Читать книгу Yes, Please. Whatever!: How to get the best out of your teenagers - Penny Palmano - Страница 15

Accept it, teenagers have different priorities to us. They are suddenly not very organized, or good time-keepers, their room is a mess, school is boring. Two things prioritize adolescents’ minds: themselves and their friends.

‘All you ever think about is yourself!’ parents can be heard spitting at their teenagers. And to a point they’re right, but they may as well shout, ‘You’re going through adolescence!’ Teenagers do think about themselves, they do become more self-centred as they try and work out where they fit in, but messages are confusing, they live in a world that is constantly telling them to grow-up, but usually in a home where they are being treated like children. Society expects them to act in an adult way and yet nearly everything adult is illegal. They are very self-conscious of their changing shapes and voices, they feel insecure and the most important thing to them is fitting in with their friends. Above all, teenagers today need to feel they belong to a group. The group of friends they will be attracted to will be the group with the same interests in music, films, football, bands or whatever. And although they want to be individual they are very happy to conform to the code of dress or behaviour of their group of friends.

There are more pressures for this generation of teenagers than ever before: broken homes, drugs, academic achievement, alcohol and sex. And it is our generation that has inflicted this confused, pressurized attitude upon them.

With all this going on, they will naturally start to think more about themselves.

Today’s teenagers are blamed for being too materialistic and a generation of consumers, but to a point whose fault is that? When we were growing up we got presents on birthdays and at Christmas, but this generation of children seem to have something new every few weeks, whether it’s from parents who feel guilty at working long hours or who gave in too easily to their pleadings for a new DVD.