It is amazing how fast things can change; how pure innocence can turn to arrogance and adventuresome. It seems up until your first year in high school, you feel safe from anything. You are preoccupied with life as how you knew it from the start, when in school you’re intrigued to hear rumors in junior high, they're usually about who likes who, and who broke up with who. It just seems so naive. But when you stepped into high school, it becomes an entirely different ballgame. Somehow you seem to have been stripped of all your innocence. Suddenly you become vulnerable to the evils that you knew nothing about before. It seems the only thing people talk about is either sex or drug use. We all know of so many personalities who have so much potential to do great things in life, but threw it all away when they started to use drugs. This is the daunting scenario that we have today. We are aware of it, the government is aware of it, law enforcers are aware of it but still the nagging problem persists and threatens the fragile future of our youth today. Numbers don’t lie. Nearly half of all high school seniors in America have experimented with illegal drugs and about three quarters have tried alcohol. A study conducted on the drug use prevalence among high school seniors in the US revealed the following: 41.8% have tried marijuana and at least 5% uses it everyday; 7.8% have used cocaine; 1.5% have tried heroin; 72.2% have used alcohol and 3.1% take alcohol daily; 6.5% have tried ecstasy; 8.4% have tried using hallucinogens (LSD, Magic Mushrooms, Peyote); and at least 15.4% have reported having used prescription drugs (Vicodin, OxyContin etc.) to get high. These are alarming statistics but equally disturbing is how easily high school students can get hold of these prohibited drugs. The dilemma that we have today is worse than what our parents had to deal with; and at the rate things are going it is quite likely that by the time you have kids, the situation will be ten times worse than what it is today. The problem should be addressed now with more stringent measures and from different fronts. It should be a collective and conscious effort from the government, school administrations and more importantly the parents. Parents should be educated about the dangers facing their teens today because they are for real and are likely to stay if nothing is done to stem the problem. The government should make laws with much more teeth in them so as to deter drug dealers and manufacturers who are selling these substances like pancakes. Schools must have more effective screening and monitoring systems to keep drugs away from their vicinity and thus give their students a good shot for a productive college life. Illicit drugs seem to fall in and out of favor with experimental youths. But one thing is constant, more and more teens are experimenting with it. The perils are great and more threatening than ever, but studies consistently show that teens whose parents talk to them about drugs are at a much lower risk to experiment.
August 26, 2009
December 12, 2008
Be there when your child needs you
Once you have confirmed that your child is a troubled teen, what is the next step you should take? It is important to accept the fact that you might not be able to help your child without professional help.
Try considering the following measures:
1. Consult your teenager’s doctor –The first measure is to get a physical check up done in order to detect if there are any physical problems connected to health. Get an appointment with the doctor immediately, without delay. Hormonal changes in the body may be the main reason for all problems. Thus consulting the doctor is utmost important.
2. Consult the guidance counselor at school – Though she might not be in a position to provide the child a one-on-one counseling service, she can be of great help by telling you about the attitude and the troubling behavior of the child that the teachers and the other staff members might have taken note of. This can be of great help in finding out the child’s moods and behavior when away from home.
3. Consult a professional counselor and look for proper counseling-If you don’t know whom to approach and whom to contact, consult your pediatrician or your school’s counselor to help in contacting and providing names of recommended counselors and psychiatrists.
4. Treatment and curing centers – The counselor, therapist or psychiatrist that you may consult may feel that your teenager is too troubled and her behavior is too troubling to treat as an outpatient. In such a situation you will have to commit your teen in a treatment center for a time period suggested by the doctors and consultants in the centre.
5. Communicate – Communicating with your child may be very difficult at this phase of their life, you need to make an intensive and determined effort to keep the lines of communication open as much as possible. This will help them to converse without hesitation. You should encourage more time to be spending with family. Go out with them. Give them your time. Show that you care. Show them that you are there beside them to love and support them. Encourage them to invite their friends for lunch or dinner. Search for new hobbies that you and your child can enjoy together.
Professional help and good communication can help your teen in this phase of life. Being a parent, you need to understand your child and give them all the love, care and support.
December 8, 2008
The distressing signs that calls for help
Recurrent depression, cribbing, lamenting
Adolescents might illustrate their invasive grief by dressing up in black outfits, scripting poems with gloomy messages and themes, or having an obsession with tunes which has sad themes. They possibly will sob for no obvious cause.
Despair
Young adults possibly will feel that there is no meaning to existence and it’s not worth living or important to sustain their looks or cleanliness. They might suppose so as to an unhelpful situation will by no means alter and live cynical concerning their outlook in life and future.
Less attention in favorite past times and hobbies:
Adolescents may turn out to be indifferent and loose interest in partying, clubs, games, and additional past times they once happened to enjoy. Nothing seems to interest a troubled teenager.
Constant dullness
Lack of inspiration, enthusiasm and less liveliness is noticed by irregular attendance in school. The child becomes very dull and depressed.
Communal separation, introvert
Teenagers may shun family and friends. Teens who loved spending time with friends will stay in isolation. Teenagers may not share their feelings with anyone thinking that no one cares about them and they are all alone in the world. This will further add to their worries leading to depression.
Low self-worth
Teens may feel like they are failures in life and this will have a negative impact on their self esteem and self worth.
Intense fear of failure
Thinking that they are not worth anything in life and they are failures will lead to further depression.
Amplified bad temper, annoyance, or aggression
Unhappy adolescents are often bad-tempered, leading to misbehaving with family.
Complexity with relations
Teenagers may suddenly stop calling friends and relatives. Stay in isolation.
Recurrent complaints of body pain and nervousness
Teenagers may complain of body pain, menstrual problems and bouts of nervousness leading to depression.
Less absorption
Teenagers may have a problem in concentrating in studies, following a television program or following a conversation.
Efforts of running away from home
Running away is a major sign of depression and it is a cry for assistance.
Consuming alcohol and drugs
Depressed teens will consume drugs and alcohol to feel better.
Self-Destruction
Adolescents who have complexity in discussing about their thoughts possibly will demonstrate their disturbing anxiety, bodily distress, arousing pain, and low self-worth with self-destructible behavior.
November 28, 2008
Where does parenting go wrong in the downtrodden section of the society?
Being a parent of a teenager is no easy task. Things go awry as you end up screwed with wrong results in your hand. You are left perplexed because you always intended to do the right thing!
Well, parenting teens is not that compound a task. An obvious and commonsensical approach will solve your problem. It has been observed that the section of the society that is lesser privileged adopts the authoritarian style. They tend to demand rather than compromise. They seldom believe in open or extensive communication and their display of affection is consciously kept to the minimum. It is basically a clear reflection of the interpersonal realities that get ingrained in the attitude of the parents. When they deal with their children, they apprehend them first as subordinates and then the actual relationship. The resultant behavior reflects the style of a social worker, a shift supervisor or a land lord. This parenting style is difficult to change since a shift in the environment is improbable.
While parenting teens, this controlling environment directs the children towards seeking reliance from others. As the adolescent mind naturally begins to hate this intrusive authority, striking a comfortable note with their parents does not happen to be much of a choice. They are in constant search of direction and limits on one hand and on the other they harbour this uncontrollable desire to break the shackles of limitations.
This leads to rebellion and external controlling factors get imposed on the tender minds. These controlling factors are in natural alignment with the respective temperament of the teenager. They can be gang leaders, drug dealers or sexual partners. This association provides them a sense of power that counters their parents’ authority. In such a situation, they naturally fail to develop their skills or attain positive self-direction.
Now what happens if the style of parenting teens happens to change radically? Well, then it becomes a dangerous proposition. This is because the change is a deviation from the parenting norm of the environment. When the authoritarian parents evolve as inconsistent ones, they create confusion of expectations. The teens are not able to assess the change logically and this resultant set of confused expectations enhances the already prevalent misbehavior.
This sudden shift towards the democratic focus on learning from natural consequences comes as a hard hitting on the adolescent mind. They fail to make well-informed decisions. The natural consequences that follow are substance abuse, teenage pregnancy and a rise in the drop-out rates.
But if the parenting teen style happens to be where the parents help the children to operate within the limitations of the society providing them with structure and example, the teens would be a lot relieved from self-judgment and the resulting chaos.
November 26, 2008
PARENTING TIPS TO IMPROVE VERBAL INTERACTION WITH KIDS
To assist parents increase the level, and improve the quality, of their verbal interactions with their children, here are a few suggestions.
• Keep a paper and a pencil handy and make notes of the things you hear your children talking about or expressing interest in. When you hear them discussing to their friends or to one another, make note of the things they spoke about. The topics they bring up on their own and spend time talking about provide you with the best clues available about what is of interest to them.
• Talk to your children in a very natural way. Make sure it doesn’t come across as a formal discussion.
• Don’t try to be too “hip” as you talk to children. Avoid the use of terms and language the kids use. Use terms that are most familiar to you and the most characteristic of you, but which the kids understand. Kids don’t like it when their parents try to talk like kids.
• Watch for signs that tell you you’ve talked long enough. Ordinarily, conversations with children about “just things” don’t usually last very long. For that matter, kids don’t typically spend very long talking with their friends about such things. They bounce around from topic to topic, and thing to thing, never spending much time on anything or going into much depth
• Keep the conversation dignified. Avoid gossip, profanity, off-color jokes, or turns-of-phrase that compromise your adult level of dignity and civility. Remain a cut above “just one of the guys.” Children want their parents to have class. They want their parents to be someone to look up to. The quality of your conversations with them can go a long way in establishing that image of you in your children’s eyes. An occasional, appropriate joke is a very good thing. While the family is gathered around the dinner table is a wonderful time to share a good joke and bring a little humor into the family.
• Avoid ethnic jokes or any kind of joke or story that puts another person or another people down or that evokes humor at the expense of someone else. Maintain your dignity as an adult by showing respect for other cultures. Children really appreciate that.
• Regarding jokes, appropriate, clean humor is a characteristic of low-risk families. In such families there is a lot of smiling, laughing and lots of happy times. Come to the dinner table every night with a couple of good jokes.
Children who learn good verbal skills are more likely to also have good social skills.