Barriers to Parent-Adolescent Communication: What do Insiders Say?

Tóm tắt

Research shows that the quality of the relationship between adolescents and their parents play a fundamental role in adolescents’ development and transition to autonomy and adulthood. One of the important indicators that reflects the quality of parent-adolescent relationship is their communication. Adolescent-parent communication is also an indicator of adolescent’s self-esteem, certain aspects of adolescent well-being and their coping strategies (Jackson,1998). However, there are some obstacles to parentschildren communication, especially in adolescence period. Using qualitative data from a research conducted by Institute for Family and Gender Studies in 2021 in Ha Noi, this paper is to describe the factors affecting communication between parents and adolescents. Finding shows that adolescents tend to open up with mothers than father. Generation gap is an important factor making communication between parents and adolescent challenging. Moreover, increasing time spent on social media and Internet decreases the time adolescents spend for their interaction with parents and increase risk of parentadolescent conflict. Time spending together can make parent - adolescent closer but in some cases, too much time can increase risk of conflict between them.