Style: October 04, 2019

72 STYLE | wellbeing
It’s also important to allow
your teen to have adequate
personal freedom and
autonomy to explore and
experience what is truly most
meaningful to them
As a parent, it can be challenging to watch your teen
be uninspired, bored and unfulfilled during possibly
the most opportune, and potentially the most promising
and most energetic days of their lives. As Irish playwright,
George Bernard Shaw, once pronounced, “Youth is
the most beautiful thing in this world – and what a pity
that it has to be wasted on children!” He may well have
been speaking for every parent of a listless, uninterested,
uncommunicative and uninspired teenager.
This is a common issue parents of teenagers face, and
often well-intentioned parents will try to fruitlessly change
the situation through strict discipline and force. Yet,
attempting to inspire your teen by autocratically telling
them what they must or must not do only results in them
becoming hesitant, frustrated, defiant or more likely to
procrastinate. This is because whatever they are being told
to do is not linked to, or congruent with, what they feel is
currently most important to them
– their highest values.
Whatever is highest on your teenager’s list of values is
what they spontaneously would love to do or fulfil. Their
highest values are not right or wrong, they are simply what
is most important to them at the time, or at least at that
moment. Values are evolving, and months or years later
these values will probably transform. This list is what they
identify themselves by at that moment.
Like when selling a product, service or idea to a
customer, the customer is not wrong for having their top
three highest values or dominant buying motives – they are
simply unique themselves. They deserve to be respected
for whatever these values are. When you care enough to
discover and confirm what their highest values are (their
dominant buying motives) and then communicate what you
would love to sell them (ideas or responsibilities) in terms
of their highest values, you more effectively engage them in
the buying process.
In the case of your teenagers, they are consumers of
ideas. If you respect them as individuals and communicate
what ideas or actions you would love for them to do
or fulfil, you will discover that they are more responsive,
receptive and flexible than first labelled. When you help
your teenagers achieve what they would love, they are
more receptive to doing what you would love.
Like all of us, teenagers want to be loved and appreciated
for who they are and not necessarily what we want to make
them. Who they feel they are in each moment is a reflection