Sunday, December 16, 2001		Article

PAWAN, a lanky lad of 17, seems to be slipping. That’s what his parents, both doctors, have been noticing for the last few months.

Pawan, known never to miss a school assignment, is often skipping homework. And there has been a perceptible dip in his school grades. Once a voracious eater, he dines with slightly less enthusiasm. A neat kid, he’s grown somewhat sloppy about the upkeep of his room. He even doesn’t bathe as often as before or care that much about his daily grooming. There has also been a subtle change in the composition of his core group of friends — the new ones aren’t in the top rungs of the class, though not necessarily bad kids.

Mohan and Ritu are feeling uneasy. There is nothing alarming about the situation, but small signs of slippage keep on showing up. That he’s doing poorly in school seems to concern him less than his popularity with peers. Has Pawan taken to alcohol, or worse still, drugs? Or, is it just the company he has started keeping?(Unknown to parents, Pawan is sliding into all these.)

Direct queries from him draw a blank:he simply repeats there is nothing. At one time they thought, "Our son tells us everything". "My boy would never lie to me," insists Ritu.

Actually teenagers can tell prodigious, bold-faced lies to their parents. Most modern adolescents — and adolescence arrives younger these days — don’t feel the slightest guilt about lying because to them it’s simply a matter of getting what they want. Everybody does it anyway, they say in justification. So lying becomes an everyday tactic of self-preservation. Freed from the old-fashioned baggage of guilt or remorse, teenagers are able to spin the most intricate tales without as much as blinking.

Evidently, you can’t stop a teen from lying. But you can be smarter than a teenager thinks you are, to understand the deception. Teenagers, it seems develop a particular lying "style": fast talkers, slow talkers, confessors, pledgers, plotters. A good strategy is to pay close attention to a teenager’s explanations and rationalisations.You’ll probably begin to notice certain ways of talking, types of excuses, perhaps some mannerisms that alert you to a simmering deception. Some kids look down; others get wide-eyed. Some shuffle around a bit; others try to stare you down. Don’t let a teen steamroll you with fast talk or dazzle you with details. If the facts don’t make sense, demand more information.

Pawan’s parents would love to know more about his current involvements and activities. Even his friends when asked, stay clammed up. It seems, on Planet Youth there’s a conspiracy of silence, whereby kids manage to keep from parents or teachers just about everything they or their friends do. Teens zealously guard their privacy and their independence. They close ranks when it comes to adults, protecting each other against prying adults. Even older siblings will rarely share their information with their parents. In fact, researchers find that increasingly it’s the older brothers and sisters who are the first to introduce their siblings to some of the pleasures and damages, such as drug use or sexual experimentation.

With parents, particularly dual-career couples, spending increasing amounts of time away from home, children are spending more and more time away from home as well. As adults become increasingly individualistic, children become more egocentric, too. At worst, the latter care little about others’ feelings and believe that the world revolves around their needs.

Sure, teenagers have always set themselves apart, broken the rules, irritated grown-ups. But the modern day teenagers are a mystery to most parents — and parents’ demands are equally mysterious to them. A certain disconnection from their families can be sensed. It’s the incomprehensible disregard for anyone who isn’t in their world.

Thus, the quality of family life has changed dramatically. Even when parents are home with the kids, they’re less connected to them and, as a result exert less gravitational pull on children than the outside world of peers. It’s not that parents aren’t trying to exert influence on their adolescent children, or to rein them in. It’s that they have few ideas about how. There’s little weight on parents’ side, little pull.

Buried by an avalanche of child-rearing how-to’s over the last decade, parents today have become so anxious about doing the wrong thing that they are often paralysed. Parents are often not sure what exact values they should espouse. For example, should they stay strict with teenagers about sexual escapades or adapt a some what liberal approach?

Experts have finally come to admit that the only way we can help teenagers stay on course is to lay down clear expectations, or what could be crudely termed bribes and punishments. Label it as you will, an incentive, a reward is what gets kids to pay attention to parents.

So, if Pawan wants a Hero Honda motorbike when he goes to college, he must clear his finals in first division. And, on top, a month’s trip to Europe if he stands first in his class. He gets double his daily allowance, the day he’s home by dinnertime, but then he forfeits it all in case he defaults.

Some parents may find such bargaining distasteful. Others make out that we should expect certain behaviours from our kids without having to reward them for it.

Teenagers always have some next big thing that they want — permission to go somewhere or to buy something. Threatening to take away a favourite TV programme or denying access to the Internet may get their attention a lot faster than yelling. What’s more, bribery or/enforceable punishments also create that pause — time to really talk — which, in turn, motivates teens to step back from their peers and take more seriously their own family. All in all, setting clear rules of conduct and behaviour, and staying steadfast in enforcing them through a well-drawn system of rewards and punishments, could be a workable parental strategy for dealing with modern teenagers, more so with the ones giving some cause for concern.