For many teenagers, the stretch between 13 and 19 is to be endured as much as it is to be enjoyed. A chasm seems to grow between teens and their parents as moods become darker and the influence of peer groups grows.
For rural parents, there often is an added angst: their sons and daughters make it clear they can hardly wait to get away to the city.
What makes rural kids dream of leaving, even as some city kids are imagining a quieter and less complicated life in the country?
Read Also
Manitoba community projects get support from HyLife
HyLife Fun Days 2025 donated $35,000 each to recreation and housing projects in Killarney, Steinach and Neepawa earlier this fall.
Are rural teens and urban teens really all that different?
For this special report, Western Producer graphics editor Michelle Houlden – herself a small town girl gone city – talked to urban and rural teens across the Prairies in search of some answers.
Kim Andrei, 18, is counting the days until she graduates and can move from her farm near Ogema, Sask., to Winnipeg, a city she thinks holds more promise than any small town could.
She hopes the bright lights mean a bright future.
“If you actually put yourself to something, you can find something to do for the rest of your life,” she says. “And I think you have to be in a big area to do that.”
Meanwhile in Winnipeg, 14-year-old Tyler Moskal is musing about life in a small town.
“I don’t like the city,” he says. “There’s too many people here.” He sees the positive side to the quieter pace of rural life.
“One day, I was sick and I went out and sat at this bus stop by myself, just sat there. And it was pretty cool. It’s not (like being on) a farm, but it was a quiet street.”
The teen years are a mysterious and frustrating time of change for urban and rural youths alike as they struggle to develop identities.
Rural parents listen to complaints about boredom and the ever-present ears of the community. City parents listen to complaints about peer pressure and lack of freedom.
In both cases, parents wonder, “what’s so tough about growing up here?”
What is tough, it turns out, is not really location. Teenagers, whether they live in Nanton, Alta., or Regina, Sask., experience similar irritants – peer pressure, parental interference, boredom, fitting in.
And virtually all wonder what’s out there for them when they leave school and whether teens on the other side of the fence have it easier.
One reason conformity holds teens in a tighter grip than ever before is, paradoxically, the thing that has shown them what is possible: television.
“I’d say TV probably does make us alike,” says Rose McGillivray, a 14-year-old Grade 9 student at J.T. Foster School in Nanton, Alta., about 65 kilometres south of Calgary. “If we like the same TV shows, we probably like the same kinds of clothes and talk the same way.”
Television fills the gap in an absence of first-hand experience, says Tannis MacBeth, developmental psychologist at the University of British Columbia.
“The media, by portraying certain ways of talking, of looking, and of being … plays a role in the teen’s task of developing a separate identity.”
In fact, it would seem that for all their claims of wanting to be individuals, teenagers mainly want only to be different from adults, not each other.
“All teenagers tend to reject some aspect of the way their parents are,” says MacBeth. “They dress in all black, or they pierce parts of their body – different parts than their moms pierced. They try to establish that they’re separate and have their own ideas. Ironically … they all tend to do the same thing. They’re trying to be different, but within a fairly narrow and rigid band of what’s acceptable.”
Moskal, a Grade 9 student at Winnipeg’s Kelvin High School, gave the typical mixed message about the teen dress code and peer pressure: “If people on the football team wear sweatpants to school, it’s like, ‘go team’. But if some other guy wears sweatpants, people will think he’s stupid.”
Wearing the right clothes is just the beginning of peer pressure, and on this subject, rural and urban teens can’t decide who has it worst.
“I think there is pressure to fit in here,” says Jessica Peterson, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Ogema School.
There, nine teachers and 105 students from kindergarten to Grade 12 fill the cinderblock structure tucked near the edge of the community, an hour’s drive southeast of Regina. “If you don’t have any friends, you’re just by yourself all the time and people will make fun of you.”
Peer pressure is the Almighty for teens, acknowledges Marilyn Petroski, a Regina therapist who has spent countless hours during her 29 professional years of counselling youth.
“It isn’t even the reality of the pressure, it’s the expectation,” she says. “The kids think, ‘if I don’t drink and smoke, they won’t include me.’ And so nobody ever tries to go out of that conformity because they don’t want to take the chance.”
Crystal Runge, a 14-year-old Grade 9 student at F.W. Johnson Collegiate in Regina, agrees. “I know people that, in elementary school were just awesome people …Êand in high school they smoke and they do drugs and they drink. Stuff like that is cool in high school, something to be proud of.”
Rather than risk isolation, “you kind of get sucked into the mess.”
To hear the kids tell it, finding anything from beer and hard liquor to marijuana is not a problem in either urban or rural areas. And that fuels more pressure to join the crowd.
“Everything is tough about being a teenager,” says Mike Shuba, a 14-year-old student at F.W. Johnson. “Just every little thing. Mostly peer pressure. You go and have a good time with your friends and they get drunk or something and they want you to join in.”
School realities help shape a different urban-rural outlook. While urban teens complain about student-teacher ratios – at Winnipeg’s Kelvin High School, latecomers to some classes have to sit on the floor – rural teens worry about lack of class choice and cuts to the education system.
“I don’t think (our education) is that good because we’re a small school,” says Karen Madigan, a no-nonsense 16-year-old from a farm near Ogema. “There are some classes that you do need, like industrial arts. We used to have it but everything just gets cut.”
Robert Cowie, principal at Nanton’s J.T. Foster School, concedes rural schools have big worries about funding cuts. Enrolment at his school is falling, and funds are tied to student population. But he’s quick to point out the advantage he thinks rural schools can give students.
“We have time for individual attention, for kids to ask questions. It’s a totally different environment. For many kids in larger classrooms, going to school is the social event of the day.”
In Regina, F.W. Johnson principal Russ Marchuk acknowledges that low pupil-teacher ratios are critical to a student’s chance to learn. With 583 students and a student-teacher ratio of 23 to one, Johnson is one of Regina’s smaller high schools. Still, core curriculum classes such as English have enrolments as high as 32 students in one class.
In Nanton, eight students take Grade 12 chemistry.
But Marchuk says the urban school’s strength lies in its ability to offer the extras – classes like art and band – that schools such as Arborg Collegiate in Manitoba’s Interlake region north of Winnipeg do not.
“It’s fine to cut those out if they’re planning to go on to university and won’t need them,” Marchuk says, “but if they’re planning to go on to an art school after they get out, then those kids are really going to be missing something.”
It leads some rural teens to think their schooling is inferior, that they’re not being as well-equipped as their urban cousins for life after school.
“It’s not true,” insists Cowie. “It’s hard to communicate that to kids when they’re 17, 18 years old but the message is always very clear. ‘You can compete. Those people do not have anything over you. If anything, you might have an advantage.’ But kids themselves don’t always perceive it that way.”
It appears that many rural teens have bought into the view that cities are better.
Paul Attallah, associate director at Carleton University’s School of Journalism in Ottawa, speculates media play a role in discouraging youth from wanting to stay in rural areas. He says part of that is a lack of comprehensive agricultural reporting.
“How many representations of rural life are there on television?” Attallah asks.
Another is the negative and sometimes false image of farming fed to both urban and rural teens on mainstream television shows.
“Farming is not perceived as cool and attractive. Media (coverage) is partly responsible for that.”
Still, despite the bad image that causes some rural teens to eye distant cities, there are some who want to stay right where they are.
One of those is John Gale, 15, who lives on a ranch near Cremona, Alta. Gale attends high school in Cochrane, Alta., a stone’s throw from Calgary’s northwestern perimeter.
His cheeks redden furiously and his green eyes dart away as he softly says that even Cochrane, population around 10,000, doesn’t hold much appeal for him.
“There’s too many people in town.”
He wants to work with horses as a farrier when he’s done school. “I’ve lived here most of my life, and I want to stay here.”
Greg Dawson, a gregarious 14-year-old who lives on a cattle ranch near Nanton, is another committed country boy.
“I don’t like the city too much. It’s too crowded, it’s noisy. You can escape from the noise out here and then travel there and do stuff.”
Living in a relatively crime-free environment is a definite asset rural teens are quick to point out.
“It’s much safer here than in the cities,” says Nadine Sigvaldason, a 16-year-old at Arborg Collegiate. “You can send your kids out trick or treating and it’s safe.”
Adds Jennifer Blandford, a Grade 11 classmate:”There was a bike left outside the Co-op in, like, May, and it’s still there.”
That feeling of security is something many urban teens lack.
“My bike got stolen,” complains Jenna-Marie Rakai, a Grade 9 student at F.W. Johnson. “I’d just got it for Christmas, and within a week it was gone. I had locked it to my fence and everything, and it was stolen.”
In Winnipeg, says Moskal, “the big threat is from rich kids who get a minivan and six other people and then they drive around looking for someone to beat up. Small towns are probably safer.”
The flip side, for some disenchanted rural teens, is boredom, isolation and gossip.
“I think we lead a very sheltered life in small towns,” says Ogema teen Lindsay Bacon, 16. “We don’t get to interact with other cultures and that’s something you’re going to need when you get out.”
If there isn’t interaction with other cultures, there is with local gossips.
“Everyone finds out about what you’re doing. And if they don’t have anything to talk about, they make things up,” says Arborg student Stephanie Eyolfson, 16.
Kelvin High School students Jenalyn delos Santos, 15, and 14-year-old Sarah Hauch disagree over whether it is more boring for teens to live in the city or country.
“If there’s not much to do here (in Winnipeg), what are you going to do on a farm?” asks delos Santos.
“But Winnipeg doesn’t have a lot to offer for kids under 18, either,” counters Hauch. “You could go to the ‘Y’ but that costs money. Or you could go to the movies, but that costs $8.50. There’s no dances. Kelvin has three dances a year. Whoopee.”
Despite their disagreement over whether cities or towns are the best places to be, in the end rural and urban teens seem united by a strong distaste for adults and authority.
“It really bugs me when adults stereotype teenagers because of what they see in the malls or on the street or on TV,” says Julie Boychuk, a bubbly 16-year-old from Arborg.
“Most teenagers I know are pretty normal. My friends, well, most of them anyway, don’t do drugs and they don’t drink very much. They mind their own business and they stay out of trouble.”
In Regina, Crystal Runge echoes the sentiment: “I think I’m pretty good most of the time but I guess people see what they want to see.”
