Final Essay for Commonwealth.

What advice would you give to a family living with teenagers?

I believe that there is almost a teenager in each family. Therefore, understanding a teenager and their thoughts and actions would be very important to a family. Without it, a family would have various difficulty to communicate with there teenager(s).

There are, in fact, countless advices that could assist the family with interacting with their kids. However, I shall pick several points with my personal feelings and comments in between.

As the small kids grow up into teenagers, rises in family conflicts would occur. Though the amount of conflicts differs from each family to another, but I feel that it is mainly due to the constantly changing characteristics in them. Parents should try to adjusts to these changes and not treat their kids like a small child anymore, otherwise the teenager would feel very awkward. Teenagers are in a time of challenge, whereby they faces multiple situations, like peer pressure, CCAs and pressure from studies. Hence, parents should be more giving towards their child to release their stress.
To me, as a teenager, I feel that parents should start spending more time with their kids even from young. In this fast moving and modern society, parents are always working day in, day out. However, no matter how busy and tired the parents are, they should always always try to extract precious time from their work to give a call to their kids, or have a short conversation with us before sleeping. Through this way, we will not feel neglected by our parents.

Parents could secretly observe their behaviour, for example, when they are on the Internet, on the phone or even their mood. Through these methods, parents can roughly guess what type of friends their kids are hanging out with. If they realise that their children are socialising with bad company, they could put an early stop to it before their kids start learning bad habits like smoking. Explaining reasons about hanging with bad company are very crucial, otherwise, the teenager would misinterpret your goodwill, assuming that you are very strict.

Teenagers like me often faces overwhelming load of homework and peer pressure, and we usually do not have anyone to talk to. This is because we fear getting chided by our parents after we speak to them over a small issue. Parents need to listen to their child’s voices, and connect more with them. Parents should try to put their feet into their shoes, and provide them with sound advices, and not just chiding them for being immature.

Another way of interacting with your children is to associate the games that they play with their daily lives. For example, if your child plays Maplestory, and if he buys A-Cash, a form of money in Maplestory, you could advice him/her to think carefully before purchasing anything, and teach him/her how to bargain with prices of items from other players. In their later part of life, they will eventually learn the true importance of money.

I feel that parents should be more flexible and entrust responsibility to their kids, for example, giving them a handphone, not setting a curfew and not restricting them to how many hours of computer usage. Otherwise, their teenager would rebel against these ground rules. Another thing that we teenagers do not like is calling us up every few hours just to find out where we are. We need more privacy and freedom to eventually become independent. Sometimes, teenagers go home late without early notices, but this may be due to problems with friends, teachers or homework, and they need to chill out at malls or at a friend’s house. Reaching home later and seeing a furious and angry parent would only worsen the condition. Parents should look out for such situations, and consult them to find out whether there is any problem with their school life.

Majority of the teenagers out there put their social life before their studies. They need to find social acceptance to become more confident. Thus, parents please do not be alarmed when you find out that your kid is spending lesser time on their studies. They should not apply too much pressure on their children about their results. When one teenager fails a test, he/she already feel very sad and discouraged over their failure. Harping on their children about it would make things worse. Some teenagers like me are not restricted by such boundary, and if I scores badly in a test, my parent would instead encourage me to work harder next time. Some parents have very high expectations would only create unneeded stress on their children, making them lose confidence every test that they attend. If the teenager feels that he/she cannot confide and communicate with their parents, the connection would slowly break down, causing the teenager to be extremely quiet at home but very lively when on the phone with their friends.

So, to all the parents out there, hope you all would be much more understanding after these advices and opinions that I have written above.