How to Talk to Your Teenagers About the Pandemic
No, they don’t need more information
Parents are frustrated with their teens right now because they don’t seem to be taking things seriously enough. Maybe they are shrugging it off because they say the virus won’t affect them, or maybe they just don’t seem to care at all.
Cavalier attitudes, feelings of invincibility — these are typical teenage mindsets. But this isn’t a typical situation. And in fact, their attitude and the way that they are responding is more similar to soldiers than stereotypical teenagers.
They are in denial not because they are selfish or self-centered, but because they have learned denial as a defense mechanism.
A generation desensitized
Imagine being a small child told to huddle under your desk and be very quiet because an evil person is roaming the halls of your school and may come in and kill everyone. Now imagine having that happen every month. These kids have grown up with active shooter drills in their classrooms once or twice a month from the time they were in kindergarten. They are ready for it when it comes, but they have been desensitized.
Desensitization happens out of necessity. I have a friend who is an ER doc, and he says people would be horrified if they heard the jokes the doctors made. Does that make him a bad doctor? No, it makes him a better doctor. In the military, they drill and drill to remove emotion and train the body to act out of habit. This is where we’re at with our teenagers, like it or not.
They’ve been inundated with threats their whole lives. They live in a post-9/11 world. Remember when you used to be able to meet people at the gates when their plane arrived? And movies of someone running to catch their true love right before they got on their plane?
We remember a time before the war on terror. It’s not like the 80s and 90s were all roses, but talking to my 17-year-old daughter yesterday, she remarked that she wished she had grown up in the 90s. I reflected for a moment on the things I was stressed or worried about when I was 17. They just pale in comparison.
