Written and Designed by: Jill O’Farrell | Photographed by:
MATURE FOR THEIR AGE Reforming the Way Teens are Represented in Film and Television Designed by Emily Snisarenko | Written by Jillian O’Farrell | Photographed by Sophia Kysela
A human’s frontal lobe, the part of the brain that controls decision-making, does not fully develop until about age 25. For this reason, adolescents think and behave differently from adults; they’re known for being impulsive, emotional, foolish. However, the current generation of teens present a slight antithesis to this stereotype. Today’s adolescents struggle with anxiety more than any other issue, likely to a greater extent than any other generation. But, this
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angst doesn’t seem to manifest into the reckless behavior we associate with teenagers. Instead, these teens retreat to screens. The average teenager spends over seven hours per day on screens for entertainment. While social media use contributes to a large portion of this, they also consume high levels of television and film via online streaming services. I was recently sitting in a cafe next to a table of high school girls and decided to ask them about
their favorite shows. Before I even finished the question, they answered: Euphoria. For the first eight Sundays of this year, the HBO teen drama series Euphoria broke records as millions of viewers tuned in to watch groups of teens navigate life. The 60-minute episodes include themes like sexuality, addiction, and abuse. Euphoria’s characters possess an emotional complexity that is usually absent from mainstream teen dramas; relationships of all
