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'Teenagers are stupid'
01/11/2005 10:14 - (SA)
Teenagers are stupid. They have the bodies of adults, but have somehow managed to escape, either by accident or intention, the acquisition of common sense.
This can be verified by the example of a friend's sister, who upon losing her cell phone while she stayed down in Grahamstown over the varsity holidays, failed to call her mother for a week and a half to let her know she was okay.
Contact was only made on the day that they were getting ready to call the police or send someone from Johannesburg down to look for her. And she resents not being treated like an adult by the rest of her family.
This past weekend, I went to the eighteenth birthday party of the daughter of a family friend. The girls, currently writing matric, were all absolutely lovely. They are still of the age that considers shrieking the ideal form of communication, but other than that, they were really sweet.
What interested me more than anything else was to notice how at 18, some of the girls could pass for 23, while others still look like rather tall 13 year olds.
And of course, some have just acquired their drivers' licenses.
Drinking and driving
This brings me back to my original point. Teenagers are stupid. What genius decided that the legal drinking age should be the same as the legal driving age, when both require such a degree of common sense to master?
Watching these girls deteriorate into a drunken mob of limp frills and smearing make up, I shuddered at the thought that they would soon be driving their way to a bar down the road.
Two drinks down and they were as drunk as I am after five (and I don't have much tolerance either). When the time came for them to move on, the birthday girl's mother interrogated each departing driver.
She looked into their eyes and smelt their breaths, and asked them how many drinks they had had. It was already possible to see the guile setting in.
"I haven't had..." one girl started, before realising that she had been seen knocking back a tequila shooter. "...More than one drink," she finished somewhat lamely, but she had a fairly direct gaze, and so was allowed to leave, keys in hand.
We stayed behind to help the mother clean up the mess, and all expressed our concern at the fact that those girls were driving to a bar where more drinking was going to take place. Could we really rely on the drivers to avoid drinking all evening surrounded by their drunken friends?
My gut feeling was "no", but I am not sure how we could have policed their outing. It's cruel to prevent an 18 year old from going partying with her friends.
Even promises that they will be fetched if anyone is too drunk to drive them home will be ignored by young adults clinging to their newfound independence.
I guess that all anyone can do, as a parent, is hope to hell that somehow, some common sense has penetrated.
Serena de Souza wishes that public transport was a viable option for teenagers who go out drinking on the weekend.
Send your comments to Serena or discuss this column now in our debating forum.
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