Today’s teenagers - A confident, optimistic generation

IT IS reassuring if not inspiring to know that, as banks are being bought up like the cheaper paintings at a minor charity auction, that 95% of Irish teenagers believe that they lead “a happy, meaningful life”.

This either shows an astounding resilience to the great economic events unfolding all around us or that they believe they are bulletproof. However, those polar opposites may be reactions from a different time; it seems today’s Irish teenagers are confident, energetic, undaunted, outward-looking and, despite everything the modern world can use to distract them, four out of five of them still put family before friends.

Today’s Irish Examiner/MRBI poll shows that they are indeed Celtic tiger cubs and regard the whole world, every last corner of it, as their oyster.

This is an amazing change of outlook in a country where a generation ago, certainly two generations ago, a degree of insularity and a fairly standard life-map were the norm for the majority. Today’s teenagers live in an entirely new world. They are the first Irish generation that can communicate with friends in Barcelona or Brisbane, Arlington or Aberdeen, more easily than their parents or grandparents, newly arrived in town or city, could communicate with their own parents back at home on the farm. It would be all but impossible to explain to them that not so very long ago emigration all but represented a death in a family.

So great is this change in horizons that the contained, socially forensic novel of the Irish small place must be under threat. If John McGahern was a teenager today his “patrols of the imagination” would not be confined to the riverbanks and byways around Cootehall. He, like all other teenagers, would join a community established and sustained by websites like Bebo or MySpace.

These are amazing advances but it is foolish to imagine that we understand the implications of this evolution, how they might change the emotional landscape and emotional loyalties. Instant communications are wonderful but virtual relationships — and only time can confirm or refute this — may leave the wounded too wounded, the indifferent too indifferent.

The poll, though hugely positive, also uncovered some concerns; worries that the pressure to do well at exams was “too great”. The 81% who felt this way felt as every other generation felt in its day though that does not make disappointment any easier to bear.

If there is one finding that indicates today’s teenagers may be less well prepared for the world than their parents were it is the one that shows how they react to failure. Today’s research shows that young people may be more deeply affected by not realising ambitions at the first time of asking. This vulnerability may be something altogether too tender for 2008 and hints that there is less depth to the confidence expressed than first impressions suggest.

Nevertheless, this is a hugely positive picture of our teenagers. It recognises the challenge of becoming an adult but suggests that our children are well equipped for the journey.