Essay On Teenage Wasteland

It is time to let teens be teens. Research has shown that teens respond to pressures from their authority in a very alarming way. Throughout our lives we have been expected to accomplish certain milestones at certain times. At one years old, we are expected to walk, at three we are expected to walk. As kids grow up, there are higher and higher expectations surrounding them. Go to school, get the grades, go to college, find and maintain a job and onwards. Life doesn’t seem to slow down and the pressures and expectations seem to get higher. The years go on ad nothing gets easier. Teenagers are more inclined to rebel as a result of the pressures surrounding them.
This is shown explicitly in “Teenage Wasteland” by Anne Tyler. This short story is told from the perspective of the mother figure, Daisy, who in her endeavor to spare her child from what she understands to be unruly and negative behavior pushes him further and further towards the brink of his final act of rebellion. Overwhelmed by the fantasy of making Donnie a successful and well-behaved kid, Daisy’s actions in the story eventually become, urgent and desperate ultimately hurting Donnie in the end rather than helping him achieve his full potential. Her behavior, we can assume, leads to her son’s strange disappearance towards the end. Her constant need for Donny to be …show more content…
She molded herself into somebody people around her needed her to be. She then faces the consequences of this by feeling insecurity and doubt (“All her doubts were someone else's point of view” [Green Day line 13). And although she did her best trying to fit into a certain scheme she is now miserable because there is no way for her to move forward or do anything with her life (“Are you feeling like a social tool without a use?” [line 8]). And upon realizing it, she feels that it’s time to “smash the silence”(15), to stop pretending and break out of her

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