The Making of a Teenager

             Starting around the 1950s, around the end of the second world war, there is this subculture of the teenager. The stage of life where an individual will grow from child to adult. At this time the individual will go through life with experiences that will stick and shape their mind, morals, and ideas. It's like that for every generation of teenagers. It's easy for the generation before the teenagers to think that they are all troublemakers. Even though they were once teenagers themselves. The young teenager is always viewed as someone that has no idea what real life is. That's some what true, most of them still live with their parents, their parents buy their belongings. Of course they have no idea what is to have real job and real life issues. The thing is, the teenage years is where they begin the transition into adulthood, where they have to deal with real life issues. These years are when they become confused. They are sort of handed these responsibilities and expected to automatically know how to handle them, with no practice. For example in the film "Rebel Without A Cause," the character Judy has become familiar with innocently, kissing her father when he comes home from work. Now that she is 16 years old, she's become too old to behave that way. When she tries to kiss her father, he slaps her. Judy in humiliated and runs away. When she becomes a certain age she is expected to act a certain way, according to her father, and it seems like over night she should know this behavior. In this great film, both Judy and Jim have issues with there parents. Jim has view issues with his parents. Although his parents provide for him and give him whatever he needs, they even show him affection (his dad more so), but they put aside Jim's real problems. Every time he gets into some trouble, they move and forget about it. They don't fix the issue at hand, just neglect it. Moving from school to school, Jim develops another issue that all teenagers have to deal with, and that  is fitting in with his peers. This is where the stereotypes come into play. For example in the same film, there are cliques of kids in the school: the jocks, the greasers, the nerds. These cliques make a general stereotype of the kids involved in them. The greasers are the troublemakers that don't participate in anything, the jocks are the athletic types that are feel privileged over everyone else. The list of stereotypes and cliques goes on, and have grown even more so today. In the beginning of the film "Mean Girls," all of the cliques in high school are named and from my experience it's pretty accurate. This film shows at what lengths a young girl will go through to be accepted by her peers. Rather they are mentally or physically harming a teenager will do what they can to be accepted or even acknowledged.