A Reputation to Burn

Do you ever feel judged?

And I don’t mean the weird looks you get when you show up to a party wearing a Spider Man costume with a sparkly, pink tutu on top. In this case, the scowls are probably justified.

I’m talking about the feeling you get when you join a group and instead of those around you being happy you’re here to help, they look down on you. They frown and the atmosphere feels stuffy.

Maybe a better way to put it is that it’s not ‘you’ necessarily that’s getting judged, but rather it’s your age. The ones around you who are older doubt your maturity. They doubt your capability.

Why?

Well, for this series of posts we’re going to focus on teenagers, because they definitely get a lot of advice and opinions thrown their way. But what should teens do with all the skeptical stares and backhanded comments they get?

Let’s answer one question at a time.

Question 1: Why don’t older people trust teenagers?

Look around. It’s 2025, and teenagers have quite the reputation:

1. Teenagers can’t commit to love, and thus all of their relationships are temporary flings.
2. Teenagers waste time. They spend too much time on their phone or doing useless activities.
3. Teenagers can’t be trusted to do anything important. After all, teenagers are known for slacking and any responsibility they are given, they complain about.
4. Teenagers don’t have a lot of experience in life, so they should be treated like freakishly tall children with weird dialect.

Think about it this way. If you went to a nursing home, and you started talking to this one lady, and she kept yelling at you, what would you think? Well, you’d probably think that lady was just mean.

Now imagine the next week you went to a different nursing home, and the same thing happened. You started speaking to somebody and instead of them smiling warmly and thanking you for visiting, they got mad and tried to kick you.

If this were to happen every time you went to a nursing home, you would probably come to a seemingly true conclusion: people in nursing homes are mean.

This is what happens to teenagers.

Older individuals have numerous bad experiences with teenagers, whether those teenagers are rude or irresponsible, and at a certain point, people start concluding that all teens are like that.

But they’re not.

It’s not just teenagers who forget to wash their laundry sometimes.

It’s not just teenagers who say something inappropriate.

There are plenty of adults who have no filter in conversations and are lazy as well.

That doesn’t help though, does it?

We still have to shake this reputation we’re tied too.

How?

Question 2: How do we fix the bad reputation teenagers have?

The answer to this question is easy to say, but hard to do.

If we want to change the reputation of teenagers, it’s going to take you. It’s going to take a group of teenagers deciding to go against the current and stand up.

Just think, if you went back to that first nursing home you were at, and instead of you going up to talk to someone, a smiling woman grabbed your arm and started thanking you for coming, what would you do? What would you think?

With enough time and positive experiences your opinion of nursing home guests might change.

And that’s what teenagers need to do.

We need to stop worrying about the reputation we already have and focus on making a new one.

A respectable one.

-D.P.

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