Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Parents or other adult relatives should make important decisions for their older (15 to 18 year-old) teenage children.
Use specific reasons and examples to support your opinion.
The statement, ‘Parents or other adult relatives should make important decisions for their older (15 to 18 year-old) teenage children’, implies that parents play an insignificant role in the lives of teenagers, and thus should be largely removed from the situation. I disagree with this statement.
Although it is true that a parent’s opinion does not necessarily carry as much weight in a teenager’s life as it once did, and that teenagers often lead far more independent lives than their parents did, this does not necessarily imply that parents should completely be removed from the situation. Teenagers are, after all, still children. Their immaturity and lack of experience makes them vulnerable, and it is vital for their parents to be around them at all times, especially during crucial periods such as adolescence. For instance, a 16 year-old girl might, without her mother’s guidance, become pregnant. She may then be pressured to have an abortion, and although the abortion may be legal, the psychological and emotional trauma that she experiences as a result of it will likely be lifelong. If, on the other hand, she was living with her parents, she would have the help and comfort of her parents as well as a sympathetic ear, and she might turn to them for support rather than seek it out elsewhere.
In addition, if her parents are financially unable to provide her with adequate support, she would likely be able to rely on them for help. She might be living a middle-class American life, but her parents have sufficient wealth that they can give her the financial support that she needs, and they could even pay for her to attend school and attend college. This is not to say that their financial assistance is the only help that she needs. Parents have experience and can provide guidance in dealing with peers, and may help her make better-informed decisions when interacting with them, both of which would be of significant benefit. At the same time, however, parents can be overbearing and inflexible, and teenagers should ultimately be left to make their own decisions, even if those decisions are ill-informed. In other words, a teenager’s maturity level should be taken into consideration when her parents make important decisions for her.
Unfortunately, many parents do not adjust their parenting styles as their children age, leading to parents being overbearing, and teenagers becoming dependent on their parents’ support. This dependence is exacerbated when parents do not set firm boundaries for their teenagers, and they allow their children to sleep over at friends’ houses even though they are not particularly close to those friends. This, of course, leads to teenagers having more friends than their parents, and the parents being unable to keep track of all of their children’s activities. Moreover, teenagers who grow up in a family with unrealistic expectations often become overworked and under-stimulated, and thus act out, sometimes violently, in an attempt to find an outlet. If their parents had set appropriate boundaries during adolescence, they would know that their children were acting wildly and that they needed to seek professional help, but, instead, they let their children continue to act out, only disciplining them long after the damage had been done, and this only made the situation worse.
Even if a parent is financially able to provide for and support his or her teenager, it is not always in a teenager’s best interests to stay living with his or her parents. As teenagers grow, they develop their own identity, and this identity often conflicts with their parents’ view of the world. For instance, a teenager might want to keep his or her bedroom door locked at night, despite his parents’ insistence that he open it. If this continues, the parents might begin to suspect that the teenager is sneaking out of the house, even though there is no evidence to support that notion. If, on the other hand, the teenager stays at home, his parents might suspect that he is up to something he should not be doing, such as smoking or drinking. Additionally, parents living in the same house as their son or their daughter may become too preoccupied with their own problems to pay close attention to the teenager, which could cause the teenager to get into trouble. The parents might then be blamed for the teenager’s behavior, and, even if their parents are not to blame for the teenager’s actions, the teenager may feel as though his parents no longer love him, which could make him or her want to run away.
The fact that a teenager is 15 to 18 years of age does not negate his or her need for parental guidance. Parents still have the responsibility to be good role models and to set boundaries for their teenagers, and this guidance is crucial for a teenager’s development.