Framing Youth by Lesley Bogad

Quotes:

Based on the Article titled "Framing Youth" By Lesley Bogad, I decided to elaborate on three quotes mentioned in the text:

1. Dominant discourses about youth — adolescent development, age,
erasure of difference — secure the weight of their voice(s) through repetition and reproduction in
mainstream texts, popular culture and “scientific” studies which naturalize them as a part of the
“common sense” of American culture.


This quote explains how the most common written and spoken ideas about youth regarding their development throughout adolescence and puberty, as well as the ways society portrays them as different than any other group secures the common sense in American culture about teens. Along with researchers and scholars with heavy weighted voices who follow these same discourses, common sense of inexperienced and emotional youth remains embedded in our culture through television, films, and magazine covers. Youth as a category has a very little weighted voice

in society. This relates to the text because the author Leslie Bogad argued that teenagers are taken for granted as a category due to representations of them that are shown in popular culture.

2.  “Youth are understood as an enigmatic cohort, mysterious and puzzling to the adults who would be “surprised” and “shocked” to learn about their lives.”

This quote explains how in society, people understand teenagers to be impossible to understand to adults with their unpredictable behaviors. This mysterious life allows adults to become eager into learning about their life which is different from any other age group. This relates to the text because Bogad explains how we see teenagers as a “tribe apart”, understanding them to be in-transition, hormone driven, inexperienced individuals in comparison to their opposition, adults. In our media, youth are subliminally represented to be these very ways.

3. As adults we believe we know youth — we once were youth, and some of us share our daily lives with youth as teachers, parents and friends.  But to rely on that which we already know is to reproduce that which we already “know.”

This quote explains that as adults, we believe we understand children to a full extent because we once were children ourselves. Parents interact with children on many different levels whether it is being a teacher, a parent, or family member, but parents raise their children based on beliefs that they have developed through experiences. Unknowingly, children are becoming reflections of these adults that interact with them in their daily lives. This relates to the text because a elementary school study Thorne said that parents believe they understand children because they are former children. Parents consider their children to be less complete versions of themselves.

Things to talk about in class:

The ways in which our written text, television, and film portrays teenagers.. is it the same overtime ?