First Blog: What's an adolescence, teenager or child?

Hey guys!
Well..as you can see this is my first blog. I'm curious about how it will turn out. Let's start on a topic that I've been working on today: What is an adolescence? What is youth? What is a child? I found it very interesting...I hope you guys will like it too. Anyway, these are my thoughts concerning this topic.

In the media and in the public debate a certain group is determined to be 'adolescents'. We also speak of children and teenagers. We take these terms often for granted and when we read about them in the newspaper we assume that most of the people know of which groups we're talking about...but do
they? Take children for example. For a long time in our history there was no such thing as a child. They were seen as little adults but adults nonetheless. They were just seen as adults who weren't able to do everything yet, but there was no such thing as a child. They had to work, they had to listen and they were responsible for wat they did. This all sounds like a long time ago but it was only in the beginning of the twentieth century that children in the western culture were actually seen as children. It was only then that they were allowed to have a childhood. Take this child from the 18th century for example:



Let's say that this girl is 8 years old, give or take a few years. Does she look like that to us? I think that most of us would say no. This child was dressed like an adult and was expected to behave like an adult. Now most of us wouldn't think about dressing our children like an adult nor would be expect them to behave as such. So maybe the definition of being a child changes over time.
Like In the past girls of the age of 14 were perceived as adult enough to bear children. Now this would be seen as waaay to soon.

These definitions may change over time but aspects like culture and social beliefs also influence this. In some countries girls of the age of 14 are still believed to be old enough to give birth to children.
Of course this wasn't only the case with children. The beliefs about adolescents and teenagers also changed over time and were also infuenced by cultural standards.


So..the age of when one becomes or is an adolescent, child and teenager changes over time. But what is an adolescent now? The always knowing Wikipedia says this:

"Adolescence (from Latin: adolescere meaning "to grow up")is a transitional stage of physical and mental human development generally occurring between puberty and legal adulthood (age of majority),but largely characterized as beginning and ending with the teenage stage."

But then again..when does puberty end? And when does legal adulthood start? For example: The word 'adolescence' is often used in texts or in speech but there are no true definitions of when one really becomes an adolescence. And of course this is logical. After all, we cannot set lines. We cannot say that adolescence starts at say 18 years old. After all, one does not mature into adolescence on the night of their birthday. It is important to realize that, when speaking of such definitions, that those definitions are understood differently by different people. Once again the same goes for the concept of a 'teenager'. The concept of a child is easier to grasp even though there still are different thoughts about that concept as well.

The last thing that is important to realize is how different the groups of teenagers and adolescents are. There is no such thing as THE adolescent or THE teenager. Take a look at these pictures for example:




See how different they are?? All about the same age but yet so different.
I believe that the answer to the question what's an adolescence, teenager or child can not be simply answered. As I tried to show you there are different beliefs, lot of influences and therefor a lot of differences. We are all defined by what is believed at that moment, by in what culture we live and by what we want to be.

Everything that is said above may seem obvious but I believe that it is an important thing to realize when people are talking about 'the media and the teenagers' or the 'media and the children' or 'the media and adolescents'. Please realize that those are very diverse groups and that their usage and their experience of the media are most certainly affected by it.