Jennifer Horgan: This won't go viral, but the kids are alright

Increasingly panicked and sensationalised coverage of teen dilemmas means we are missing the real lived experience of young people — they're clever, empathetic and more emotionally intelligent than ever

Pamela O’Leary is having ‘incredible conversations with young people in schools'. She finds herself dealing with 'very thoughtful, articulate, positive kids’. File picture

Imagination can be personal and it can be public. I’m wondering this week about our public imagination when it comes to young people.

I find myself thinking of the medieval phrase: Here be Dragons. Here be Dragons, or hic sunt dracones, was used on the Lenox Globe to indicate an unexplored region, where all sorts of dangers were imagined existing. The classical version was hic sunt leones (Here be lions).