Helping Parents in the Toronto SDA Churches Understand and Deal With the Challenges of Adolescents and Work Towards a More Harmonious Relationship

Problem. Parenting is a process which requests a great deal of flexibility and understanding. Both parents and child are engaged in the human developmental process; in most cases parents reach the midlife crisis more or less at the same time when the child reaches the adolescence phase. In most cases neither the parents nor the adolescent understand what is really happening in their lives. They begin to dislike each other and a conflictual atmosphere exists in the home. This lack of understanding brings about the breakdown in the relation parent adolescent. On the other hand parents usually have certain goals for their children and ideas about how these goals should be achieved, but the children in the adolescence phase have goals and intentions of their own as well. Thus when there is a great difference between what the children do and what the parents expect them to do, this also causes a breakdown in the relationship between parents and adolescents. This project intends to elucidate some of the causes of this breakdown in the parent-adolescent relation and to propose certain elements of solution in order to help parents understand better their adolescents and maintain a more harmonious relationship with them. Method. The research method adopted for this project was the survey. This was conducted among the parents of a number of churches in the Ontario Conference including my former congregation, the Woodbridge Seventh-day Adventist Church, to ascertain the problems they experienced with their adolescents and what information would be most helpful in developing and maintaining a good relationship with their adolescents. A variety of churches were selected because of the cultural-ethnic background of the membership in the Ontario Conference. The adolescents were surveyed as well, in order to obtain their perspectives on the problem. The general findings from the survey and general insights gained from the literature review were used to develop seminars geared towards addressing these specific findings. These seminars were held in the Filipino-Canadian Church and were presented to parents and adolescents. A process of evaluation was used to verify the learning experience of the participants and the level of their understanding of issues during the adolescence stage in order to ascertain the pertinence of the content of the seminars and the usefulness of the information shared. Results. The parents who attended these seminars had their level of understating of the issues of adolescence increased and it is hoped that they are better equipped to deal with their adolescents and thus maintain a harmonious atmosphere in the family. We found that the level of understanding on the issues about the adolescence phase has increased for a number of parents who attended the seminars. Conclusion. Three seminars have been prepared in the context of this project, a survey has been administered to the participants before the presentation, and the same survey has been administered to participants after the presentation. A comparison of the pre- and the post-survey helped me to ascertain that education through seminars among the churches in the Ontario Conference can make a positive impact in the relations between the parent and adolescent. Nonetheless these three alone cannot address all the aspects of the dynamic of the relationship between parents and adolescents. This project opened the pathway for more work in this orientation. It is hoped that parents will benefit from the seminars and a harmonious relationship will be fostered in many families within the church.

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