América Latina | Sueños, miedos y esperanzas de la adolescencia | UNICEF

Summary

The video presents adolescents reflecting on their dreams, fears, and hopes, as well as the conditions that shape their futures. Their comments address both personal concerns and wider challenges in their families, schools, and communities.

Main Ideas

• Fears and risks: Adolescents describe fearing failure and losing educational or career opportunities. Other concerns include unwanted pregnancy, discrimination, harassment, abuse, domestic violence, and insecurity. Some have grown used to hearing gunshots and ambulance sirens, and violence has disrupted at least one participant’s schooling.
• Discrimination and inequality: Participants describe being mistreated or excluded because of their appearance, ethnicity, or poverty. They emphasize that every young person should have the opportunity to express themselves and receive an education.
• Relationships and emotional wellbeing: Concerns include peer pressure, inadequate communication and sex education, and pressure to hide feelings. Participants also discuss resisting pressure and persevering toward their goals.
• Dreams for the future: Their ambitions include becoming an engineer, chef, dancer, preschool teacher, businessperson, or baker. They also hope to finish a degree, work, help their parents, start a family, and pursue new goals.
• Hopes for their communities and countries: Participants want safer, cleaner neighborhoods with access to drinking water and less violence. They also hope for greater equality, progress, and less corruption.
• Hope and determination: Despite the obstacles they identify, adolescents express faith in effort and hope as ways to pursue their goals.

Workshop Activity and Prompts

The workshop invites participants to identify problems and imagine their futures:

• Draw two silhouettes: one of a man and one of a woman.
• Write situations affecting adolescents on cards. Examples include peer pressure, discrimination, street violence, gang influence, sexually transmitted infections, suicide, and losing a parent.
• Identify community or relationship problems, including harassment, abuse, teenage pregnancy, poor communication, lack of sex education, and domestic violence.
• Write a phrase describing what they hope their lives will be like in 10 or 15 years.
• Write about their biggest dream, including alternative paths if their first choice does not work out.
• Discuss expectations about whether boys can express their feelings.
• Reflect on young people’s rights to speak up and access education.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Adolescent workshop participants share their fears, experiences, dreams, and views. No individual names are provided in the subtitles.
• A workshop facilitator gives instructions and asks questions to guide the activities and discussion.
• Music and applause are heard between and around the spoken segments.