Why We Teenagers Rebel
To learn from our mistakes, we need to be allowed to make them.
As we grow older in our teenage years, the fact that we are becoming adults is a subconscious, persistent thought in all of our minds. Even the simple thought of venturing out remains terrifying no matter how old we get.
Finding a place to stay, learning to cook and clean, getting a job, and paying bills, it’s just the start of it. And we can’t be expected to know everything from day 1 of our 18th birthday. So, it becomes a natural tendency to want to be prepared for it, to learn to manage ourselves and to become independent.
And hence what you call rebelling, is often a mere way to prepare ourselves for our future.
A crash course on life? Appreciate it, but no thank you, please.
Because here’s the thing.
What we want to learn needs to be at our pace, not yours.
We don’t want the sit-down 5-day crash course on life or the stack of self-help books with a deadline to finish.
We want to make mistakes now so we don’t make them later. And unless that is allowed to happen, we’ll never know how to deal with those hurdles when they come.
Personally, it’s the small acts that bring joy to me.
That feeling of contentment and confidence in me when I wake up at 5:30 to go to the gym, with no one dragging me by my ears, is incomparable. It makes me feel like I can do things for myself, independently. Or say, the feeling of planning a to-do list on my own, and then accomplishing all it is I wanted to do for that day; it’s no less thrilling.
But for us teenagers to enjoy that feeling of certainty and confidence in ourselves, we need the space to be able to do so.
Anecdote, anyone?
It was one of those days during my 11th grade final exams after which we were to be dropped off by the bus at a common stop from which all of us students could disperse home individually. I called my parents and let them know that I was booking an Uber back home with one of my friends, which they were fine with (after the initial insistence on coming to pick me up, like they usually do). Unfortunately though, my Uber app crashed just a few minutes later and we had to hunt in the sweltering afternoon summer heat for an auto-rickshaw to catch and go home instead.
Upon reaching home and telling my parents this, my dad (just like many other parents would) became slightly perturbed and began to lecture me on how the entire ‘hassle’ could have been avoided if he would have just picked me up, to which I replied:
“Relax, it’s not a big deal, we figured something out anyway!”
I claimed that I didn’t want it to be too much of an inconvenience for my dad, but there was another underlying reason too.
Truth is, I wanted to be confident in myself and be certain that I would be capable enough to handle unexpected situations independently. Hence I didn’t really see the issue in facing small difficulties or challenges as such, because, if anything, I just wanted to learn from them.
Scientific proof needed too? Alright then, just this once.
Just a week ago, as this piece of mine was patiently sitting in my drafts, my grandmother coincidentally showed me an article on a new study done to compare the receptivity of children and teenage minds towards auditory stimuli.
It described how, in the early stages of our life until the age of 12, our brain is mainly in tune with the voices of our parents or guardians. But as we grow older, we become more responsive and sensitive to all voices, regardless of the source, suggesting a sign of the teenage brain developing social skills. In fact, unfamiliar voices are seen to have more of an impact on us during this stage in life.
To quote Vinod Menon, a neuroscientist from Stanford University,
“ When teens appear to be rebelling by not listening to their parents, it is because they are wired to pay more attention to voices outside their home”
Pretty insightful, right?
Well after all that’s been said, I guess I could put it this way.
Often when we ‘rebel’, think of it as us merely trying to loosen the harness that’s, albeit unintentionally, gotten us into a chokehold.
We don’t mean to disrespect you, or the knowledge that you want to give us.
It’s just our way of making ourselves ready for what is to come.
It's our subconscious ‘want’ to experience the wrongs so that we know how to recognise them; to get cuts and bruises so we learn how to treat them; to fail at things so that we learn how to succeed in them.
And sometimes all we want you to do is to let us.
Further ReadingStanford Medicine News Center|The teen brain tunes in less to Mom’s voice, and more to unfamiliar voices, a study finds| Published on April 28, 2022
