by postbox74

Parenteen

The kids who need the most love will ask for it in the most unloving way

– Russell Barkley

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This will be the last blog post for this month from Epiphany. This blog post is special as it is interrelated to the first blog post that talked about depression. Very often, we find people facing depression and we often mistake it to be a weakness. Very often, people also mistake it to be something innate. It is true that the basic support system starts from family. It is from one’s family that one learns values and gets the biggest source of care and support. But unfortunately, it is the same parents who are supposed to be the greatest source of strength and inspiration for their kids, pull them down. Many of the behavioral changes in kids are not given much importance by their parents, which often lead to serious issues like depression, suicide, etc.

 

Kids feel ostracized when their parents scold them publicly, pull them down in front of their friends, do not encourage them, do not appreciate them, etc. These are signs of poor parenting. It has been noted that some kids are reluctant to share their thoughts with their parents and that they instead share it with their friends because they do not find their parents trustworthy or maybe because they have a gut feeling that the parents would not understand.

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Photo from: goodmenproject.com

It is a family that is the basic structure of a society. Parents need to be friendlier with their kids and make them feel that they are important and worthy. Kids must feel that parents would be there to hold them within their arms when everything else seems to be failing, they must feel protected and cared for rather than feeling scared and dejected. Let parents keep their busy schedules aside for a while and spent quality time with their kids and be able to understand what their kid is going through because at the end of the day that’s what matters the most.

On talking about this issue with some teens, it was discovered that the teens were either friendly with their parents or too cut off from them. These extremes were discovered from the aforementioned interview. The usual response of the teens who are friendly with their parents was like “They’re very supportive. They correct me if I’m wrong, but they do understand when I’m going through a tough time”. On the other hand, these kinds of responses were contradicted by the teens who are not very close with their parents, who stated that “I willingly went to my parents to talk about the tough time that I was going through, but they just trivialized my situation and did not even want to hear about it! They didn’t realize that, trivial as it may seem to them, it was a very big deal for me.”

Photo by: Pexels

 

These responses bring to light the fact that parents are needed the most by their kids when they are in their teenage years, an important and vulnerable phase of life. A teenage is a transitioning phase from childhood to adulthood. Not just hormones but the outlook of the world changes in just a matter of years. These are the years when they are the most vulnerable. Even if they take a single wrong step, they fall into the wrong path. They need to be guided through everything. But that doesn’t mean that they need to helicoptered or policed. They need emotional support more than any other form of support in these years because emotions become more complex and confusing in this age. They get driven with emotions. But sometimes those same emotions can do harm instead of good. So, in short, they need every kind of support possible in this phase. All they want and need is just a friend, whom they can trust and confide in and from whom they can get guidance, acceptance and love.

30 thoughts on “Parenteen”

  2. So true. Wish every parent would read this with an open mind. I often find people of my age trying so hard to be honest with their parents about their feelings only to be left crying on their friends’ shoulders whispering “They don’t understand”. People are very much engaged in building the right path for their children that they pay no heed to walk it with them.

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    2. Yeah, well said. Good one!
      As it is said early in the blog, if the values and Morales are good at home or instilled by parents, neither the parent have to pamper the kids nor the kids would get depressed when pointing wrong irrespective of sorrounding. It’s perception!

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  7. I so agree! All too often parents see their children behaving “badly”, or expressing anger, tantrums etc, and their only thought is how to discipline their child effectively. It seems to fail to reach so many parents’ minds that there are feeling/emotions/worries behind such behaviour, and there will likely be a root cause of the distress their child is feeling. How must it feel to experience such distress at such a young age, before they have emotionally developed, or are able to accurately verbalise their feelings? How much worse must they feel when they are then publicly disciplined as well? Don’t get me wrong, children of course must learn boundaries, respect etc, but parents also must take the time to understand their childrens’ behaviour so they can also support and nurture them. So well written!

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  8. Without love and compassion all parents are as empty as a vessel. Children add colours and life in the lives of children. But the modern times have their problems : parents very busy and children very alone. The result is deprived children; always helpless, struggling alone to keep their presence felt. It is time to think and show the feeling for ur children’s and for children it is time to be responsible otherwise we will lose both children as well as parents

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  10. Well written. I love your blog. You can say that I’m a kind of person who brought underwent changes all alone since class 6. I hope no other person goes through that. I can relate with this blog. Thank you for writing it. I’m glad I found some medium to vent it out. And it’s thru you guys. So thank you for writing this blog 🙂

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  12. This is so true…. But it seems parents can’t do the alternative either because adolescents seem to take that as a false sense of ascent to do whatever they want. This might make them end up in a bad place when in all reality the parents only wanted to be friends.

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