Acting Adultish

Last night, at dinner, the teenager posed this question:

Mom, do you think sometimes children act better than adults?

Absolutely, I told her.  Sometimes adults can act really childish.

Well, she said, then they shouldn't call it acting childish.  It's insulting to children to call it being childish. They should call it acting adultish, but that sounds more like a compliment than an insult.

I've been thinking lately about how teenagers often get a bad rep.  Someone will post something on social media, or an incident will come up in conversation, and someone else will invariably say, "oh, it must have been teenagers".   Or, you'll be in a conversation in a group with a pregnant or new mother present, and someone will say, "Enjoy that baby, before you know it, she'll be a teenager" and then there will be groans and eyerolls.  I used to do the same, before I actually had teenagers. 

I know there are teenagers who get up to no good.  I also know there are plenty of teenagers who are hard working students, involved in their families and communities, teenagers who take time out of their summers to go on mission trips and are willing to sacrifice an entire month for marching band, teenagers who work part-time jobs to help out their families.  I don't think it's fair to make blanket judgments about an entire developmental stage.  Teenagers don't always make the best decisions.  They can and do make decisions we don't agree with, as their parents, even though those decisions aren't always bad ones- just not the ones we'd make.  Sometimes they make awful, horrible ones that make parents scream  "What were you thinking?".  However, that's not all teenagers, all the time.

Adults, we're all guilty of making bad choices, too.

Plenty of adults get up to no good- grown-ups who supposedly have fully developed frontal lobes and plenty of life experience and therefore have no excuse for immature behavior.  However, no one ever says, in response to a comment about "oh, my car was almost broken into last night",  that it must have been a bunch of adults.

Sometimes, my fellow adults, we don't even act our ages.  I've frequently seen memes on Facebook  about being kind to others.  Some days, I think that might be setting the bar a bit too high for the adult population; we need to start with just being civil to each other.  If you can't be kind, be civil.  

If you want to watch a bunch of adults start acting childish- or maybe I should say adultish- just observe a discussion on anything controversial or sensitive and see how fast it degrades into name calling and personal attacks.  Read the news.  It's easy to find examples of adults making bad life choices.  Adults can be bullies just like kids can.  Kids and teenagers do not have exclusive rights to bad behavior.

Yes, I know that most adults are just like most teenagers: going about their day, doing what they need to do, working hard, volunteering, being responsible people.   We just need to remember that the kids are watching us, seeing how we behave and how we treat other people.  Acting adultish should be a good thing, not a bad thing.