Teens and Antigone

Teenagers tend to want everybody to accept them. The ongoing battle inside teens holds the fragile choice they must make. If they tilt too much one way, the precious gem will tip and shatter into a thousand pieces, and they cannot repair the jewel to the perfection it had before. Most people may say that teens would easily choose the acceptance of their peers over their parents, but that does not come easy. A huge dilemma facing teens today consists of the pressure of acceptance and acknowledgement between their peers or parents.

Teen try different strategies to grab their parents’ attention. Even the messenger from Sophocles’ Greek play, Antigone, wanted to gain acceptance from higher authority. Parents sometimes become consumed in their work and forget their obligation as a parent. Teenagers tend to do crazy acts in order to obtain their parents’ attention like doing drugs. They figure that if they get in trouble with the law, maybe the parents would give them some attention. When I stayed in the mental/behavioral hospital, one girl hoped her mother would acknowledge her presence during her stay. Her mother would just make rude remarks like, “Who said we came to visit you?” when she came to drop off some of the girl’s clothes. Teens make good grades as another method to grab their parent’s attention, which sometimes does not work either. A top of the class straight A student may have a parent that would not give a care because of their own selfish needs. Some parents just think about themselves way too much and do not have the proper qualities of parenting. A child trying to gain a parent’s acceptance becomes difficult when the parent does not acknowledge their child’s existence. Though it does not seem like it, some kids that have parents paying attention to them do not feel accepted. For example, if a father wanted his son to become a football player and expected his son to receive a full-ride to college and the son wanted to pursue a career in English, the father would not accept it. The father has a narrow mind and does not care what his son wants.

The acceptance of peers has a major part of our high school years. Antigone’s character has a brave soul