Lets Talk...

Let’s Talk…..

Something today provoked my desire to start blogging my experiences with people, mainly young people, teens, troubled teens.  I work as an alternative education instructor.  My true profession and passion is Behaviour.  Each day I am faced with listening to real struggles and challenges that I could not have imagined as a young person.  I interact with teenage parents, students getting abortions, students living with influences of drugs all around them, students who have lost track of their parents, students in foster homes, students who have been homeless and addicted.  I notice different trends and patterns with the students I work alongside each day and I wonder, is this behaviour true for most social groups or just the lower economic group?  The biggest barrier I have observed is communication.  “What’s wrong?” “Nothing” “OK.”  If your teen replies to this question in this way, do you leave it simply at that?  Or would you pry a little further?  I am feeling as though teens don’t talk, and parents, teachers, elders, (we) don’t make them.  Perhaps it’s a case of “No news is good news.”

Let’s look at a middle-upper class family.  Parents are working, may not return home from work until well into the evening.  Perhaps their kid(s) have already fed themselves dinner, or perhaps there is hired help to do this.  The parents get home in time to hop in the car and drive to piano, sports, etc.  They arrive home and go to bed.  Parents are exhausted and only think of getting to bed to do it all again tomorrow. 

As a lower socio-economic family, the children may be home alone, they may have parents who are working any hours they can find, and perhaps this is a group living environment, such as a fostered home.  They may have to work anything they can because if they don’t the next meal may be difficult to find.  Perhaps the kids are off hanging with friends.  Maybe this is a single parent family and so time becomes cut in half compared to a two-parented family.  

**  Note:  I understand problems between social classes overlap.  I am simply trying to identify a few scenarios, not meant to be interpreted as stigmatizing or discriminating.

As I think more about this I begin to understand.  TIME.  Time in the present day seems to be of the essence.  Time is not free, do we need to buy time from people and do parents have to buy time from their teens?  Have we been inclined to be so caught up in our own personal lives due to societal changes, employment and additional activities and opportunities that we have minimized the time we have with our own families, or others in our lives.  Rich or poor, people no longer value the face-to-face time with our own families that live under the same roof.  The consequence of this is that EVERYONE is always too busy to talk. 

Additionally, fear plays a significant role in not knowing or engaging deeply into conversation with our younger counterparts.  Teachers don’t want to feel as though they are crossing boundaries, boundaries past their acedemic responsibility.  Parents fear that if they are not focused and dedicated to their job they may lose it, which turns into a belief that perhaps they won’t be able to support their family members.  Times are tough, no one wants to be without employment.  However, this does not have to be the result.  Parents always will have the time, and teens will remember when they are older, the time their parents took to just talk.  Adolescent years are not easy, but they are even more difficult without guidance, boundaries, and especially communication.  We all have the time, the truth is, and we aren’t making time.

In a book I recently read, The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge, M.D., described various stories of how plasticity of the brain is controlled primarily by the “Use it, or lose it,” rule.  Meaning, the behaviours we are constantly performing are easily performed because we continue to practice, or rehearse them.  The less we practice learned behaviours, such as social skills and communication behaviours, the more difficult it becomes to efficiently perform them.  As human’s we build our personal repertoires of behaviours to serve our endless amounts of functions.  Without having the ability to retrieve behaviours of communicating and socializing out of our repertoires easily, other behaviours that are easy to grab will be used instead, which could end up with less than desirable results.  If parents can simply continue to allow their children to talk and communicate, they can prevent these behaviours from getting lost, out of their repertoires.

Parents have the sole responsibility of protecting, educating, and listening to their children, among other things.  Parents have the right to question and investigate. In a world of text messaging, Facebook, and instant messaging, parents have a greater responsibility of keeping up with events in their child’s life.  Things can be kept secret and things can go on undetected.  I hope parents and teachers can recognize what these modes of communication are doing to our ‘Y’ generation.  Talk, question, listen, and make time. This needs to change.  Youth should not go through their teenage years keeping things from their parents, parents need to take a stand, make time, simple as that.  Teachers need not be afraid of getting too involved, find what is causing persistent behaviours and discover communication, support a student; they may have no other outlet of communication in times when they need guidance.