I don't like it when people are trying to (even sympathetically) explain why teenagers can sometimes have emotional volatility as "well they're just biologically stupid and angry and bad because of their hormones and underdeveloped brain" with no mention to be found of the fact they're also still trapped in an incredibly oppressive environment 24/7.
working 12+ hour days for school without pay or the right to "switch jobs" to something better, often working a real job on top of that, still the legal property of their parents, can't even dye their own hair or use their own name or have a door to their own room in many many cases. yeah I would be at the end of my rope too, especially when dealing with the adults in my life who are enacting and/or facilitating the abuse! it feels pretty glaring to ignore this dynamic when talking about the strained emotional capacity of teenagers. did you forget? what it was like to not have the right to your own life yet? to be hurt 24/7? and then to have your (extremely reasonable!!!) emotional reactions dismissed as pure hysteria?
purely anecdotally, I'm also not convinced that teenagers are "biologically" more prone to volatility in a meaningfully distinct way tbh. thinking back to the people I knew as a teen vs the people I've known in adulthood, in both demographics there have been people prone to lashing out, and people who were completely stoic, and the differences between the two groups have always seemed to be split not along age or hormonal makeup but along life experiences and who had better support structures. (but again this is anecdotal, and somewhat besides the point. because even if there is a non-pseudoscience biologically provable difference in teenagers' brains that make them universally moodier across the board, perhaps they could better manage their own moods if they weren't being crazy abused as an entire class with no legal ability to escape.)
not to drive the implicit point home too hard but I also can't think of literally any other instances where it's been good or helpful to say "[class of people] are all universally bad and stupid because of their small brains and crazy hormones". so idk why we think saying it about teenagers is the one exception to the rule. even if you're tacking on a "so this is why we have to be nice to them. because they can't help having small dumb brains." who does this rhetoric help?
