This is a guest post by my son, a teenager in Grade 9 – his first year of school. On Take Your Kid to Work Day, I asked him to write a blog post about what parents may not know about their kids in high school. This is what he wrote.
Parents ask their kids all the time, what’s going on at school? Their response is, “nothing much.” Well, this is what’s really happening in high school.
The thing that teens do most at high school is look at their cell phones. They’re addicted to them, and get in trouble because they are not doing their work. They lose focus during a class when teachers are trying to teach a lesson. Students mostly worry about when they get a text message on their Instagram or Snapchat.
What happens is think they got a text message or their phone went off but it didn’t. This is called a phantom message. A phantom message is where someone thinks that, “Oh, did my phone just beep or did, I get a message?,” but since how highly addicted they are to their phone, they think that every few seconds or minutes their phone beeps but in reality, it doesn’t beep at all. This means that you are highly addicted to your phone and that is a huge problem for this modern era.
Another big problem with teenagers at school is vaping. Often teenagers say, “Oh I won’t get addicted to this stuff. I mean I can just quit when I want right?” They think that, “I can quit no problem,” but they can get highly addicted to it as soon as they try vaping which is not good for your health. Vaping can have a big impact on school and family business because if you keep vaping during school, your grades could go down and you would start to be very rude to your peers. When teens don’t have their vape, they go nuts. It’s like losing your house or a lot of money. Some people would honestly kill for more vape if they couldn’t have it. Studies have shown that students will lose brain cells if they keep on vaping.
The problem with teenagers is that the use their cellphone all the time or they vape a lot during school. These are two major problems that teenagers are addicted to. Both cellphone use and vaping are easily addictive, which is something parents of teens may not realize. Parents need to stop these teenagers from hurting themselves with their vapes and cellphones.
