The Rise and Fall of Tangling Discourses

I don't know how closely the rest of the articles we read this semester are going to be with each other (my assumption is - a lot), but I thought that Thomas Hine's The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager was spot on with everything that Raby discussed in A Tangle of Discourses.

Lets start with the idea of "teenagers as not a quite competent person, beset by stress and hormones" (Hine, 4). In Raby's article, this is also something she talks about. It is only a stereotype that further fules the twisted view that we have on teenagers. In her article, she referred to this as The Storm discourse. And to further prove this particular point, she had one of her interviewees share their thoughts on this and she said that "as a teen, you don't feel like [having sex, being driven by hormones, etc] and I think it's something you don't realize until you get older". But at the same time, I feel like this is something that is so embedded on everyone's brains that as we go through adolescence, we kind of believe it so much that we begin to experience the things that people relate teens to. And at that point we become the things that people bad talk about, even if we all, as human beings will and have gone through that same thing.

One of the discourses that Raby also talked about was the idea of teenagers needing to find an identity - that this is the only thing they strive for, they want independence and they want independence. Is it a discourse if "study after study suggests that teenagers' principal preoccupation is to adapt, to find a place in life"? (Hines, 2). Is this one of those things that we become the things that people always say about us? Or is it truly what teenagers want in life? So, is it a discourse? Or is it a psychological fact that we're bound to experience regardless of discourses? It's a bit confusing to me and I don't think I have quite an opinion on it. But these opposing views are definitely food for thought and a nice discussion!