Ah @Tink1113, already, at your tender age you say this? Well, it’s true: we’re all crazy, but that’s not saying much, because everyone is crazy.
Is it crazy to disagree with you? Is it crazy to have another point of view than you do? Is it possible that people with more experience kind of lose any sense they ever might have had?
I forgot to say something in my comment above. After I described all the kids I knew who did things that most parents don’t want them to do, or are even against the law, I forgot to say that they all survived, and many—maybe even most—went on to have good jobs and families of their own.
Children can survive all kinds of horrendous things. Look at kids in Africa or the Middle East who survive war and being orphans from early ages—five or even younger. Of course, no parent wants their child to experience that level of pain. Also, that pain is not without consequences. It can make people have a fairly warped view of humanity for the rest of their lives.
If a girl gets raped, that often remains with them the rest of their lives. If drugs mess with your mind or bring on mental illness (LSD made one of my cousins predisposition for bipolar disorder turn into the real thing). If you get addicted to something like Meth or whatever, you can spend years trying to get out from its influence. You might suffer permanent physical consequences, like losing your teeth. Psychological consequences like losing friends and family.
Of course, no one believes they will get addicted. Everyone thinks they can handle it. Most people probably can, but if you have addiction in your family, beware. Another thing that is typical of teenagers is that they often rush into things, instead of taking it gradually. They think (as do many children) that they can do something perfectly the first time. (That particular idea can last until a person is thirty, forty, or more.)
When I was a kid, I thought I’d be able to do anything well the first time. Woodworking. Football. Any new skill. It took me ages to learn that I needed all kinds of practice before I could do it well. Most importantly, it took me ages to learn the value of patience.
The same thing applies to love, partying, drugs, or sex. If you are going to do these things, take it slowly. Work up to it. Allow yourself to make mistakes in more protected situations before venturing out into the adult world. If you are going to do drugs, it helps to have an experienced person lead you into it. They can help you do the right dosage, and they can be there to help if something bad happens. This is true of alcohol, too. It’s far better to learn about the impact of alcohol at your parents’ dinner table than it is to crash a frat party at age of fifteen, and do all those drinking games the first time you ever try it. That’s just asking for some guy to get you totally drunk and to fuck you. You have no idea how fast the drunk sensations will occur, even though it seems like nothing is happening at first. Unfortunately, once you’ve passed into passing out, it’s way too late to undrink it.
With all the changes—especially technological change, it can be easy to think that older people are way behind the times. Kids grow up handling technology for their parents these days, and this can make it appear like you know more than your parents, so they just don’t understand. Please don’t be fooled. Technology, including social technology (social networking sites) do pretty much the same things that high school did for your parents.
Now, having said all this, there are far too many parents, I believe, who refuse to prepare their kids for the reality of adulthood. They won’t talk about sex or drugs because they figure that what their children don’t know can’t hurt them. So kids end up experimenting on their own and then keeping it secret from their parents, supporting this lie that they are innocent and pure.
What can I say? Some parents think that if you know something you’ll have to try it. I think that the more you know, the more likely it is that you will not do dangerous things. You won’t be fooled by the glamor. It looks like fun—partying and drugs and sex. It looks like power—joining the armed services. It looks like independence, and doing whatever you want—moving out of your parent’s house. It looks really boring—getting a lot of education.
I’m afraid that the reality is often far different. Education is the single greatest predictor of financial success in our world. In the long run, it is far more important than independence or partying or drugs or sex. You’ll get to all those things. You can take it slowly. You don’t have to rush. If you focus on education, everything in your future will be so much easier.
It’s a lot of work: education. So is most of life. You can recover from not getting educated when you are young, as you can recover from many trips into hedonistic activities. But it could take you much longer, and you may have to suffer a lot more before things do get better.
It’s your life. You can do what you will. There will be consequences. The hardest thing to do is to look down the road and try to understand those consequences. That is something that it usually does take experience to understand. That’s what your parents are trying to tell you. So, if you do really try to understand the long term consequences of your behavior, you can take that into account in deciding what to do now. You will be happier in the long run if you do.
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