Currently age seems to define you. If you’re a child your views are not taken seriously. As a teenager you are written off as overdramatic. And ironically, the elderly are treated as children again. This is not correct and many people are wrongly labeled. When a child is treated in a way better suited to someone younger than them, they can become overly reliant on their elders, less capable of independence and may start to adopt the behaviours thrust upon them. My 7-year-old cousin announced to me one day that he didn’t like how he was always talked down to, like he was a baby. Children notice and the way people treat them can stunt their abilities. This goes for elderly people as well. 

In actual fact, the older you are the more you know, as you tend to have experienced more and understand more about the world. But as technology improves and the world develops, it becomes more and more challenging for them to adapt. This causes people to regard their elders as less intelligent, becoming almost comical. By treating the elderly like this we are causing them to lose confidence and independence and become increasingly like the stereotypes we place on them, causing this to continue and result in ageing being feared. 

Furthermore, the teenage years are being represented by stereotypes as an attention-grabbing group that is melodramatic and badly behaved. But the vast majority of these ideas are not true and by creating these stereotypes, teenagers are being denied their rights to an opinion and to standing up to what they believe in. In schools across the country, teenagers are being sanctioned for having a say as they are said to be ‘making a big deal about nothing’ or ‘stirring it up to be more than it is’ but this is a violation of human rights as we should be allowed freedom of speech. Our arguments, unless they are something that adults are also fighting for, are condemned as unimportant and our opinions are only validated when an adult speaks up too. 

We need to remove the stereotypes that fill our society about age as they cause limitations and mean that the generation that will make up our society in the future will be crippled by the previous one and the world that we want and need will be a distant dream.