A PERMANENT SOLUTION TO A TEMPORARY PROBLEM

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate April 2001

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The adolescent years are a time of change, heightened expectations, and sometimes painful emotions that make day to day problems extremely hard to cope with. Unfortunately a lot of teenagers on the threshold of their adulthood give up trying and choose to end their lives. Their reasons are left a mystery for the families and friends to wonder about. Nonetheless, there are some researched causes for such irrational behavior. The main ones include, family and peer relationships and the influence of media. Experts believe that these causes have led to most of the suicide attempts.

In many cases, parents are blamed for the deaths of their children due to the arousal of misunderstanding and conflicts in the relationship with their child. Each family is different in their ways of setting up rules and standards. Strict parents can cause a youth to impose unrealistically high standards on themselves or feel a need to impress the surrounding adults.

Due to this factor, the youth's concept of self-worth is so heavily oriented towards achievement, that they often can't even be second-best. Other times, a teenager might fail to meet the family's expectations. Weak educational results or achievements can result in lack of support that a child needs at that age.

Through the eyes of an adolescent, parents can be very hard to understand. For example, some parents expect their child to be both dependent and independent at the same time. Parents often have mood changes that are too quick for a child to catch up to, resulting in confusions. There has been a large increase in the rate of divorced and remarried families which also brings confusion. Such changes usually require a lot of time for the children to get used to. However, during this time the youth can fall into isolation and...