Many parents have concerns regarding their teenager’s educational and career progress.  What is important in the voicing of these concerns is to ensure that your talk with and not to or at your son or daughter.  Talking to teenagers is the unwise act of giving unsolicited advice.  Even when young people ask for advice, it is best to talk about what you would do yourself in the situation present and encourage the teenager to see how what you are saying ‘fits’ for him or her.  Young people are best helped when they are supported to come to their own social, educational and career choices.  Interestingly, when they do they are more motivated to follow through on their own decisions.

An interesting study on the benefits of marriage was carried out on more than one thousand marriages over a twenty year period.  The research was done by Professor Andrew Clark of the Paris School of Economics and he was looking at a life satisfaction score that he got the individual partners to rate at different times over the twenty years.  The results have enabled him to examine whether or not the seven year itch is a reality or whether dissatisfaction occurs earlier or later than that.

Professor Clark reported that ‘the size of the effects seemed more dramatic for women in that their happiness levels climbed more steadily and to a higher level than men, but then declined more sharply and to a lower level than those of men’.

Two horrific events have dominated the media – the Austrian dungeon of horrors of the Austrian Josel Fritzel and the familicide in Waterford.  What struck me about much of the media coverage was the consistent response of commentators not being able to understand how any human being could perpetrate such violations on spouse or children or adult daughter.  This pessimism serves only to perpetrate the possibilities of such tragic events re-occurring.  The suggestion that Josel Fritzel is ‘insane’ is not helpful because mental illness labels serve to distract from reality.

I know of no infant that emerges from the womb wanting to terrorise, violate, who has a gun in hand or a hypodermic needle to put self into oblivion or with a blade to cut self with! 

Ten years ago an American author, Patricia Hersch, in her book, A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence, stated that for teenagers ‘the fabric of growing up has been altered.’  She believes that today’s young people have been left to their own devices by a preoccupied, self-involved and ‘hands off’ generation of parents.  Adolescents, she writes, have been forced to work out their own system of ethics, morals and values, relying on each other for advice on such serious topics as abuse, dysfunctional parents, drugs and sex.  There are reasons to believe that in Ireland today some adolescents are faced with this situation, not because parents don’t care, but because they themselves are confused and uncertain about what to believe in and what is now a complex and pluralist Ireland.  My own belief is that unless parents are helped around their confusions, then it will not be possible to resolve the troubles of adolescents.

‘It is only human’ is a phrase that I frequently come upon either as an explanation for or in a verbal response to expressed anger, loss of temper, irritability, failure and forgetfulness.  It is the adverb ‘only’ that affects me in that I perceive it as a diminishment of what it means to be ‘truly’ human.  Somehow, too, the ‘only’ human becomes a clever way to reduce the weight and impact of another’s particular actions, especially those that create an unsafe situation for another person – adult or child – to be in our company.  Furthermore, the ‘only human’ response suggests that such threatening actions are ‘beyond our control’ and absolves us of having to reflect on and resolve the causes and intentions of these responses.