualities as a group: they are inclined to be extra energetic and inventive and full of righteous enthusiasm for changing the world. The trick is to admire and support this energy without envying it or fetishising it in that weird “Ohhh being an adult is so terrible I wish I were young again” way. "Both ways of being are different but equally valid", as a teenager's pastel coloured tumblr post would say ;)
I also think it can be helpful to interact with people of a wide variety of ages, though there's complicated power issues that come up there, and also just different ways of thinking that can make any sort of genuine friendship difficult past a certain point. I find fandom useful for this, there's always people of all sorts of ages around, and even if we don't connect super deeply I can still keep on eye on what the 15 year olds and 65 year olds are saying and doing and try to engage with them with an open, accepting mind. This results in some cool experiences! The nice thing about remembering that teens (and everyone else) are people instead of ignorant monsters, is it lets you live in a world with a whole bunch more people and a whole lot less monsters.
I've concentrated on teens in this post because that was the original topic, but the same approach works with kids as well. I don't spend much time around kids these days but get along with them pretty well when our paths cross, and I think that's in part because I treat them like people, which most adults don't.
Also! While I have no interest in Sounding Like A Teen it is easier to understand and communicate with people if you can figure out the way they use language and adapt to suit it. This applies even more to children, who communicate and think very differently to adults, and it's much easier for us to adapt to them than vice versa. Unfortunately, while kids tend to be ok with this idea, teenagers tend to hate anything they read as condescension or fakery, but also react badly to being talked to exactly like adults, since they find this mode of conversation unpleasant and confusing(*). Back when I worked with teenagers and it was important they respond well to me, I developed a semi-effective synthesis of my natural conversation style with the way teens talked at the time that didn't pretend not to be Grownup but was less alienating. These days I just try to make sure I can understand them, and accept that they'll mostly find me pompous and old fashioned (especially since plenty of people my own age feel that way too)
(and yes, I was an odd six year old to respond to being picked on by older kids with an eternal vow to remember how young people feel that I am still following 32 years later. But hey, it worked :))
(*)[I had a thing here about adults who deliberately make their language appealing to teenagers in a creepy, manipulative way, but I was overgeneralising way too much. So I have taken it out and am pondering a more precise way of describing the problem]
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Ha yes I definitely don't look at teens and wish I was them, it's more "you poor things don't worry it will get better" :)
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I suspect that the rigid age-grading in schools goes a long way towards teaching children (and eventual adults) that they're not meant to make friends with/sympathize with people who are too much older or younger than them. In general I've found that homeschooled children are more interested in talking with adults and more willing to mix with kids who aren't exactly their age.
For my part, when I was 18 and before I went to university, I had some casual friends who were 13. When I went to university I had a couple of friends who were 30 - and actually one who was probably around 40. Today I'm 35 and my youngest friends are probably in their early-mid 20s. My oldest friends are definitely 50+ and probably 60+?
Teenagers are an interesting topic. I remember being vaguely amused by the whole "emo" thing when I was in my early 20s, but the first thing that has struck me as really culturally baffling is the whole "purity culture" thing on Tumblr. I can't figure out if that's genuinely a phenomenon of the current generation of teenagers or it's just the chosen wank of the era, as it were. I've definitely found myself thinking recently about what I would do if someone asked me to proactively ensure the safety of minors in my online presence, which is not really something that I've considered before.
I suspect that 'purity culture' types would be unsettled by my discussing cross-generational friendships/interactions as a good thing, but I really do think they can be. (With obvious consideration of the potential for abuse and appropriateness given emotional maturity.)
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I wasn't homeschooled, and there was huge social pressure from both adults and other kids not to form inter-grade friendships. I was born right at the end of the year, and have something like autism that made my social development slow, so often found kids from the year below me easier to talk to. But I got so much crap from the other kids in my year in primary school (who for the most part refused to be friends with me themselves) that I limited it to multi-grade social environments like a choir I was in. Some older kids were nice to me, and I appreciated it, even though I found them hard to talk to, because any positive social interaction was better than none.
In highschool I made an effort to be nice to younger kids, especially the ones who seemed to be experiencing bullying or social exclusion, and ended up with a multi-grade social group of outcasts and misfits (which had a friendly relationship with the multi-grade social group of Indonesian students, who'd banded together for similar reasons) I'm still friends with many of them now. And the school was way more uncomfortable with us older kids "discouraging normal social connections" in the younger kids than they were with the rampant bullying that drove them to hang out with us. Ok, one girl did decide she had to cut off her original, same-year friends group in order to hang with us, even though we didn't want her to. But she later decided to cut us off one by one, for similarly spurious reasons, she was just that kind of person. And everyone else moved between our group and other social groups comfortably, having gained a bit of self confidence.
And then I got to uni and it was just...chaos! Nobody cared any more! And once I adjusted it was great and yeah, I made friends with people in their 30s+ and then, as a postgrad, got to know the new waves of 18 year olds etc, and now have friends of all sorts of ages.
I have definitely seen the dark side of this kind of environment, watching those new waves of 18 year olds meant also watching the creeps who hit on them. But overall it's great and also...how the world works? Work break rooms don't divide up by age bracket, even when some of the staff are teens and others are in their 50s.
So yeah (I say after a novel) it's been really surreal encountering this idea that adults and minors/teens/people under 25/etc need to be STRICTLY DIVIDED. Online spaces are often at least pseudo-anonymous, which makes the idea even more bizarre and unworkable. I also don't know how many young people actually subscribe to it, I mean I make no secret of my age and have teenagers follow me on social media all the time. But some definitely do feel that way, I'd ask them to clarify, but, well.... ;)
On the plus side, the discussion has got me thinking about these issues more than I was, and I do understand the desire to do something about the "creeps taking advantage of young people" problem. But...yeah.
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Additionally, I made friends with adults quite easily, though I can't recall why exactly. But I remember, for example, going out for a highschool graduation dinner with the librarian (like a year later), and we hung out and chatted. She was 70, and I was 17.
When I was about 15, I paid to use the library's internet to use the internet (we didn't have it at home or at school). I discovered usenet and then php pagan forums. The bulk of the people there, back then, were in their 40s and 50s, and even people in their 20s were considered young. At first I never mentioned my age and no one asked me, but eventually everyone found out I was a minor. I could be looking back with rose coloured glasses, but no one ever condescended to me or talked down to me, and some of them commented positively on the enthusiasm of 'seekers' (what we call newbie pagans), and how contagious that can be, and how it's good to have young people around for that reason.
As a result, I became aware pretty early - not as young as 6, but perhaps younger than some - that age is...often quite irrelevant. I met people in their 20s more compassionate, even-tempered and thoughtful than people in their 70s and I'm pretty sure it blew my mind the first time. It was a very clear: 'everyone's the same, just with different lived experiences.' (Which I know most of us know objectively, but I got to internalise it at that point - sometimes in really unpleasant ways. Like, I have seen 60 yo pagans flounce off forums after a tantrum of screed better suited to someone not emotionally developed, only to be moderated by an 18 yo, lol).
As I grew up, I encountered more and more ageist gatekeeping on both sides. A friend saying they'd never want to see a doctor younger than them. An older person saying they couldn't work for a 'younger manager.' A young service worker saying the manager couldn't manage because they were 'past it' age wise. Casual ageism is everywhere. Though it's never been quite as noticeable to me since like, Tumblr's teen push to have adults declare their ages, or adults saying that they won't allow *anyone* under the age of 18 to follow their blog in their tiny 'about me' sections.
These days, I generally try and catch myself when I start to disparage something the 'youths' are doing. Lol. A lot of the time it's not just the 'youths' anyway (purity culture / wank is not a 'young tumblr' thing, I honestly think it's an 'all ages' thing - but that the bias falls towards younger people possibly because they *generally* have more energy and vigour to press it forwards. But some of the nastiest grossest voices in the purity wank culture shit are those of older people who never let go of their hatred that they've nursed in fandom sometimes for decades).
I remember the first time I saw like, people come up with autochorissexual as a type of asexuality and I was really mentally disparaging about it. Like 'okay that's gone too far, typical of teens trying to categorise everything they don't understand, like pathologies, this is like ridiculous.' Maybe it *is*, I don't know, but I'm wary of that part of my brain that becomes more rigid and inflexible as I get older, just for the sake of being rigid and inflexible. It is sometimes really easy to be like 'back up, this is fine, you're just not used to it yet' and sometimes really *hard* to do that, and it can be super challenging. (Tbh that's not an age thing, that's an everything thing for me).
I really enjoy in the spiritual group I'm in, that there's two teens (one 15, and one 18, I think). Sure, you have moments of like 'Oh I recognise that thinking pattern from when I was a teen you'll probably grow out of that' (which there's no point in saying because you have to grow out of it, lol), just like they probably have moments of 'oh, they don't understand this aspect of my lived experience because they're an Old and don't Get It / weren't here for that.' (Which is also often true lol). But overall, I'm just mostly humbled by how much they have to share and teach. Like all the other members of the group, really.
I do think the point with adults talking in a way that's not alienating/confusing being a sign of say...someone just doing something to appeal to you is not always necessarily true. I grew up with a brother who is only just now 21, and consequently, I grew up with lingo shifts that means I can discourse like I'm one of his mates and we're used to that. To me, that's not like...a way of talking I do for him, that's a way of talking. There are a lot of reasons to explain why and how adults can discourse with teens at their level, from 'it's my job and I'm a YA writer' (with varying degrees of accuracy), to 'I'm a babysitter' to 'I'm on Tumblr and this is just the way I like to talk because linguistic shifts are fun and don't come from posts where people denote their age so it's hard to know if this is coming from 'cool 18 yo tumblr' or 'cool 30 yo tumblr' and no one really knows.'
I mean if I meet a 70 yo in a space (irl or online) dropping all the acronyms and memey goodness and all the other stuff I'm less likely to think 'you're kind of creepy' and more likely to think 'you have a Tumblr.' So while I think teens need to be warned away from predatory behaviour, I also think that adults speaking to teens 'on their level' (Tumblr makes this a grey area, contemporary lingo doesn't just belong to teenagers, especially in places like Tumblr) may actually be - for some - the very sign of flexibility and non-rigidity you're advocating for here in the first place. Just, a much more successful and natural attempt at it, where it's not a mask put on just to put a teenager at ease, but a natural shift in lingo because the environment has changed.
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Some of it is just getting used to the idea that someone born in 1995 can possibly be an adult, or that people born after 2000 are allowed to drive cars, and being generally disoriented by the fact that time passes. It's also really weird to see the nostalgia culture juggernaut rolling up to things I remember from when I was a kid. Radio stations thinking my bracket has the most disposable income, and stuff, when the oldies stations etc all used to be aimed at people older than me.
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I somehow didn't end up replying to this comment, and don't have anything interesting to add, but: thank you, it is a good comment :)
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Thanks!