How often do you go to your parents for advice? Are they your first option? Or do you choose to keep to yourself or go to your friends?

NY Times writer Lisa Damour says, “Parents of adolescents are often confronted by a puzzling sequence of events…. These moments feel ripe for connection. Why do they so often turn sour? Almost always, it’s because we’re not giving teenagers what they’re really looking for.”

My opinion: we kids tend to choose to not go to our parents, because we think we know how to handle certain situations, and we choose to go to others because we think they know best because they’re our age, and have a more relatable experience in “our time”.

Yes, our parents repeat, “we’ve been down that road before,” but does that mean they’ve done every little thing that we have done? Is their experience with dating, and school, and overall really like ours?

When you argue with your best friend, or get a bad heartbreak, or even just feel low, are your parents your go to person? My opinion, we choose to go to them last, because we know deep down that they can get real about anything, and talk some serious sense into you. We choose to go to others because they’ll comfort us in a friendly way, rather than comfort us and still keep it real like our parents. 

I also think we are scared of the ugly truth our parents tell us when it comes to certain situations. We know that our parents will tell us what it is, rather than what we want to hear, and that scares us because we don’t want to believe what our parents say all the time. 

When we have those days, are parents able to help you? Can they make a bad day go good, or will we continue to keep our mouth shut? Do we always tell our parents the problem, or do we say, “I’m okay.” How close are we really with our parents? Can we go to them, or shut them out when we don’t want the cold hard truth?

As a teenager, it is struggling because we want to be happy, and we want to live this perfect life, and try our best to fit in, but what a lot of teens fail to see in my opinion, is it’s not always sunshine and smiles. There will always be a rough day. There will always be that day where you don’t even want to talk to anyone. But, instead of looking at what’s real, we strive to find the bright side of things rather than accepting the cold hard truth.

We all know we can go to our trustworthy friends, or sometimes our siblings, because we know they will just tell us stuff we want to hear rather than stuff we need to hear. We teenagers seek advice from those who tell us the good stuff, rather than the stuff we need to hear. 

As a whole, we should be able to go to our parents, yes it is scary because we may never know what they say, but they want what is best for us, and they push us whenever we don’t feel like being pushed. Parents give us advice because they see our friends, or significant others true colors before we even see them.