Glossopdale Sixth Form student Matthew Howard, who was with us on work experience recently, puts into perspective how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected teenagers in many ways.
Everybody has had it rough in lockdown and no one enjoys staying at home the whole time. For Gamers, staying home is a regular task and a fun one for all gamers, but not when the choice is taken away.
I play games with my friends most of the time but when you know you can’t see them it begins to feel like a prison.
Being a teenager is supposed to be the best time of your life.
You can go out with your friends, there are less restrictions on what you can do and families begin to trust you to stay out later.
However, Covid has caused everyone to stay inside including these teenagers who would have finally understood their freedom.
Teenagers would have had the chance to learn a certain level of responsibility for their own actions but they are also trapped.
Some teenagers will learn to lack responsibility by sneaking out and breaking quarantine in order to see friends.
This is a large part of why the virus has spread the way it has. Teenagers lose some of their restrictions including being able to stay out later, buy alcohol or even energy drinks.
Some teenagers are scared to go out, others feel robbed of their youth, but in this pandemic everyone feels the same and everyone needs to work together in order to keep as many as possible safe.
Other teenagers may stay at home and play games. These people may also feel robbed though. Even though they don’t go out often it’s nice to feel as if there is the choice to and without the house starts to feel like they are locked up unable to go outside. The walls that they surrounded themselves in start to confide them and make them feel as if there is no other choice.
Everyone’s daily lives are different and even if everyone is tired and bored of lockdown they all need to do it to make sure our daily lives go back to normal.
This includes teenagers that feel trapped, people who are worried about family and everybody else. Lockdown is protecting the people that we care about and we needed to keep it up so we can go back to normal.
