The consulting psychologist supervisor, Ms Lee Li Li, shares about the topic “How to continue instilling value on disobedient teenagers?” at Ai FM (Live) on 18th July 2017, 10a.m.

Teenagers in this new generation are easily influenced by the temptation from the outside world. Their concept about materialistic is influenced by peer pressure. They are refrain from getting the right values due to the influences from the outside world.

Why values are difficult to display at the stage of adolescent?

• The value instilled from various aspects such as school, religion, and family are different among each other. The parents do not practice the value that teenagers learn in school. For example, teenagers learn about traffic rules which we must stop when traffic light turns red, but in real life parents may go against the rule by speeding when traffic light turn red.
• The inconsistency of values being instilled to children between father and mother. For example one party may agree on a certain thing, while the other party is not may also create discrepancy in instilling the values to children. This not only confused children in learning about the values but also let the children to interact with others in a situation which put own interest as prioritize.

In fact, the consistency in instilling values toward teenagers should be emphasized, which can lead the children to internalize the values learned, after that apply the values into real life more effectively.

How to enable parents to practice the same values practice in school and religion?

• The teachers may encourage the teenagers to lead by example to their parents, such as to motivate and influence their parents to practice the similar values through actions.
• Teachers may encourage teenagers and parents at the same time, for example, teachers may also show care and concern to parents.

How to instil value in teenagers?

• Modelling. Parents have to practices the values that are being instilled to teenagers. Otherwise, teenagers may not motivated or unwilling to practice the values given that their parents didn’t lead by example.
• Discuss the values from stories or movies with teenagers. Children who aged ten years old and above tends to display egocentric behaviour. Therefore, they usually resist to learn in a way of being ordered or coerced to accept the values such as “You have to…”
• Instil values through action. Actually, 60%and above of the value should instil through actions.
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• Parents are the role model to teenagers. They are always observing their parents behaviour. As a result, values are difficult to instil in teenagers with parents who do not practice the values themselves.

Types of topic that parents can communicate with their teenagers?

• Talent and interest. The parents should spend time doing exercise with their children once a week. The intention is to create opportunities more freely to discuss about the teenagers’ interest and talent when parents have a common interest (e.g. sport) with their children. The topic about talent and interest must be different each time to avoid teenagers to feel boring.
• Recent trends. Apart from the trends, parents can also chat about casual news. For example, the topic about their children’s idol. The parents can understand about their children’s thought and values through their sharing about their idols.
• Parents should stay calm when rectifying teenagers’ negative perception. For example, parents may discuss using diverse real life example to allow the children to analyse the differences of values that exist from the real life examples. Hence, they are capable to determine the right or wrong by themselves.

Note: The above content was received from Ai FM on the topic “How to continue instilling value on disobedient teenagers? Part 1” on 18th July 2017 (Tuesday). For further details, please contact our administration office. We will have our psychologist to advice you further. Thank you.