For teenagers, good friends can be like a personal support group. Friends and friendships give teenagers:. Teenagers might be focused on their friends, but they still need your help and support to build and maintain positive and supportive friendships. Good parent-child relationships tend to lead to children having positive relationships with peers. So being warm and supportive, staying connected and actively listening to your child can help him develop friendship skills. Being a good role model is important too.
How Teens Today Are Different from Past Generations
Adolescence is the period of developmental transition between childhood and adulthood. It involves changes in personality, as well as in physical, intellectual and social development. During this time of change, teens are faced with many issues and decisions. The following addresses some of the key issues that can have an impact on a teen's social development. Self-esteem is how you feel about yourself. The development of a positive self-image and a healthy self-esteem is very important for making a successful transition from child to adult. Here are some suggestions for helping to encourage positive self-esteem in your teen:.
Every generation of teens is shaped by the social, political, and economic events of the day. She identifies their unique qualities by analyzing four nationally representative surveys of 11 million teens since the s. Those surveys, which have asked the same questions and some new ones of teens year after year, allow comparisons among Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and iGens at exactly the same ages. In addition to identifying cross-generational trends in these surveys, Twenge tests her inferences against her own follow-up surveys, interviews with teens, and findings from smaller experimental studies.
Advances in technology mean today's teens are facing issues that no previous generation has ever seen. While some issues are not exactly new, electronic media has changed or amplified some of the struggles young people face. For instance, teens today struggle more with their interpersonal relationships than any previous generation and a lot of this dysfunction can be linked to overuse of technology.