Teacher: Barbara Downey

WB00792_.gif (728 bytes)

Personal Responsibility Among Teens Today

By Rachel Murrin

Grade 12

While adults are working to make a living, teens today are cruising the mall or driving around in their cars, wasting their time and money being lazy and useless. It is true that many teens have part-time jobs, but most of them just use the money to buy clothes or CDs instead of spending it on worthwhile things that teach responsibility. Kids today are not spending as much time with their families. Communities today, as well as families, are not as close-knit as they used to be, and part of it is the way teens do not take any responsibility in their communities. To improve the quality of life in our communities today requires a great deal of personal responsibility among everyone, especially teenagers.

Teens today need more personal responsibility. There are many examples to support this fact. More and more junior high and high schoolers are dropping out of school without graduating, only to sell drugs of work at low-paying jobs with no way to advance in them. What they do not realize is that this is not the way to live. They will not have good lives living this way. The percent of kids using drugs and alcohol is rising again, after going down in the 80's. Without any responsibility, teenagers find themselves with a lot of time on their hands, and they resort to "partying" to have a good time. Problems result from spending their time this way. And kids are not looking to themselves for answers to their problems. They are blaming their parents or other adults. Some are claiming that their parents and teachers are not giving them enough responsibility and freedom to do things on their own. Youths need to take responsibility for their own actions, and adults need to give teens the ability to take on responsibility.

A few teens across the country are doing something to help stop the growing number of irresponsible teens. In Putnam County, a youth court has been established. These types of programs are not common enough around the country. Teens act as the lawyers, judges, and jury, and they have real-life cases. They see kids just like themselves in the court for crimes like drug possession, under-age drinking, stealing, and even murder. Through youth courts like Putnam County's, teens learn

responsibility through seeing what can happen to them if they commit crimes that might seem harmless to them. Teens can also be active through their churches. Most churches have youth groups to give teens something productive to do. The youth groups do community service, like picking up trash on the side of the roads and highways or helping out at homes for the elderly. They can also help out members of their community by rebuilding homes that have been damaged by storms or floods. This helps to create responsible, hardworking kids. It also makes them feel good about themselves when they help others. Athletic activities also help to make responsible teens. Through junior high and high school sports, kids learn self-discipline. They learn to work together with others to accomplish something.They learn to listen to the advice of adults like their coaches and parents, and they learn to be in control of their actions.

Despite all of these good examples, more needs to be done to help with this problem of irresponsibility among American teens. One of the keys to personal responsibility among teens is volunteering. Teens need to volunteer in their communities more. They can enter volunteer programs offered in their communities, or start programs of their own if there is not already one established. Another idea for teens is to have an after-school program where they can help out younger children with schoolwork and other things. This will show teens that younger kids look up to them and that they need to set a good example. Teens need mentors, too. Adults who are successful in their jobs make good mentors for kids. More mentor programs need to be established to help adults and teens work together toward the future. This will help kids in their career decisions, and just having a relationship with a responsible adult will help teens become more responsible themselves.

Many teenagers in America today are bored, desperate for some kind of responsibility. They say that adults are not giving it to them. It is time American teens received the responsibility they are craving. How they will handle it is hard to say, but I think they will thrive on it. Through volunteer work, helping out younger kids, and mentoring by adults, teens today can achieve personal responsibility.

Questions

1. In the United States, people invest time and effort, but not much else. In Manus, the whole family is involved. Relatives invest financially in the marriage between a man and a woman. The groom's side of the family invest "dog's teeth and shell money", and the bride's side pays them back with "pigs and oil."

2. 1)1 marriage, 18 years. "You have to be able to compromise."

2)1 marriage, 26 years. "Communicating with each other is important."

3)1 marriage, 62 years. "Learn to ignore the things that bother you about your spouse."

4)1 marriage, 13 years. "Only fight over what is really important."

5)1 marriage, 6 years. "Make time for each other to spend alone."

6)3 marriages, 1st-5 years, 2nd-10 years, 3rd-2 years. "Make sure you love each other."

7)1 marriage, 8 years. "Be patient with one another."

8)2 marriages, 1st-10 years, 2nd-12 years. "Keep the magic alive in your relationship."

9)1 marriage, 35 years. "Don't spend every waking minute together."

10)1 marriage, 23 years. "Don't get married for the wrong reasons, like money. Make sure you marry for love, and you will be happy."

3. Our collective goal, according to Richard Eckersley, should be to make society less materialized without reducing the quality of life. We need to have global economic growth help the rich and the poor, not just have the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Economic opportunities should be open for people of all ages and races.

4. I think a worthy goal for my local community would be to make the place friendlier. Our community should have an activity center where families could go for a fun night with other families in the community. This would create a more homey feeling in the community and reduce hostility among the people who live here.

5. I think it is sad that the toy industry is making a doll to remind children of their mothers. Children should not have to carry a doll around, in need real maternal comfort. The comment about racial distribution in the year 2050 interested me. I think that having a more equal distribution of races in the American population in the future will help close the socioeconomic gap between races.

6. Our democracy makes lawyers helpful, as Kathleen Sullivan says, because "just as the framers created a government in order to settle the disputes among factions of passion and interest, so we create contracts to regulate and anticipate disputes among individuals and entities." Our diversity, wealth, and size makes lawyers helpful, too. Law helps mediate across diversity of custom. As our country gets wealthier, people worry about things like the deteriorating environment and the expense of healthcare. The law can help solve these problems. With our large size, lawyers help us save money on large-scale work forces and large-scale transactions by helping us set up processes, procedures, and rules.

7. I prefer rules over punitive damages. We create rules, and then if they are broken, people pay punitive damages. For instance, McDonald's probably has a rule for how hot their coffee can be to serve. If the temperature on their coffee is hotter than the standard that they have to go by, then they must pay punitive damages. Rules are a good way to change bad practices.

8. The baby boomers will retire and then start their own businesses, creating jobs for other retired baby boomers and young Generation X'ers. There will be "elder care facilities" for the care of older people who do not have jobs. Many Generation X'ers may go into business for themselves, providing the growing elderly market with home health care, home shopping, travel and recreation, and real estate services.

9. I think Clinton's anti-poverty program will not work that well. The poor need training if they are going to be taking on complicated jobs, and that costs money. Companies may not be willing to pay to train them. The poor may not even have a good enough education to get a good job, so they will have to be educated more. The biggest reason that the program will not make huge improvements is because it is going to take an effort from the American people, and apathy is our biggest obstacle. We have to work to create economic equality, and some people just will not do it.

10. They were both determined, they had dreams and made them come true, and they both had faith in God.