Man… The amount of comments saying that kids are dumb at fifteen and I didn’t know what I was doing at fifteen are all falsely equating respect with success and knowledge. Kids literally don’t know what their doing because they are figuring it out. They’re not dumb, they have a lot to learn. And most want to.
Kids need respect for being who they are. You give most kids real respect and watch them do everything they can to live up to it. They need real connection and mentors. When you give high support then you can set high expectations.
The difference is you knowing that you don’t know, and an average teenager feeling like they know it all, while they know about as much as nothing.
“I’m 20 and this is deep”.
Become an actual adult and you will realize how ridiculously difficult it is to take some uneducated teenager’s radicalism with any grain of seriousness and respect. Even if you try to because you remember what it felt like not to be taken seriously, and you don’t want to be that adult…