what are needs and necessities of adolescents
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
What teens need
All of us need to feel safe and protected, to have our physical requirements for food, clothing, warmth, healthcare met. One of the flash points with teenagers may be a conflict between parents wish to fulfil these needs and a teenagers apparent desire to frustrate or be unrealistic about them.
Teenagers may defy your attempts to keep them safe, by staying out late, running around with ‘bad company’, taking what you may consider risks with internet use. They may go head to head with you on the physical requirements you try to offer - refusing healthy food and demanding chips and fizzy drinks with everything. Perfectly good clothing may be rejected on the grounds that their friends would laugh - they have to have the latest styles. And boring things like dental and health checks may be something they suddenly turn their noses up about.
The fact that they become contrary, however, doesn't mean they don’t want you to continue caring and continue to act on their behalf. What would help would be for you to enter into a dialogue about these issues and look to agree with them. When you are clear about what is your concern and what you’d like to happen but are prepared to hear their point of view, you can get somewhere.
What teenagers want as much as when they were little is your love, your care, your respect and your attention. They want to be noticed by you. Too often, because teenagers are being moody and withdraw into themselves, we respond by ignoring them. Ignoring bad behaviour and not rising to it is one thing; ignoring the person who is annoying us is another. And it can become a pattern, where they mope so we ignore them so they mope even more, convinced we don’t care.
Family time and meals
Teenagers still want to spend time together with their parents. Yes, of course they’d like to be on their mobiles or computers, playing games and communicating with their mates, all hours of the day and night. And given the chance, they want to be with them too, either at each other’s homes or out together. But they also still value family time - round a table eating together, watching television as a family, even going out with you.
Which is why one core aspect of family life that seems to have slipped away may be something you need to defend or bring back; the family meal. Many families have found shared meals, as a family, have become a luxury they have lost. Some of the reason may be the pace of life - you and your children may have so many competing demands that it’s really hard to find an hour each evening when you can all be together.
If you feel pressured and short of time and opt for meals that can be put together easily, you may also be offering dishes that can be done individually, so there doesn’t seem to be any reason why you should all be at the table at one time. And of course, if preferences and food fads has meant that people are eating different foods anyway, it can seem just as sensible for people to get their own as and when they wish. One of the side effects of sharing family meals is that it allows everyone round the table to feel valued and appreciated - another core need for teenagers.
Teenagers need both stimulation and activity, and rest and relaxation.
Teenagers today seem surrounded by an overload of things to do and ways of taking in information. It’s not unusual to have a young person come home late from school because of an after-school activity, to turn on the TV and computer and be messaging friends while watching a programme with one eye, texting on the mobile with the other and somehow managing to play a computer game as well while eating hasty meal before dashing out to another club or meeting with friends.
Teenagers also need the activity bit - and that doesn't just mean ‘activities’ such as meetings or clubs but physical exercise. Kids tend to keep fit by rushing around in school breaks. Teenagers often need support in keeping active so that it becomes a part of their adult life style, and they stay healthy and fit. If they’re not attending after school sports activities (and actually, even if they are…), you need to make exercise something the family does together. This has the added value of giving you one more time when you can share time with them, while running or cycling or swimming or going to a gym.