Teenage Labels

Picture this; Charlotte is cool, popular, pretty. She’s funny, kind and amazing with people. She loves sport and shopping and she’s your classic popular girl. Sophie is a little bit strange, she spends a lot of time completely silent on the outside but animated and noisy within. She loves books and writing fanfiction, she sucks at sport and her fashion sense is a little quirky. In any teen novel, Charlotte is the nasty mean girl who will eventually get her comeuppance and Sophie is the protagonist who will probably fall in love with the popular sporty guy (who is obviously secretly a great guy.) and she’ll become cool and popular and liked by all, leaving behind all her realism.

Pop culture gives us one of two views; the first, that Charlotte is cool and the one we should aspire to be, Sophie is boring and will never amount to anything anyway, and the second that popular girl =bitchy and that Charlotte is shallow and false while Sophie is dorky and relatable. We only get one view never the possibility that both girls are good people and that we can learn from both. Nerdy guys are either our protagonist (such as in “Life in Outer Space” by Melissa Keil) or, (and this is more common), a side character, sometimes shown to be kind and/or smart but never with a love interest or portrayed as attractive.

So why do we do this? Why do we categorize people and disregard evidence that doesn’t fit with the way they’re meant to behave? We have formed stereotypes for thousands of years, it provides an evolutionary advantage in that if we know that a certain type of animal (or person) behaves in a certain way we can be on guard around them. Friendship groups in a school setting are usually quite solid by the age of 11 and while heavy emphasis on “popularity” is most common in middle school and lower high school, most situations in which there are cliques will have some sort of social and popularity hierarchy.

Knowing why we stereotype doesn’t tell us why we associate things like “nerdiness” with being a loser and “popularity” with unkindness, when in reality, some studies have shown it’s not the kids at the top of the pecking order that do most of the bullying, and that many people have identified popular people as being popular because they’re kind and good with people. We also seem to have this idea in our heads that you can belong to one group and one group only! Apparently popular people can’t love Doctor Who and write fanfiction, and if you have glasses and love books you are destined to remain at the bottom. I personally know this to be untrue, as of of the most popular girls at my old school secretly loved to geek out over fanfiction with me.

So how can we leave these stereotypes behind? Well, it’s going to be hard to do that entirely. Teenagers are always going to label each other no matter how much we preach. In fact, some people are proud of their labels, proud of having something to connect them to others. But we need to remember that labels are a perception, not a perfect description. No label can Entirely sum up an individual and nor should we expect them to. Labels can be useful, they can be a badge of honor. But a badge shouldn't define a person and neither should any label.




"Why Nerds Are Unpopular." Why Nerds Are Unpopular. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2015. <http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html> Kennedy-Moore, Eileen. "Popular Kids." Psychology Today. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2015. <https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/growing-friendships/201312/popular-kids>.

SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS

Problem with sibling relationships - Are your sibling relationships healthy or unhealthy? 

Having an older sibling is good because you have someone to look up to even if you have your parents, but is it true?

Just imagine twins. Usually people believe that twin are best friends, right? But usually, people, even parents like one twin better than the other. Are the twins trying to steal each other’s spotlight? Yes. Are the twins trying to get people’s attention? Yes. They fight with each other to get people’s attention, and fight to get love from BOTH of the parents instead of one.

It is natural for sibling to fight. It is pretty hard to find siblings that get along with each other. Parents usually have the hardest time trying to get their children to get along with each other. It is not the chores, it is not the shopping, but it is their children. 

Sibling conflict usually happen because of parents, like it is a divorce, or your mum have a not so brilliant idea of having you to chose with your own seat in the dining table, and you and your sibling fight for the seat that is closest to the TV? Small arguments like this can drift sibling apart. Siblings with divorced parents relatively are closer to each other, because they rely on each other to survive through a single parent, while that parent is at work, the children will take care of each other, help each other when needed.

“We only argue about the most randomest things like who gets the last piece of chips or who is the best.” Ella, an eighth grader, agrees.

What about the people who are an only child? They usually have more friends and they tend to trust their friends more than the people with siblings. They have more trust on other people then their family members. The good thing about being a single child is that you do not have to fight for seats, the last piece of pizza, for anything.

They why are sibling relationships important you ask?

Sibling relationships are important because:

1. Friends might come and go, but you will have siblings will stick with you for your entire life. This relationships is one of your longest relationships that people have experienced.

2:Siblings have the same genes, the same interest, grown in the same environment. Siblings might be different, but you generally have the same interest, the same ideas, same hobbies etc. just because you share a house, perhaps sharing a room, even sharing the same food maybe. They know that they will always have each other, and that bond them together even more when they are together.

3. A support from an older sibling can drive academic achievement. The older sibling helps with work, while the younger sibling copies the older one, and the older sibling can give advice of what is good or not like which classes to take etc.

So how close is your sibling to you?

According to businessinsider.sg with a survey with 7,730 americans, only 30% will call their sibling for an emergency, and over 60% said that their sibling was one of their best friends.

Bonding with your sibling is really important, even if their parents treat them differently, your sibling is one of the most important people in the world. People tend to bond with their sibling more than bonding with their parents. Are you close to your sibling?

By: Lydia