How to talk to teenagers

Educational psychologist Richard Hogan looks at a number of ways to get through to your teenagers

The Department of Education and Skills, are rolling out a new initiative in schools by introducing 300 hours of ‘Wellbeing’ into the Junior Cert curriculum. This arrival of early mental health promotion in schools signals one of the most striking and innovative changes taking place in the Irish educational system. However, it also illuminates the alarming fact that the number of adolescents presenting with emotional, psychological or behavioural difficulties in our schools has increased considerably over the last number of years. In my experience, working as a systemically trained psychotherapist and schoolteacher, many of the conversations I have with parents explore the fact that they are finding it almost impossible to communicate with their children. Parents are meeting resistance because communication for millennial children is starkly different than any other time that has gone before.

A digital generation gap now exists between those born in the age of technological dissemination (digital natives) and those not born in this age (digital immigrants). This new way of communicating that the digital age has brought with it, has interrupted communication patterns. Communication is now abbreviated, fast, instantaneous and functional.