Critical Analysis essay

Over the course of youth’s childhood, they will eventually make a remarkable change from an adolescent into an adult, resembling a caterpillar undergoing metamorphosis and emerging into a beautiful butterfly. For years there has been a debate between teenagers and adults dealing with the topic of when teens rightfully become mature and grown up. Henry G. Felsen addresses this subject through telling his own sixteen year old son his opinions and thoughts on this debate in ‘When Does a Boy Become a Man?’. The difference between a boy and a man is not in which one looks like, it is the actions and choices that a man makes which differentiates him from the boy he once was. Henry Felsen has done a commendable job in supporting this theory. He explains what the future holds for these teens that rush into adulthood with the wrong idea of what it is all about. There is a fable that Felsen uses to back up his theory on how a boy can look like a man but may not actually be a man. The fable tells a story of a donkey who covers himself in lions skin and is overjoyed when the lions do not take notice of him. He even feels as if he is truly a lion. “All went well until evening, when the lions began their customary evening roaring. The little donkey completely fooled by his own disguise, lifted his head and roared with them. What came out, of course, was a donkey’s bray. Whereupon the lions fell upon him and devoured him.” Adolescents have an image of what an adult is to them, which they try to replicate in ways such as smoking, cursing swearing, drinking and dressing provocatively. Teenage boys act masculine to be seen as a man, while girls dress inappropriately to look like a woman. To the adults in society, these adolescents look like donkeys foolishly walking around in lion’s skin. The images of adults that the youth copy are influenced by a minority of irresponsible adults such as famous celebrities with bad reputations because of their actions Felsen backs up this