Are Teenagers Expected to do too Much?

Teenagers are expected to do and be so many things. Society has formed this image of a ‘perfect young adult’. This idea has been informed by many things, including parents, teachers, friends, role models, celebrities, the media and many more. These expectations are ridiculously high, whether its for what we should act to impress people or how we are expected to live our lives. Teenagers are supposed to look flawless. We should have perfect skin and be skinny, otherwise we get bullied. We are supposed to be able to balance how we spend our time, with friends and family, school, work, and hobbies.

The media has photoshopped all of the people on magazines and people have started to believe that this is what we are expected to look like. The media has made it so the way you look is more important than your personality. There are high expectations for us to look perfect all of the time. For girls, we are supposed to have flawless skin, that we could not possibly have without a tonne of makeup. We have been told by the media that we should have a thin but curvy body otherwise we wont look attractive. For guys, because of the media, society has concocted this theory that they have to have a beach body to look attractive. They have to have a toned chest and stomach along with muscular arms and legs. Girls are expected to wear short or revealing clothes to impress others. None of these things are necessary to look attractive but because of the media, our society now says that they are.

How do we keep our lives balanced? Teenagers are expected, by our teachers and parents, to go to school, get a decent education and then finish all the extra work we get from school at home. People in the top classes are expected to get excellence in their assessments. In some classes the teachers only show us examples of excellences because that's what we have been told that we should get. However we are told by our friends and family, that we are supposed to be around them as often as we can. We are also told that we should be in a sports team and have a job when we can. Its extremely difficult to balance out these things. Sometimes it’s not possible.

Media has the biggest impact on us. The models they use in magazines have an incredible amount of photoshopping done on them. This is because people feel like they are expected to look like this due to clothes designers using skinny models. Designers want skinny models to show off their clothes. But the people in magazines are not natural. If you saw one of these models walking down the street, you would not recognize them. But because these magazines say that the models are natural, it causes the quest for perfection to increase. When media shows celebrities looking flawless whenever they leave the house, it affects us. It makes it seem like that if we want to be famous, or even beautiful, we have to look like that too.

Teenagers often spend way too much time trying to make themselves ‘perfect’. The majority of girls wear makeup to cover up any acne they may have. Guys do tonnes of exercises, hoping that they’ll get fitter. We spend all of our time trying to impress people. Its a waste. You don’t have to do any of these things to be successful or to be in a relationship. Many teenagers get extremely stressed trying to balance out school and social life. We should stop trying to change ourselves to meet these expectations. Instead of spending all of our time trying to fix what quirks or flaws we have, we should spend it on making ourselves happy.