Why your parents can also be your best buddies

Dear children,

Two weeks of school have passed and you would have had a great time catching up with friends, which is what you must all have missed while you were away on vacation. Let us admit it, no one misses studies, what everyone misses are friends. It is the idea of getting back to endless banter with friends and sharing the quirkiest thoughts with them that makes returning to school such a delightful experience. Your friends are your lifelines, energy boosters and above all, your most trusted confidants. When it comes to sharing life's smallest and biggest secrets or parting with emotions that you feel no one understands, it is friends, and not parents, whom most of you bet on. It is not difficult to see why.

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For starters, as teenagers, it is your natural disposition to gyrate towards your friends than your parents who in your view are often 'autocratic', trying to impose rules that you detest. This resistance is part of growing up. I have felt it; your parents have felt it and we have grown out of it too. Parents are not autocratic; they are by instinct overprotective, and that sometimes comes across as excessive policing. Give them the benefit of doubt.

Remember how, as younger children, you used to give a blow-by-blow account of every little incident in school? Slowly as you moved into your teens and you began to grapple with a host of physical and emotional changes you couldn't comprehend, that openness began to shrink, and doubts began to creep in.

Somewhere the world split into two unequal halves and you began to wonder if your parents would grasp the fears and insecurities that were haunting you and if they would lend you an ear and offer solace to your rankling thoughts. This apprehension coupled with the knowledge that your friends were travelling the same path and had stories similar to yours, might have made you decide that friends were more dependable than parents. The former, in your estimation, will not dismiss your concerns as frivolous nor will they chastise you for being what you are – edgy youngsters with loads of worries about every teeny thing under the sun.

These are perceptions: that your parents will disregard your feelings and will not pay heed to your anxieties; that their world is estranged from yours; that they were born to criticise and find fault and that your happiness is the least of their priorities. These are misconceptions that imperceptibly crawled under the blanket and snuggled up to you while you were growing up.

Your parents have been children too and have faced the trials of teenage, but in a different era. Their issues might have been less concerned with exams, expectations and gadget control, but they too were troubled, despite cooler climes, because turbulence is part of human life. As adults, they have problems that you cannot decipher with your inexperience, but with so many years behind them, they will have a notion of your travails. Give them a chance to know what is in your heart and on your mind.

Talking to parents is just not a mundane exercise of appraising them about what transpired in school. It is establishing a channel of communication to know and share mutual concerns and find better ways to reach amicable resolutions. Your parents are your bulwarks. Shed your inhibitions and repose faith in them by asking them, “Dad, mom, will you be my besties for life?” Try it, and you will know that they have been waiting to be an intimate and pally part of your world.

Keep glowing!

wknd@khaleejtimes.com