It’s one of the most common accusations levelled at teens, right after “they think they’re invincible.” Despite their lack of experience and sheltered lives, teens think they know everything. Adults, in contrast, actually DO know things. They’ve been your age before, and therefore they know what’s best for young people. Or so they would have us believe.
Of course sometimes it is true. Adults do have experience and expertise, which they use to teach youth. In Dance Academy, for instance, it was foolish of Tara to assume that she knows what’s best for her own education, despite what her teacher wants her to work on. Feeling as though Miss Raine is limiting her by forcing her to work on the basics, Tara ignores the assignment and tries to prove she’s as good a dancer as all the other girls in her class, by joining in precisely what her teacher told her to sit out.
It’s not only a terrible plan to gain a teacher’s attention, but one that emphasizes the flawed perspective youth sometimes brings to a learning environment. Tara learns a typical lesson about patience, and putting her faith in the experience of the people meant to teach her. Just because she needs to work on basic foot work doesn’t mean she’s being punished, it just means she has things to learn.
But on the other hand, just because teens still have things to learn before they go pro, doesn’t mean they don’t have real experience and real perspective. Buffy the Vampire Slayer approaches the question from the opposite angle, demonstrating how parents are the ones often out of touch in assuming that just because they were once 16 they know everything about being 16 today.
In the season 1 finale, Buffy is naturally upset, as the time approaches of her prophesied death. Meanwhile her mom, sensing something is wrong, tries to offer some motherly advice, and goes comically awry. Assuming the reason Buffy wants to run away the weekend of the Spring Fling is because the right boy failed to ask her daughter to the dance, Joyce confidently asserts:
“See sometimes I actually do know what you’re thinking.”
Joyce Summers
As she goes on about the wonderful experiences that can happen when you go to a dance by yourself, and has what she believes to be a sweet heart to heart with her daughter, Buffy’s eyes fill with sorrow as she is forced to come to terms with her imminent death.
It’s a metaphor, but a powerful one. Buffy‘s take on the “wisdom of adults” validates the legitimate feelings and experiences of youth. Buffy doesn’t just feel like she’s going to die because she doesn’t have a date to the dance… she is actually going to die, and her mother just doesn’t understand what’s at stake.
Different shows clearly approach this topic in different ways, and this is one of those times when the variety in the storytelling is important. It is good that the genre runs the gamut, because while teens are hardly always right, neither are parents. In order to do teens (and adults) justice, stories need to balance two truths: teens have lots to learn, but they also have valid, legitimate experience to draw on.
It’s about being incredibly specific in storytelling. Just because Buffy’s mom is totally off-base, doesn’t mean Tara doesn’t need to trust her teacher, and vice versa.
But I tend to be wary of the lesson Tara learns, not because it’s not right for her particular case, but because of the fear of over-generalization. If teen stories tend to go one way, it seems to me they go the way of the wise elder, offering impeccable guidance. Which isn’t wrong, but shouldn’t be confused with automatic truth. After all, adults don’t always remember what it’s like to be 16. As Dumbledore, the ever wise, reminds us:
“What I have done, and not done, with regard to you, bears all the markings of the failings of age. Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young…”
Albus Dumbledore
Sometimes it really is a matter of life and death. Just ask Sirius Black.
