What is Teenagers Want?

Time and attention. Praises and encouragement. As a mother of 3 teens and as a one time teen myself, I think I can speak from the heart on this one. Sure they like the shiny new stuff. Electronic gadgets, games, clothing, ipods, etc. But some of the best times that we have had and the things that my teens will talk about the most are the memory makers. Little day trips to week long vacations. Just them and us. We discuss as a family where we want to go and what we want to do. A week's vacation starts out like this: beach or mountains? kids usually pick beach for the week long. Mountains for weekends. Camp or hotel? We discuss budget. We go around the table and we each get input as to what we want to do. Then it is my job to set up the itinerary. Where we stay and loosely what we are going to do each day and evening. We don't make a strict schedule. That takes the fun out of it. We all have a choice to change our mind on what we want to do if we find something else when we get to our destination. The important thing is the teens have a part in the planning and discussing instead of being told, "You will do this". Give them praises for just being who they are. Teens are trying to find out who they are. Even they don't know. So they will go through phases of "trying on different hats". My 15 yo is into mostly black clothing and playing emo. She can't be emo. She is too happy. Aren't emo kids depressing? Fill me in if I have the wrong concept of the word. Just yesterday I was praising her and telling her that she is really cool. She is the me that I wish I could have been when I was growing up. I wasn't allowed to be vocal. I wasn't allowed to show excitement for life. She is allowed. She is free and a free-spirit. My 18yo is a beautiful young lady who is blossoming into adulthood quite gracefully. We are guiding and directing and helping her wherever she needs help.She has truly been amazing me with how she is handling full time college student, full-time waitressing, volunteer babysitting at our church, and working as a youth leader helper. My 17 yo son. He was my mama's boy when he was little. Not anymore. At 6'4" I literally look up to him. He thinks that is great. He is one inch taller that his dad. His sights, since 6th grade, he wants to an aeronautical engineer. He has the brains and the grades.

I'm not a parent. But we were all teens once, and it seems like most teenagers are caught up with following the trends. What ever is hot today will be out of style in a few months when something else comes out. That's what I don't miss about being in highschool. Every thing you wore had to be up to date. if it wasn't name brand or something that everyone was familiar with you got teased and made fun of. are you familair with the Saucony sneaker line? when I was in higschool back in '93, these sneakers were starting to make a name for themselves. but not too many people heard of them. I remember only seeing them in the eastbay catalogs. But I had a pair and people would say "what are those". It sucked back then because what ever you wore one year, it was out of style the next year. that's the problem with teens, most of them are caught up with the "whatever is popular", they have to have it. Teenagers make big deals out of the dumbest things. when I was in highschool, there was one yr that Jansport book bags were the big thing. I used to blame it on black people being ignorant and I still do. I am black, and i don't mean to offend anyone by saying this, but I have allways said that black people make big deals out of anything with a name tag on it. Just because the bookbad had the name Jansport on it, everybody had to have one. It's just a bookbag. But the majority of "my people" had to have them. If you didn't have a Jansport bookbag or a Discuss t-shirt it was considered corny. You had to have a discuss t-shirt. Not a russel athletic or a champion, it had to be discuss. Sounds stupid, it was stupid, but that's how it was. If there is one thing I can say that most teens might want today, it might be a new cell phone. With the IPHONE, the sidekicks, and the recently new 3G Blackberry's that just came out, I would think that most teens are into them. I think the new technology is becoming a demand for evryone these days.