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Kids and Teens

The terms kids and teens are used to informally refer to children or young people. Kids and teens are very general terms to refer to people who are not yet adults. In some perspectives, kids and teens refer to the classification of people who are not yet expected to be economically productive by joining the workforce. However, the terms kids and teens are not interchangeable and may refer to different age ranges.

Kids are the more general and inclusive of these two terms. Kids refer to young individuals. Literally, they are young goats. But in humans, the word kids refers to any human not yet in the full of adulthood. Thus, those persons who are not yet of legal age or are not yet adult by legal standards can be called kids. Because of this very general definition, kids can refer to a newborn baby, toddlers, grade-schoolers, and even to teens.

But the term kids can also be relatively interpreted. Thus you will hear people not fully mature themselves calling other people younger than themselves as kids. You will also hear adults calling other adults kids when the latter are younger than them.

The term teens, on the other hand, is more specific. Teens is the shortened version of the word teenager. And teenager refers to a person whose numerical age ends in "teen". Thus, teens are people whose ages are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen.

Teens are also used interchangeably with adolescents though these two concepts are not exactly equal. From the stages of development perspective, adolescents are people who are in the transitional stage between childhood and adulthood. Since teens fall within the age range where the transition from childhood to adulthood occurs, teenagers are also called adolescents and vice versa.

In the adolescent stage, teens undergo several changes. These changes are biological, social as well as psychological. Biologically, teens go through the stage known as puberty. In this stage, the pituitary gland will release hormones that would change the hormonal balance in the body. The result would manifest in physical changes such as a deeper speaking voice for males and the development of mammary glands (bigger breasts) for females. Both sexes would also notice the growth of more body hair.

During the adolescent stage, teens are also more prone to demand more independence from parental control. The changes in their bodies may lead them to search for sexual encounters. Teens are also prone to have what is known as identity crisis where they try to search for their own unique personality. Ironically though, this is also the time of life when they are most under pressure to conform and to belong to a group of their peers. This is where the term peer pressure gains its meaning.

Knowing now what we do about the subtle differences in the terms kids and teens, it would not be wrong to call teens kids, but it would be quite wrong to suppose that all kids are teens.