There are multiple difficulties in today’s world that our young generation is facing that makes it hard to develop their true potential. The teenage years of our life are the most important frame of time that shapes the road to healthy adulthood. The obstacles that we have in this period and the way we overcome them can play a decisive role in how well we’ll deal with all the challenges in the next years of our life.
The Current Challenges
In some of our previous posts, we talked about how important is to have the support and a good connection with our family. Today, with the always-changing economy and the world itself, we can find more and more families that are forced to take more than one job and automatically, this leads to spending less time with the loved ones. When parents cannot find the necessary time to spend with their kids because of working long hours or having more than one job, this leads to a lack of communication, and from there, they lose the strong connection that they need. It is harder to feel support when they don’t communicate and spend time with each other. When the young generation doesn’t get the necessary sustenance, this can bring up emotional problems that are hard to deal with later in life. It can also arise the desire to escape from reality. All this can create an unhealthy environment that can even lead to refusal to go out of home and tо missing willingness of being independent.
The Internet as a Threat
The online space had become an inseparable part of everyone’s daily routine. The unsupervised time that is spent online is also another big impediment that can lead to emotional problems. Kids and teenagers age 8 – 18 spend more than 7 hours a day looking at screens. It is recommended screen time to be limited to 2 – 3 hours a day. When parents don’t have the necessary time to supervise their children on how much time they spend on the internet, it is easier for kids not follow these recommendations. If children spend more and more time on the internet, many types of research have proven that this can lead to not only emotional but to social and mental problems. There is an interesting article that is reviewed by the KidsHealth Medical Experts that has some tips and a guideline that can help parents set some limits when it comes to screen time.
The Life at School
Another big problem that the young generation is facing daily is bullying. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), more than 20% of students in high schools are bullied, and more than 15% are cyberbullied. There are surveys confirmed by CDC, where 33% of students between 12 – 18 years of age were bullied at least once or twice per month, and middle school has the highest reported rate of bullying – 25%, at least once a week. There are so many consequences that bullying can provoke that are damaging in the long and short term. The bigger problem is that some of the reasons why bullying exists are because of the unsatisfied need for connection and support.
The right approach
If you stop for a second and think about the big picture, it is all one big circle. If your social status is different than most of the people around you, and your income is low, you will have to make everything possible to provide for your kids with the necessary resources. But to provide for your family means spending less time with them, which leads to problems in their development. So, for our kids to be happy and to have a healthy youth development, they need their parents more, but if this happens you will end up with lower income resources. The need of finding the balance between work and spending more time with our kids is undeniable. This can make such a big difference in the future development of our kids which is the main factor that will show how well the young generation will succeed in life.
Closing Words
In some way, there will always be some challenges that the young generation will have to deal with. The way that we help them overcome this situation will make a big difference in their life. It can have a positive impact and make them more confident, or it can have a negative effect and not help them at all. Even if you have the necessary time to spend with your kids and can give them the needed support, all those problems can still occur. The world is constantly evolving, and if we don’t evolve at the same pace, there could be a possibility where we won’t be able to deliver the support they need. Everybody wants the best for its kids in this world, and the hard job of finding the possibilities for healthy youth development lays on every parent’s shoulder.