Parenting Adolescents

In class on Thursday we talked about adolescents and how their behavior is different as they grow up. As an adolescent you are growing up and wanting to experience new things and experiement as well. Some things mentioned were Ego Strength and under that was the loyalty to friends and power or wanting to belong. Those are two major things that you do see a lot of especially now-a-days with kids just wanting their peers to like them or to be popular and some will do whatever it takes in order to be loyal and show their friends just how much they will do for them. It can be very scary raising an adolescent and knowing that that is the case and wondering what they might do just to please their peers or friends. Another was the desire for independence. Now this is a big thing as a teenager, wanting to do things on your own and find out what happens or this and that. I know as a teenager I wanted to independent when I wanted to be and when I was I didn' want my friends let alone my parents or siblings telling me what to do or how to act. That is one key thing when raising teens, you need to let them be independent, explore, make mistakes, live, and have fun. If you don't again it comes around to tuesdays class about how strong is to strong. The last thing we talked about was teen pregnancy. I do believe that teen pregnancy is on the rise and it can be prevented, with parenting, talking to your child, school programs, movies or pamplets on pregnancy to show teens what will happen with your life and how it will change, etc. The media is definetly a strong influence on sexuality. There are kids at the daycare I work at that know words to songs and see things on t.v. that they talk about that they shouldn't even know it or know what that means. I think that if media dosen't start to become more censored, then teens will start having more sex then just within the first year. Media is very appealing to teens, and what they see they think they have to have or do. I think that movies portray only sometimes the good of pregnancy. It seems to be more black, then black and white. I fear that if media and they way parents talk to their children about sex, etc. we will have a big problem in the future.