Being a rebellious teenager isn’t like it used to be in the old days.
Sure, the defiant attitude and rule-breaking are still there, but so are smartphones, which can instantly capture anything they’re up to.
So, when four 9th-grader students from William Allen High School surrounded an elderly man, of course their actions were caught on camera!
Ask any parent of a teenager, and they’ll tell you that the rule-breaking, boundary-pushing behavior doesn’t end just because a kid survives the toddler years. It just goes into hibernation until adolescence, when it emerges in new and sometimes baffling ways.
Rebellion is supposed to be a hallmark of adolescence, yet sometimes it manifests in ways that are so downright baffling, they can make anyone ask – “what is wrong with this kid?!”
Or in this case….what’s totally RIGHT with them!
The city of Allentown, Pennsylvania is famous for hiding the Liberty Bell from the British during the American Revolutionary War.
So of course, it’s only natural that the town also squirreled away something else from our prying eyes: four teenagers on a mission to do good things.
“A lady comes to us and she is like ‘can you watch that man over there,’ and we see the man in a distance,” said Makayla Ward of Allentown.
Not only did the teens keep an eye on him, but they went over to offer assistance.
After a stranger asked them for help, Jose Cerda, Lashante Smith, Makayla Ward, and another unidentified classmate didn’t hesitate to jump into action.
In a now-viral video, an elderly man can be seen walking at a steady clip, but then he starts to lose his balance.
“We saw him walking at a steady pace for a second and then he looked like he was staggering a little bit. He was holding on to things,” Jose Cerda said.
Lashante Smith told WFMZ-TV that he and his friends asked the man if he needed any assistance.
“We went up to him, asked him did he need help. He said yeah.”
While the teens were busy helping the elderly man down the street, a passerby filmed their heartwarming gesture of goodwill.
Sensing that he needed more help than they could offer, the teens eventually asked the man to sit down while they waited for an ambulance to arrive.
The foursome never expected that a video of them helping another human being would go viral. Nor did they expect it to be viewed thousands of times on Facebook! After all, they were just being good people.
“I don’t think this was going to be such a big deal, we just did what anyone should do,” Cerda said.
However, school administrators think it’s a big deal because it’s showing everyone how the face of the Allentown community is changing for the better.
“It makes me proud, it makes the community proud. That’s the way to lift people up, that’s what we are all about,” said William Allen High School Principal Shannon Mayfield.
Although no one knows the identity of the elderly man that was helped, he did call them afterward to say thank you.
The good news is, these teens are likely to continue doing these wonderful deeds in the future.
One study reported by the BBC indicated that:
“…long-term studies show that the traits that appear in our teenage years are predictive of a wide range of outcomes in life.”
In other words, the personalities that are shaped during adolescence can be very predictive of a teen’s future success in life. And these four students have already proved that they’re not bad actors, but good ones!
The students hope that their actions will inspire others to do the same for anyone in need.
Check out the video below to see why this good deed is changing opinions about what it means to a rebelliously dependable teen.
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