Dear parents of teens,

Being a teenager is not easy. All the trials and tribulations you go through, asking too many questions or not enough, you say the wrong thing or nothing at all. All of sudden our knowledge somehow exceeded your parents, you listen to music as if it was breathing in air, social media is our biggest addiction, most of all, our love is so fragile. At this age we love easily, we hold on to people as if we couldn’t imagine life without them when truth is, we spent 10 years without them and somehow survived. You start to experience hormones and confuse lust with love, which gets us more confused and often leads us into trouble and more heartbreak as well. You are not a child but certainly not an adult, you are confused about life, wanting to be grown, but never wanting to move out. You love your parents yet they don’t understand you, because they definitely were not our ages once or anything. You go from watching "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to "Beauty and the Beast." The world seems to be against you, when in reality it’s you against the world. You feel things you never felt before, your family realizes you’re not that perfect little girl/boy anymore. You start to make stupid decisions and get grounded. The only people who seem to understand you are your friends, and you cry yourself to sleep more than you probably should. With college up ahead, conflicting relationships, and parents who seem to never understand how you could possibly be so stressed out, or even depressed when you’re not the one paying the bills life can be really complicated for us.

Here is every teen’s secret that somehow you seem to have forgotten:

We feel things ten times as strongly as you, we need to learn some lessons the hard way, we need our music and alone time to escape, we need love and encouragement, we need you more than ever. Especially at times when we push you away.

We may seem hopeless, but somewhere deep inside every one of us is a little mustard seed, that with the right amount of love, we can blossom into something magnificent.

Also we really do love you.

Love,

Just Another Teen