I understand the title is controversial but give my a chance before you bite my head off! My English teacher gave all of my class topics to write a speech on. This is the topic I received and, (as you can see), I have to agree with the motion that “Teenagers today have too much freedom”. The following are the 9 reasons my teacher required us to brainstorm:
1. Parents don’t know where their children are anymore.
2. Not everywhere is a war zone, but not everywhere is safe. So, teenagers shouldn’t have as much freedom as they do to roam dangerous streets and hang around in parks or alleyways, especially at night.
3. Teenagers spend less time with their families as they are out so often. This can give teens an unbalanced life as they spend too much time with their friends or online and not enough quality time with their families. 33% of teens don’t want to spend more time with their parents. This is a relatively low figure, but if you ask me even the lowest figure is too high when it comes to this.
4.The amount of freedom teenagers have affects their studies and homework, as many teenagers today rush through their after school work to go outside and hang around with their friends. It would be a different story if they were rushing out to get exercise or do something beneficial for their health. Yes, it is beneficial for teens to spend time with their friends but how much is too much? To paraphrase Bob Phillips: “Teenagers complain there’s nothing to do, then stay out all night doing it”.
5. As much as we’ve been called the “technology generation”, no teenager knows how to fully utilise the internet and make sure their personal details and information is safe. As the saying goes, “once you put something on the internet, it stays there forever”. For that matter, not many adults can be completely safe on the internet either! So, with the amount of freedom teenagers have today, many of them spend it with their faces stuck to a screen, talking to God know’s who and doing God know’s what! No parent know’s what goes on behind closed doors or what teenagers are really doing whilst on their phones and laptops 24/7. So as a result of too much freedom with technology, teen’s can be subject to cyber bullying or worse. Fact: Teenagers spend 31 hours per week online.
6.Everyone (especially those in their teenage years), needs rules and boundaries in order to keep them grounded. Teenagers who have too much freedom could lose their perspective of what is important in life and create this false interpretation of what life will be like in the future. What I mean by this is that teenagers could lose the very meaning of freedom itself. Freedom is the right to say what you believe, practice your own religion and so on. Teenagers today regard freedom as being allowed to go to discos or stay out till eleven at night, or spend four hours on the internet. This in turn, could affect what young people value life and what they think is important or not.
7.Teenagers who have too much freedom can take advantage of it and get into bad habits.
8. Naturally there needs to be a certain level of trust and privacy that parents should give to their teenager children, but at what point does this trust and freedom border the line of neglect and leaves the teens feeling deprived of attention, forcing them to act out to see if their parents really care? So another result of teens having too much freedom is that they can begin to think their parents couldn’t care less what they do so they might as well do it anyway. This can lead to emotional problems, or worse, in later life.
9.The age at which children are allowed to work is seemingly becoming lower. Due to the fact that more teens are able to work, they then have their own source of revenue and parents cannot control or be apart of yet another aspect of their children’s life. Teenagers have the freedom to buy whatever they want and they use the fair argument that it’s “their money so they can do what they like with it”.
