福建师范大学外国语学院2001级1班 李凤荣

One of the most popular topics many people talk about now is generation gap. “It’s like being bitten to death by ducks.” That’s how one mother described her constant squabbles with her fourteen-year-old daughter. And she is hardly alone in the experience. According to a poll, the relations between parents and teenagers are frequently marked by squabbling, nagging and arguing despite considerable love between them. What causes this verbal behavior and which party is at fault: the adolescent or the adult?

One of the major causes for the misunderstandings between them is that parents and children see almost everything in different perspectives. While children always complain that their parents are out of touch with modern ways, the parents criticize their children for the radical ways to deal with things. The gap seems unbridgeable.

Accounts of conflict between adolescents and their parents can also date back virtually as far as recorded history. But our predecessors enjoyed an important advantage over today’s parents: adolescents rarely lived at home much beyond puberty. Poverty drove high-school-aged youngsters out of home to learn their trade as apprentice. But now the higher standard of living has brought extended schooling, which has prolonged youngsters’ economic dependence on their parents and delayed their entrance into full-time work roles. The net result has been a dramatic increase in the amount of time that physically mature youngsters and their parents must live in close contact, and hence in the conflict between parents and their adolescents.

Beyond these obvious reasons, however, lies a deeper cause: the changing attitude of the youth. For years, offspring, especially sons had been expected to remain at home permanently, bring their spouses home to the big, extended family when they got married. But that’s changing now. With growing demand for independence and the improved living standard, more and more young people seek to leave the parental family to establish their own households. Young people want to be independent. They have their own philosophy of life, their own way of filling leisure, and their own method of raising and educating children. To leave their parents and live independently is to avoid disagreement and quarrels brought about by the generation gap, and to enjoy the freedom from constrains of a big family.

As young people, we should know what the differences are between the two generations, otherwise, we cannot understand why we can’t get along well with the older generation.