ADOLESCENCE IN THE ECUADORIAN SOCIETY

By Miguel Molina Díaz

Ecuador is a youth country considering that 60% of the population is under 28 years. The adolescents in the Ecuadorian society are a diverse group of people that express themselves in a lot of different ways. Depending on the social status, education opportunities, familiar formation and the location where they live, teenagers’ personality and characters can vary a lot. The social status can determine the way of thinking of a teen, for example we can find young people that are only interested in consuming and others that want to preserve the ecosystem. Education is an important factor because in our country a lot of children and teens don´t have access to this basic right as a consequence of poverty, so many of them mature early, being exposed to risky behaviors that include the use of drugs among many other dangers. Every factor is related to each other. If we talk about familiar formation we can assume that not all the families in Ecuador are functional, which means that a lot of teenagers grow in atmospheres that include violence, the use of alcohol and the lack of a father figure. Some adolescents grow without their parents because of migration. According to statistics, the location is a factor that has a great influence in the situation of a teenager because the reality of rural zones and urban zones are not the same.

Of course, the above mentioned factors are not necessarily definitive, but they give us an idea of how teenagers develop in society. At this time, the young people are the most diverse group in the society, and some of their expressions are influenced by factors as music. In Quito alone, we can have a lot of urban cultures that interact following gender postulates and principles that prevail in rock, punk or metal. In the last years a group of teenagers denominated EMOS appeared, whose name relates to the word emotion. They wear a very original fashion using shadow colors and a strange hair style. This group of people thinks that the way in which they can give sense to their lives is through suffering and pain, for that reason they have a big opposition in the society. There is another group called skin-heads that are a group of young people influenced by Nazis ideas and believe in the social cleansing, so they use violence and abuse to show the supremacy of their race. These two groups are part of a minority but the majority of the adolescents in Ecuador are good people who dream as any person.

In my opinion the role of teenagers in society gets bigger and bigger with time because we assume bigger responsibilities in a society that each day is more difficult to us in a lot of aspects. We are in the middle of a lot of danger as the AIDS infection, and we are the only ones that can take care about our own lives. The Constitutional Assembly approved the optional vote for teens between 16 an 17 years, and that is for me an opportunity to show our own capacity and decision-making ability to built better days for our country. We can´t wait for other people to make the changes that we need and this is a good way to involve teenagers with Ecuador, our country. Something important to mention is that the conservative Ecuadorian society conceptualizes the teens as unreliable people, and this stigmatization and prejudice became so strong that a lot of adolescents think the same as the establishment. That is something that we have to avoid as a society in order to promote the participation of adolescents.

miguelmolinad@gmail.com