Former Girl Meets World star and social activist Rowan Blanchard, 16, has a message for grown-ups: Stop shaming teenagers for feeling their feelings.
The actress, who will next appear in Disney's A Wrinkle In Time, sat down for a conversation with her co-stars Reese Witherspoon and Storm Reid in Seventeen's March issue. During their talk, Blanchard got candid about the way adults sometimes look down on teens when they are struggling with some very real stuff for the first time.
"I've always been really nervous about adults calling me pretentious or saying that whatever I was doing was dramatic," admitted Blanchard in Seventeen. "I think that's a really interesting word that we put on teenagers: dramatic. People are always saying our feelings are over-the-top, or they’ll say, 'They’re just being teenagers.' But we forget that when you're a teenager, everything is literally happening for the first time. Growing up is dramatic! It's emotional, it's sad, and it's really amazing."
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The actress has a point. It's easy to dismiss teens for being silly or dramatic, but there's a lot happening at that point in time. Whether it's experiencing something as major as a first heartbreak or as simple as failing a driving test, that time between child and adulthood comes with a lot of unique challenges. We simply don't experience all of the things that we do in teenagehood at other times in our lives. Couple that with the whole puberty thing, and yeah: "drama" may occur.
Blanchard may want adults to stop calling out teens for their allegedly dramatic antics, but she's also proof that grown-ups need to start respecting Generation Z. The actress may not be old enough to vote yet, but she's still spoken eloquently about topics like intersectional feminism, using her voice at protests to fight for causes that she believes in.
If Blanchard is dramatic, well, then I think it's time we realised drama queens get stuff done.