Contemporary Issues Facing Adolescents

Description

One of the contemporary issues facing adolescents today is high parental expectation. Often times parents live their dream through their children, and this is when the pressure builds up. Expecting the adolescent to excel in academics, get good grades, be the child of their expectations, well behaved, responsible for themselves and sometimes for their younger siblings and bring in accolades from extracurricular activities. I believe this is enough pressure on the part of the child. The child’s failure to meet these expectations creates anger and frustration and results in abuse. Or the abuse is seen as normal discipline designed to create obedience or to mold the child to the parent’s expectations (Gardner-Neblett& Cooper, 2016).

External stressors that are associated with a child passing through high parental expectation are aggressive behavior, and substance abuse. Parent must support their child’s aspirations for college education as what they need is the encouragement to do well. Nutrition and exercise can help them get the strength and endurance they need to get through the hectic high school period. When parents are firm but warm, children tend to comply with their requests. Parents who discipline with harshness and impatience tend to have children who resist and rebel. Because misbehavior is stressful for parents, they may increase their use of punishment, leading to more unruliness in the child(Fernandes &, 2018).

Aggression occur when the interests between the parents and their adolescent children are in conflict. Aggressive behavior is a hostile or violent behavior or attitudes toward another; readiness to attack or confront. Events that can lead to aggression are frustration, disappointment, and victimization. Aggressive behavior of a child can lead to his or her dropping out of school. Assessment strategies to screen for aggression include admission screening which is to assess risk for violence (intent, plan, means). Identify risk factorswhich involve single best predictor, and past history of violence.