Hooking up Through the Newspaper
The teen years are all about “hooking up”—hooking up with peers and their social environment, hooking up with the latest movies and celebrities, hooking up with the right set of wheels or with employment opportunities and maybe even hooking up with the whole world. For many teenagers, hooking up with their parents is not tops on their list of connections to make.
On
the other hand, most parents want to stay connected with their teens during
these years of tremendous growth and changes. Using the newspaper to connect
to your teenager can help you both learn about each other and the important
issues in your lives. During high school, teenagers often feel they are ready to make their own decisions about everything. In the next few years, they might be driving, going away to college, joining the armed forces, voting and/or getting married. They may not seek parental advice to make any of these decisions.
However, many teens will turn to print or online versions of the newspaper to help them make informed decisions, which is where parents can get involved. Teens may read the newspaper or search a variety of newspapers online to gather information and learn about what is impacting their immediate world. Parents can encourage this information quest by clipping out articles they think will be of interest to their teens, or discussing what they have read with their teens in the car, while they are watching TV or during meals together.
When reading the newspaper, parents demonstrate its usefulness and relevance by expressing how they learn new facts or react to various opinions. As teens express the ideas they glean from reading the paper, parents can encourage the development of critical thinking skills by asking appropriate questions. What reasons or evidence did the writer present for that article? What do you think would happen if…? Do you think the writer has a bias? Can you consider another response to the same dilemma the writer discussed? Which one of the op-ed writers do you agree with the most and why?
Parents can also model the importance of reading the newspaper by turning off the TV or radio and focusing on the paper instead. Make a family time of reading the paper together by having each person in the family take a separate section of the paper and then summarizing what has been read. In this way teenagers will be exposed to a variety of writing styles and will have an opportunity to recognize different writers’ use of fact, opinion, humor, quotes, idioms and questions as forms of expression.
Encouraging Independence for Teens
Want to know what your
teenager is thinking? Check out the newspaper for advice-column letters or post-graduation
opportunities, and then try out these activities:
What
would you do in this situation? Clip
the letters written to the advice columnist but don't read the columnist's responses.
You and your teenager can read the letters independently and write your own
"advice." Then read your responses to each other and talk about why
each of you responded in that way. This communication gives parents the opportunity
to discover how their teenager makes decisions and allows the teenager to hear
his or her parents' approach to resolving the same problem. This activity will
help your teen build reading, writing and critical-thinking skills.
So,
just why is school so important? During
their high school years, teenagers may being to tire of going to school everyday.
But can they really afford not to go to school? To help answer this questions,
develop a budget together that includes food, housing, transportation and clothing.
Use the grocery ads to develop a list of essentials. Check out the rental ads
to determine housing costs. Working through the other areas listed above to
make the budget complete. Check out the help-wanted section of the newspaper.
What jobs are available to your teen now? Do they require a high-school diploma?
A college education?
