POSITIVE PARENT-ADOLESCENT RELATIONSHIP

POSITIVE PARENT-ADOLESCENT RELATIONSHIP

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Each time one looks at or interacts with adolescents, one thing kept coming to one’s mind: “why is it that parents spend less time with their adolescent children than when they were younger?” One adolescent who confined in the researcher said thus, “Aunty, my mother does not care, she always scold thus “if you want to be useless all for  you; what I know is that nobody told me what to do when I was your age. Use your head and think maturely, you are no longer a child. . . . .” She doesn’t want to know your programme. As for Dad, forget him.” The expectations of adolescents and parents often seem violated as adolescents change dramatically during the course of puberty. Many parents appear to see with dismay their adolescent children changing from a compliant being into someone who is noncompliant, oppositional, and resistant to parental standards and directives. Consequently, they often clamp down and put more pressure on the adolescents to make them conform to parental standards. This negatively affects them emotionally, socially, morally and academically, thereby making them behave nonchalantly towards their academic pursuit. During early and middle childhood years, parents spent considerable time in care-giving, instruction, readings, talking, playing and helping out with their children’s assignment. One wonders why the drop in such relationship during adolescence period.