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Parenting is a great place; the discussions are very useful and fascinating.

However I, as a 15 year old, feel a need of something a bit similar but different. I proposed a new site, Teen Life, which you can see here, and it's meant to help teens deal with various aspects of their lives by benefiting from other people's experience.

Question:

Do you think the proposed site is similar to Parenting? How can the two communities help each other?

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I can see the intention of a teen.SE site and it makes sense to me.

There are teen topics which would be served just as well on this site, it's just that you don't see them here because, frankly, we have way too few questions and an over-abundance of baby questions. That just shows how the site came to be, but it can grow to include a lot more -- teen topics, for instance. Getting input from relatively unbiased parents is probably also worth a lot to teens.

I imagine there are also teen topics that have practically no overlap with this parenting site, or might even be off-topic here. For these, a separate teen.SE would make sense.

The four examples currently in the teen proposal seem to be valid on parenting.SE though. Granted, it's going to be hard to convince teenagers that a site called parenting is a cool place to post tricky questions!

The question I can't readily answer is how much overlap these two sites would have. Overlap is a problem because it becomes a grey area where questions might not get the best possible treatment (or exposure) because some folks believe "the other site" would be the better venue. This grey area is difficult to manage, for moderators and no less for users.

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Let's play the upvoted game with what's currently there.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/52910/teen-life/52921#52921

  • Probably answerable on this site; while you might get a different perspective from people who are parents rather than teens, I think we could answer that valuably.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/52910/teen-life/52911#52911

  • We do have the tag, although as you can see from the existing questions, it approaches stuff more from "what can I do to protect my child", rather than how can I handle it personally. You'd probably get upvoted answers to a downvoted question on Parenting.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/52910/teen-life/52912#52912

  • We do deal with parent-child conversations, so this would totally be suitable.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/52910/teen-life/53128#53128

  • Probably no more suitable for this site than it would be for any other existing site.

I think when it comes to teen questions, we'd probably have initial teething troubles with the answers from the teen's perspective. The urge, given the site's mandate, would be to parent, rather than to view from the teen's perspective. Of course, an upsurge in teen questions could easily diversify the focus of the site and thus the types of answers you'd get, probably for the better.

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    I can't think of a single reason why adding more information from the perspective of a teen wouldn't be potentially very useful for parents.
    – user420
    Jun 5, 2013 at 12:33
  • I agree. What I mean is, the current crop of users on the site are mostly parents. Therefore, we're likely to get more answers from the parent's perspective, and those kind of answers will resonate with the existing community more and thus get voted up. (This isn't necessarily true, but it's something for the community to be aware of when answering/voting on these kinds of questions)
    – deworde
    Jun 5, 2013 at 13:30
  • As an example, I do feel like you'd get people voting down or to close "how can I deal with a bully", but within the question there'd be good quality upvoted answers.
    – deworde
    Jun 5, 2013 at 13:49

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