Talking Points #3: Raby

when reading this my mind went back to the our first class discussion about Croteau, and the whole idea of consent. we (well most) whether we know it or not do not give our consent for these discourses to brain wash us. i say brain wash, because after all from these discourse is where we form our own “ideas”, “truths”, “reality” and such. i put these words in quotation marks because they don’t really exist in us, they were put there. maybe there is a reason, or maybe there is not.

some people might not want to discover these discourses and their roots, some want to stay in the dark and live happily ever after. maybe because once you discover the ins and outs of these discourses, it’s just too much work from there on, and you start to see everything in a different light. and you realize that everything you were ever tough is a lie.

“Steinberg concludes that ‘parents probably project their own discomfort about adolescence onto their children… as a way of avoiding facing the unrest they themselves feel about growing old”.

i totally agree with this quote and also think that parents fear that their children will do either the same things they did as adolescence or even worse. or it could also be that some parents wish they were still adolescence themselves and were doing the things that their children are out doing, and think to themselves: “if I was my child at this age, I would …. “ and therefore this might disturb them a bit and so they worry.

all these ideas about what or how an  adolescence should or would be acting like or experiencing, is another one of those constructed ideologies that media, society and or ourselves have constructed somehow from somewhere in our heads. many adolescence don’t even experience what its said to be the “adolescence experience”, they don’t realize it until after they have passed that stage in their lives. could this be because that is when they reach the point where everyone else telling them what they should be experiencing? and media and or society, etc, has fully taken over their brain at this point, and they “see” what everyone else was talking about?

(not sure if that makes any sense)

i find it funny, how many adults think of adolescence as the age to “rebel” and not “following rules”, when many adults themselves one might say are still in this stage. those adults are the more critical of what a “teenager or adolescence” character. the same can also be said for adolescence, they can act more mature and level headed than a lot of adults.

a question for the class might be:

do you think we ever cross the “adolescence” stage?

meaning what most people think of when they think of adolescence today.

or is “adult” just another word made up, so that we somehow feel superior to those little kids growing up? 

i chose this video because it gives a little information on puberty and the changes one as adolescence are suppose to go through.

but also because I believe most "adults" are still to move on from this stage.  

smile :)
kt