Millennials. Cellphone carrying, media consumed, half dressed, trophy children. These are just a few characterizations assigned to the children born around the turn of the century-a.k.a. the students currently attending LT.

As a Millennial, I am constantly exposed to the critiques of my generation through the mouth of my elders and the pen of my fellow columnists. There are hundreds of columns published with the sole intent of slamming our generation, and frankly, I am sick of hearing it. Like many of you, I am all too familiar with the pity-filled comments from adults that tend to go along the lines of, “when I was your age I had fun. I didn’t have my head buried in a device,” or my dad’s favorite, “when I was your age, I walked to school, uphill both ways.” Whatever the rhetoric is, adults like to remind us that their generation is, and their experience growing up was, far better than ours.

While I agree that my coming of age experience was far different than that of my parents, I refuse to accept that it was any worse. I had a phone by seventh grade and “surfing the internet” has long been a familiar phrase in my vocabulary, but those details of my youth never depleted my happiness. With an iPhone, I can communicate with my friends who live miles away, I can celebrate an amazing moment by posting a picture commemorating it and I have access to unlimited information. Our perspective on technology is different from that of our parents because we have grown up around it and are familiar with a world reliant on technology. To us, technology is just another aspect of everyday life; it is not an evil thing that attacked us and left us dependent, obsessed and vulnerable.

Along with being technologically dependent, Millennials are often portrayed as parentally dependent, and therefore, lazy. This characterization bothers me the most, as I have witnessed first hand the persistence and hard work that teenagers are capable of. Often, adults are frightened by the size of my textbooks and shocked at the amount of time I spend doing homework. The workloads that teenagers receive in high school today, and the repercussions for not doing our work, are seemingly worse than they were 20 years ago. Lazy people exist in every generation.

Maybe me writing this column challenging the way today’s teenagers are labeled furthers that I am a “Millennial”: a teenager who refuses to accept criticism and whines about what people think about them without actually doing anything about it. However, as someone who watched a 45 year old man have a temper tantrum in a restaurant because he and his family had “been waiting for 25 minutes for a table and that couple over there just arrived and got a table(!)”, it is hard for me to accept that the generation I grew up in will forever dictate how I behave and how I treat other people. My hope for LT students is that we will rise above the expectations of how Millennials are expected to live and behave. And if we can’t do that, we can always refer back to the age-old excuse, “you people raised us!”