Teenage Angst

Teenage angst is no fairytale; it's as real as a pimple at the tip of your nose and just as painful. Of course there's the fun and games, the tweeting and the wiing. Apparently this is the only period of human life when staying awake till break of day and sleeping in till 2 p.m. leaves no telltale damage. Well, those are the breaks, and then there are the angsty aspects.

• Unrelenting peer pressure.
• Inadequate expense money.
• Unsatisfactory part-time jobs.
• Girl/boy friend issues such as break-ups, two-timing.
• Lack of parental control or support. 
• Homefront issues such as divorced, unemployed parents. 
• Pressures of academics.

Teen angst can sometimes appear trivial to adults. For instance it's way past impossible to empathize with the trauma of a curly haired teen who desperately wants a Zac Efron hair do. Not that it can't be achieved, but what kid on a fastfood takeaway joint salary scale could keep that up?

Homefront issues, now that can really take the air out of a teen's sails. Parents are at the best of times hard to understand and better seen and not heard as far as teens are concerned. Those super types who make sure you have clean underwear, feed you warm cooked food, and chip in with pocket change when you're down to picking lint are to die for. 

And then there are those ones that are fully occupied with their work, their affairs, their clothes, their gadgets, their lifestyles, their vacations, their social groups, their leisure, well, their own lives, to sum it up nicely.

Problem is kids are a massive spanner in the works as far as that above list is concerned. They are in the way, eat up money that could be spend on vacations or golf clubs, whine away when adults want peace and quiet, wear clothes and hairstyles that make them cringe in the presence of their friends like goat got their fig leaf.

However, it is when divorce, ugly spats, and domestic violence rear their ugly heads that teen-beings are hit hard. Parents can get pretty self-obsessed when faced with such issues and even believe that teenagers can handle it as adults simply because they don't wear diapers anymore. Big mistake.

Well, faced with such a scenario, kids often grab some or all of a variety of survival modes. Some plug their ears with ipods, lock themselves in chatrooms, join the neighbourhood street gangs, try out mind numbing materials that turn into life-threatening addictions, do better at academics with a vengeance or skip school altogether, make a solemn vow to not look, act, or think like their parents which in turn means body piercing and/or tattoos, hook up with losers who either make them feel better or drag them down to their levels, or run away from it all.

Teenage angst then is something each teen has to figure out and survive pretty much on their own, all  while struggling against crazy hormones, silly adults, mind bending school systems, and gorging on potentially toxic junk food.

However, fortunately for the human race, at the end of all that turmoil appear mostly well adjusted young folk who actually seem to make sense of it all and have a good life.