care

A four-panel SMBC comic. A teenage girl with curly reddish-brown hair asks her mother, 'Mom, how come adults don't take teenagers' problems seriously?' The mother, wearing round glasses and shown mostly in profile, delivers a long, dryly logical answer across the panels: she was once a teenager and now isn't, and concludes that because adults can't tell the difference between merely changing viewpoints and actually gaining wisdom, they assume their own understanding has improved, and therefore that their current problems are real and substantial while the teenager's are silly and ephemeral. In the final panel the teenager hopefully asks, 'So you DO care that my favorite band broke up?' The mother replies, 'I have tried. I have tried so hard, but no.' In the votey aftercomic, the teenager declares, 'I only like generic pop music from my youth!' and the mother stares back with a stricken, distressed expression, having just realized she has become the thing she was describing.