Wild teen girls: Dangerous lifestyle patterns – Part 2
Drugs. Promiscuity. Alcohol. Pregnancy. Each of these words is enough to send a bolt of fear though every parent’s heart. Yet with changing family values, increased demands and a whole assortment of new stresses, every parent of a teenaged daughter will eventually have to deal with this. Before you can accurately handle these situations, it is important to learn what’s behind this new lifestyle of young females.
The changing family structure is having a severe impact on the development of young women today. Twenty years ago we’d find a mother staying at home with her children, raising them with the care and devotion expected of them. These days you’re more likely to find the children planted in front of a television, with maybe a nanny or child sitter watching over them. Both parents will be off at work, attempting to earn enough to keep the family afloat.
Young women are now increasingly expected to match, or even out perform their fellow male classmates in school. This is causing an increase in stress, as teenaged girls are being taught that they need to best other students for the chance to attend a university or get a high paying job. Yet the result of these higher expectations is that more students than ever appear giving up and failing. Both teachers and parents display an attitude implying that you either win, or you fail. There’s no longer a middle ground, which unfortunately is where the majority of teenagers tend to be; so young girls, seeing that they’re not going to “win” will give up.
Both changing family values and higher expectations are leading young women to make choices the may not have ordinarily made. Drugs and alcohol quickly becomes an outlet for stress and fear. When intelligence is perceived to fail, young girls will fall back on what they consider their next redeeming asset: their bodies. Sex is something that is readily bartered, whether in hopes of attention, grades, money or drugs, it is an “easy” way for girls to get what they need. Which can then lead to obsessive compulsions about body image; anorexia runs rampant throughout high schools and universities, with diet pills and binging becoming the only way to achieve the body they “need” to get by. Many young girls will ruin their lives, their bodies or their mind with these dangerous habits leading to a growing issue that needs to be addressed in American society.
