Keeping an ear out

“Maybe the loneliness teenagers experience is rooted in our failure to listen”

SPEAKER'S CORNER
DENISE HORAN

MOL an óige agus tiocfaidh sí. Praise the young and they will come – a phrase oft-used when simplistic solutions are required to the problems with, and faced by, young people.
When the ‘mol and óige’ phrase was coined, praise for young people – or anyone else for that matter – wasn’t commonplace. Telling people how good they were wasn’t the done thing. A mortal fear of big heads, inflated egos and general positivity prevented it. Cheeriness was proscribed and optimism sacrilegious; much better for everyone if gloom and begrudgery prevailed.
In fairness, those were days when there wasn’t a lot to be positive about. Now, thank God, light has entered the world again and happiness is permitted. So if we praise young people regularly they should turn out okay, right? Not quite.
Young people today live in the same sophisticated world that we adults inhabit. With sharper minds and greater curiosity, they are, in fact, far more sophisticated than us in many ways. They embrace the myriad changes that are being thrown at our society, so it’s probably time we embraced a change in our attitudes to them.
Rather than just praising – which certainly has its merits – we should listen too. Really listen. Listen to their conversations and find out what interests them. Listen to their friends and find out how to interact with them. Listen to their fears and learn to allay them. Listen to their dreams and help them to realise them. Listen to ourselves and realise why we anger them.
We are all guilty of generalising about teenagers. ‘They don’t know the value of anything.’ ‘They have no respect for anyone or anything.’ ‘They won’t see reason.’ ‘They never listen.’ Were we any different when we were teenagers?
Maybe the rebelliousness of some of them is down to our refusal to engage with them in a meaningful way. Maybe the loneliness some of them experience is rooted in our failure to listen properly to their problems. Maybe their failure to accept responsibility is because we never really give them any.
Last weekend’s Dáil na nÓg 2008 conference in Croke Park was an impressive example of how capable teenagers are of presenting their views, of thinking through problems and coming up with solutions, of being mature when given real responsibility. Focussing this year on the themes of education reform and mental health, some of the 19 recommendations put forward by the 200 delegates from 34 Comhairle na nÓg branches all over the country, are certainly worthy of implementation.
Among the notable ones on the education front were the suggestions that language subjects at school be more conversational and relevant to everyday life, that more of an emphasis be placed on the oral aspect and culture in the teaching of all subjects and that all teachers receive training in guidance counselling and communication skills. The central theme in all of these is communication and, with parents frequently despairing of the lack of communication they have with their teenage children and with poor communication often identified as a key factor in youth suicides, these should be acted upon.
On the subject of mental health, they recommended that there be accessible youth cafés in all areas, that a positive advertising campaign that shows the effects of suicide on family and friends be initiated, and that more funding be put in place for mental health services for young people. Again, these are all common sense proposals, capable of being easily and readily implemented.
The Dáil na nÓg forum is not only a wonderful opportunity for young people to express their views, but also a wonderful opportunity for adults, and in particular legislators, to get into the minds of young people and see what they want. Contrary to the image of complexity we often like to conjure up, it seems that many young people’s needs are pretty straightforward. All we need to do is show a willingness to listen – and act.