Top 10 Unrealistic Expectations We Got from Teen Movies

One of the tropes that is present in the majority of teen movies is the idea that all teens embody common stereotypes. There’s the jock, the mean cheerleader, the nerd, the band geek, the bad boy, and many more. But in reality, people are usually much more complex than that and defy easy categorization. Not all athletes are intellectually inferior, not everyone who plays an instrument is a dork, and most importantly, the majority of real-life teenagers can’t just be squeezed into a one-dimensional framework. More modern movies are definitely improving on this, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

If you’re currently in high school, you know that most of your free time is taken up by homework. In real life, studies show that teens do up to 17.5 hours per week of homework- that’s like a part-time job! And yet in movies, it seems that they have endless time for long phone chats, hanging out in cool cafes, and even large-scale musical numbers. Also, in fiction teens who play sports or do extracurricular activities STILL seem to have a bunch of time on their hands, despite the fact that theoretically most of their daytime hours should be accounted for.

In real life, teens may be interested in romantic relationships, but much of the time, they’re too busy with school and their friends to get into serious partnerships. In movies, however, it seems like there are tons of long-term couples who have stuck it out for years and, more importantly, that just about everyone dates seriously. While there are definitely people out there who focus on their boyfriend or girlfriend in high school, there are also many examples of people who didn’t date properly until they were in college.

When they do actually get into relationships, most teens are awkward and have a hard time expressing their feelings at all, let alone doing it in significant or public ways. In movies, however, it seems like teenagers are always willing to put their hearts on their sleeves and risk embarrassment in front of their peers in order to tell the object of their affection that they love them. When we were in high school, we would have swooned if someone just said they liked us, let alone doing it with a big romantic gesture.

Things may be a little different today, but for decades it was seen as acceptable (or even romantic!) to basically stalk someone. There are many examples in movies of guys aggressively pursuing women who have made it clear that they’re not interested or even doing creepier things, like taking photos of them secretly or watching them sleep through their windows. In teen movies, this kind of behavior is often rewarded with the two people involved dating, but you can bet that in real life if someone was peering into your window at night, you wouldn’t be thrilled about it.

Why is it that teenage girls in movies are frequently seen in high heels and miniskirts? Not only do those outfits defy dress codes everywhere, but they’re also just not that realistic. Getting ready for school on time is a challenge on the best of days, but putting together a coordinated and fashion-forward outfit just doesn’t happen for most people. In reality, there are a lot more teens in jeans and t-shirts or even loungewear in the hallways. Unless their parents are super-wealthy, most high schoolers just simply don’t have the budgets to dress like that.

The school dances we remember involved a half-empty gymnasium, a crappy sound system, and mediocre lighting. But if you only knew about high school dances from teen movies, you’d think they all featured live music, incredible, over-the-top décor, and teenagers dressed to the nines. Maybe there are some schools out there where there are committees putting tons of effort into decorating for big themed parties, but we’ve never encountered them in the real world. Realistically, we can’t imagine most schools having the budget for parties like this.

The parties that we’ve seen in teen movies make us envious to this day, because if we recall, there was nothing like that going on when we were in high school. In film, teenagers always seem to be able to throw massive raging parties where half the school shows up (whether they want them to or not) and there are kegs, bumpin’ music, and sick dancing. In real life, it’s pretty tough to pull something like that off, even if your parents are out of town, without having some very real consequences. Oh, and to get to these parties, teens are often seen sneaking out of their bedroom windows, which hardly ever goes smoothly in the real world.

We get that some things have to happen in movies to make the plots more interesting, and obviously it would be difficult to write a teen movie if the parents were constantly meddling in everything their kids did. But sometimes it seems ridiculous how oblivious parents are in teen movies, letting their teenagers sneak out, have parties, skip school, drink, and much, much more without ever noticing. You’d better believe that real-life parents are a little more observant and would totally catch us doing pretty much any of this stuff.

The most obvious way in which teen movies differ from reality is simply how hot everyone is. Real-life teenagers have acne and braces and are often going through awkward phases where they’re definitely going to regret their fashion and beauty choices. So why is it that in movies everyone is always flawlessly coiffed and drop-dead gorgeous? We get it, it’s nice to watch attractive people on screen, but it definitely creates an unrealistic expectation for what teenagers should look like. Luckily, current movies are changing this trend, adding more diversity in characters’ appearances.