We are not animals

"I am getting increasingly annoyed by articles about teenagers, and the adults who keep trying to explain our behavior."

Sir, I am getting increasingly annoyed at the barrage of articles about teenagers, and the adults who keep trying to explain our behaviour (“Moods and meltdowns: what’s inside the teenage brain?”, Mar 1).

I am 16 and a straight-A student, like most of my friends. We are not as irrational and immature as adults seem to think. We’ve grown up with financial crises and accept that most of us will be unemployed. We no longer flinch at bloody images of war because we’ve grown up seeing the chaos in the Middle East and elsewhere. Most of us are cynical and pessimistic because of the environment we've grown up in -- which should be explanation enough for our apparent insolence and disrespect, without "experts" having to write articles about it.

Has no one ever seen that we are angry at the world we live in? Angry that we will have to clean up your mess, while you hold us in contempt, analyzing our responses as though we were another species?

I would like adults to treat us not as strange creatures from another world but as human beings with intelligent thought -- a little different from yours, perhaps, but intelligent thought nonetheless.

Stop teaching adults how to behave around us, and instead teach them to respect us.

- Jenni Herd