Conforming To Society's Expectations Of Teenagers

All throughout time humans have tried to conform to society’s expectations, especially teenagers. In today’s society there are many things that pressure teens to conform to the standards of their peers. One of these pressures is the clothing they wear. The clothing we wear expresses so many different things. Have you ever heard of a teen saying “I want to wear this because so and so who is popular is wearing that”? An example of this would be of the movie Mean Girls, one of the students said “I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip flops so I bought army pants and flip flops.” Or, in the same movie when Cady and Janis cut holes in Regina George’s shirt and everyone then had cut holes in their shirts. Other impacts that clothing has is where you get your clothes from and how much you spend on clothing. Labels shown things like status. Status sometimes can help with who you are friends with or how many friends, especially in private schools or schools that have a huge amount of cliques. In the show Orange is the New Black the character named Pennasatucky said she hated rich people because they bullied her when she was little for not having the nicest clothes and shoes shown in a flash back. There are schools that have uniforms because of this reason. Clothing is a huge pressure on a teen, and they tend to conform to their peers because they want to fit in and not stand out, one of the

Teens tend to share test and assignment scores and grades, honor rolls are published, and no one, no matter how much or how little they studied, wants to have a failing score and let it be known to everyone else. There is always someone who wants to be better than the rest, someone who does not want to do bad because they don’t want others to think they are stupid, and there are others who just won’t do an assignment and admit they don’t understand the material for fear of being laughed