Challenges for Today’s Parents
By Harriet Davids
Thesis: Being a parent today is much more difficult than it was a generation ago.
Raising children used to be much simpler in the ’50s and ’60s. I remember TV images from that era showing that parenting involved simply teaching kids to clean their rooms, do their homework, and ____. But being a parent today is much more difficult because nowadays parents have to shield/protect kids from lots of things, like distractions from schoolwork, and from dangerous situations.
Parents have to control all the new distractions/temptations that turn kids away from schoolwork. These days many kids have stereos, computers, and televisions in their rooms. My girls can’t resist the urge to watch MTV and go online, especially if it’s time to do homework. Unfortunately, though, kids aren’t assigned much homework and what is assigned too often is busywork. And there are even more distractions outside the home. Teens no longer hang out/congregate on the corner where Dad and Mom can yell to them to come home and do homework. They hang out at the mall, in video arcades, and at fast-food restaurants. Obviously, parents and school can’t compete with all this.
Parents have to help kids develop responsible sexual values. Kids see magazines and cheap paperbacks in the corner store where they used to get candy and comic books. And instead of the artsy nude shots of the past, kids see ronchey, explicit shots in Playboy and Penthouse.
And movies have this stuff in them today. Teachers seduce students and people treat sexual relations casually/as a sport. Not exactly traditional values. TV is no better. Kids see soap-opera characters in bed. Even worse is what’s on the Internet. The situation has gotten so out of hand that maybe the government should establish guidelines on what’s permissible.
Worst of all are the life-threatening dangers that parents must help children fend off over the years. With older kids, drugs fall into place as a main concern. Peer pressure to try drugs is bigger to kids than their parents’ warnings. Other kinds of warnings are common when children are small. Then parents fear violence since news shows constantly report stories of little children being abused. And when kids aren’t much older, they have to resist the pressure to drink. Alcohol has always attracted kids, but nowadays they are drinking more and this can be deadly, especially when drinking is combined with driving.
Most adults love their children and want to be good parents. But it’s difficult because the world seems stacked against young people. Even Holden Caufield had trouble dealing with society’s confusing pressures. Parents must give their children some freedom but not so much that the kids lose sight of what’s important.
(Adapted from The Longman Writer: Rhetoric, Reader Handbook
by Judith Nadell, Linda McMeniman, and John Langan (2003) @https://wps.pearsoncustom.com/wps/media/objects/2426/2484620/240012_ch06.pdf)
UNIT 12. MAKING A CHANGE
A EXPLORING A TOPIC
I Expressing an opinion (B1/B2/C1)
1. What is a change for you? Does it mean it breaks the stability of your life balance or does it improve your life to make it more balanced?
2. Comment on the following:
Life balance is easier when we understand its causes. In the fortunate Western world these factors are broadly within our control if we focus on them and approach them positively. As we go through our lives, new challenges and experiences change the relative importance and mixture of these factors. The better we understand the changing needs of our life balance, the better able we are to achieve and maintain them. Think about whether your life could be happier and better balanced. Think about what sort of person you are. Think about the factors which are truly important to you. And then ask yourself if and how you might want to change them. We cannot simply become happier by wishing it. We must first understand what makes us happy, and then plan how to change these things (From Life balance, happiness and life change. Ideas for happiness and life change - tips and tools for work-life balance.).
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II Related information (B1/B2/C1)
1. Define the meaning of the following terms: environment, determination, influence, change, habits, manage, approach to life.
2. Read the following fragments of the article Life Balance, Happiness and Life Change from Businessballs.com.
1)What habits can we change to improve our life?
2) What is challenging about changing a job? How is it connected to work-life balance and life balance in general?
Manage your environment
The ways we use mobile phones and emails significantly influence our living and working environment - and specifically external pressures and demands on us. These potentially very positive communications technologies have become for many people habits and systems which enslave and constrain, rather than liberate and enable. Left unmanaged and uncontrolled, mobile phones, emails, and increasingly laptops and blackberry-type gadgets, make us constantly available, and constantly attentive. This is fine if it makes you happy, but what if it makes you unhappy?
Manage your environment - don’t let your environment - external factors like mobile phones and emails - manage you. Changing these habits takes determination:
Understand and accept the need to change.
Commit to and plan the change.
Make the change - ensuring you explain your new ways of working to those who need to know.
A simple change to make with emails is open them and deal with them at set times during the day, not whenever one pops into your inbox. A simple change to make for a mobile phone is to get rid of it. Or hit it with a great big bloody hammer. That’ll sort it. Failing that try switching it off when you want some time for yourself. Communications technologies are meant to make your life easier, not more stressed and difficult.
Control these things. Manage your environment. Don’t allow external factors - especially your habits and expectations and assumptions of others - to manage you. Manage other people’s expectations and demands on you. We all get into habits which form the expectations and views that other people hold about us. Other people’s demands on our emotional and time resources are a significant aspect of life balance. If you do not manage these demands they will leave you with no resource for yourself, your loved ones, your other passions in life, and the changes you want to make in order to pursue them.
Construct your own approach to life - challenge what is imposed on you. Life changes fast. Conventions and beliefs of the past are not right for the future. You can be certain of one life on this earth. If you are not happy then take time to think and plan how to change things for the better.