Am I the only one who gets upset when those in the previous generation deem ours “hopeless”? As teens and young adults, we’re branded immature, thoughtless, selfish, violent, disrespectful, and rebellious. Even us teens look at others our own age and cringe for our generation. Let’s be honest, for a second. Teens do a lot of stupid stuff. But do we mess up because we’re physically young? According to so many parents and teachers, we supposedly make dumb mistakes because we’re under the age of twenty-five.

I beg to differ.

When I was fifteen, I had a fling with a kid I hardly knew. He was abusive and forced me to do certain things. After a month under his thumb, my mom found out and separated us, threatening him with involving the police if he ever contacted me again. Thankfully, he left us alone. Still, that experience scarred me – both physically and emotionally. Was it a dumb move to be with him? Certainly. Was it because I was physically young? No.

While my uncle declared me to be “young and stupid” and making decisions based on that statement, I chose to believe it’s because I was simply desperate. Growing up with low self-esteem, one tends to lower one’s standards if only to feel loved by someone. No matter how abusive that person is, they’re acceptable if they’re able to whisper sweet promises to me… right?

Wrong. But I wouldn’t know that because I was emotionally immature. It had nothing to do with my physical age. It’s true that as we get older, our emotions and mentality are supposed to age with us. I truly believe this statement because as we go through life, past mistakes and experiences cultivate us and give us wisdom if we learn from them. Some lessons can only be learned by experience and time. That being said, I’ve met sixteen year olds who are more emotionally stable and mature than some sixty year olds.

Think about the story I just told you, the one about my involvement with an abusive person I hardly knew. Do you have any idea how many full grown women make the same mistake? My friend’s mother married a control freak who hit her son and attempted to run her and her daughters in literally every area of their lives. Since she’s in her forties, she should have know better. But is she really older? Now that I have higher self-confidence, I’ve refused to lower my standards. That’s emotional maturity. A person can be anywhere from fifteen like I was to seventy and they can display emotional immaturity by entering a relationship they know is abusive. This decision is a foolish one and it doesn’t suddenly become intelligent if an adult makes the same mistake a teen might.

Not all teenagers are the immature, thoughtless, selfish, violent, disrespectful, and rebellious idiots so many adults think we are. They say that these are our “fun” years where we’re supposed to make mistakes and laugh ‘em off (even though some mistakes may very well stick with us the rest of our lives and can’t be laughed off). Or they say that this generation is lost and has no hope, that we’re stupid and naïve. I refuse to be branded an idiot because other teenagers are making mistakes that any two year old would shy away from. I know for a fact that adults are more than capable of making the same mistakes and often do. It depends on our emotional maturity and mental age, not our physical age. It’s true that this generation appears to be going down the tube, but maybe adults should assist us in making better choices instead of sitting back and judging us.

To conclude, physical age doesn’t always dictate emotional and mental maturity. It’s up to us, as intelligent individuals, to make good and healthy decisions. We’re expected to make mistake after mistake, but all of us – adults and teens alike – will be making mistakes till the day we die. All we have to do is learn from them and not repeat them. That’s how we become wise. It’s my honest belief that there is genuine hope for our generation. It’s up to us to beat down the expectations placed on us and prove we are not little kids anymore. These are years of transition from child to adult, so our mental and emotional transition should be taking place too. I take pride in becoming an adult.

Don’t you?