Moj odgovor na blog:
I'm not from Serbia, but in Croatia teens live exactly the same. I agree with most of what you wrote, but still, not everything is true.
We get allowance, but not for fun, but to eat when in school. And most of the high school kids come from villages into town to attend high school. They have to travel every day, and eat in that town, sometimes even live there in a rented appartment. So we learn to be on our own at age of 15.
Naturally teens won't have their DL here, let alone a car. If I would like to get the license, I would have to pay somewhere around $1000 (just for license, not to buy a car.) And gas in Europe i a lot more expensive than in USA, plus the paper work. There is no way teens can afford all that.
Our teens can't be as independent as those in the USA. First of all, there are no jobs for teens. The earliest time to hope to get a job is after graduating from high school. Even in college is hard to get a job. In Osijek, there are 10 thousand students, and only about 50 job offers for students. And even if there was a job for me, I couldn't accept it, because my classes are not in morning, or the afternoon, but spread across the entire day with hour pauses, form 8am to 8pm. There is barely enough time to study.
College is NOT free. I was a student with straight As in elementary and high school, and I even got a scolarship, but my parents already spent all their savings on my college, and my dad has to put aside half of his paycheck, just so I would have something to eat and somwhere to sleep while in college. And that's not some elite college, in Croatia, let alone in Europe. Actually, I think it's a joke.
And when I finish my 5-year college (I'm 21 now, just got out of teen years), I will become a proffessor of English and History (my 2 majors). I hope to get a teaching job at my local elementary school, get monthly pay of about $800, and that will be enough for me to move back to my parents house (my old little room) and contribute to paying the bils. There is no way I'll be able to afford a car before I'm 30, and there is no way in hell I'll be able to get a loan to buy a tiny apartment for myself.
Actually, my parents expect me to come home, marry there, bring my wife in that little room, and start a family there.
While US teens take it for granted to make good money when they are 30 if they work hard enough, we hope just to be able to survive and that our heating won't be cut of in the winter because we couldn't pay the bills..
This is the reality teens here expect to live.
|