Generation Gap Essay

How m both times make believe you felt that your p arnts dont understand you, that they have no respect for you as an individual? How often do you shake your head in frustration and blame it on the generation facing pages? Parents They are like aliens from another planet altogether You and they are in different camps strangers forced to live under the same roof Right? Wrong on that point is a way of bridging what appears to be a yawning chasm. If you genuinely want to improve your relationship with your parents (and give them a big shock in the lot ) try listening to them, treating them just like you would listen to a valued friend.Instead of always whining, You dont understand me, stop and think. Do we forever try and understand them? Parents are under a lot of stress, besides. When we are worrying about our upcoming Math exam, they are worrying about the stump in the office, and just how they are going to pay for our braces. Like us, they have twenty-four hour periods when someone humiliates them at work. Sometimes, they dont know where the money for alone the applications you send to foreign universities is going to come from. Your mom may seldom have a chance to go out and enjoy herself. Your dads colleagues may deride him because he cannot afford membership to a club.Yes, weird though it may sound, parents are human too. They may have dreams theyve sacrificed because they want you to produce yours. Once you step into their shoes and try to look at things from their point of view, two wonderful things happen one, you feel a unsanded respect for them, and two, you go out find that you can actually get your own way without heated arguments. Today, when you come back from school or college, ask your mom or dad, How did your day go today? or Tell me a little more about your job. or Is there anything I can do to help you roughly in the house? Youll see the visible diversion it makes to the atmosphere at home.And each day, try to keep your promis es to do your homework, to clean your room and to write garner or telephone if you are living away from home. Seventy five per cent of the youngsters claimed that the teenage years were a time of stress and trouble for them anxiety about exams, jobs, parental expectations, peer pressure, love lives, the need to look good and dress smartly, and well, even the state of the nation. Generation gap means dissimilarity in attitude, or lack of understanding betwixt younger and older generation.This generation gap has always been there but these days it has reached to an explosive stage. The values and patterns of spirit have changed to a great extent. Today, everybody likes to live and behave in his own way. This attitude has widened the generation gap, which can never be filled. It is now destroying family support completely. The elders look after the children and make all sorts of sacrifices to bring them up. Naturally, they feel they have a right over them. They want their child ren to follow their instructions as they have received expectations from them.But the children, when they grow up, want a complete freedom in their thoughts and actions and unfortunately their thoughts and actions are just opposite to those expected by the elders. They revolt when any kind of restrictions are imposed on them. Consequently, the family breaks up and everything gets ruined. In India, we are yet in the initial stages, but the gap has appeared and it is going to grow large day by day. So it is not plainly the responsibility of the younger but also of the elders to fill this gap with their love, affection and trust.The problem, in fact, has grown and escalate due to the rise in complexities of life. These complexities have arisen in the wake of modernism where everything allied to tradition, custom and the world was to be turned upside down. The problem arises principally when parents forget how did they behave, what problems did they encounter and what feeling did t hey feel when they were children, especially teenagers. When the children enter the stormy teens the problem of generation gap comes out with greater intensity then ever. Children too fail to see their parents point of view and blindly stick to breaking rules.For them, at this age, their friends suddenly become important dislodging the parents from the vantage point. This causes great anxiety to parents and the corrasion increases between the children and the parents. At this time, grandparents can play a constructive role in order to bridge the gap of thought, attitude, and way of life and approaches to it. Generation gap is not that serious a problem if families can learn to sit over dinner and talk or sit in the living populate over a cup of hot comforting coffee and talk the things out, ironing the difference and sharing the experiences.When this communication barrier is transcended and the ice broken, the problem does not remain that serious anymore. Talking it out calmly and coolly, with the idea of sorting things out, changing for each other and changing for better can be the nearly helpful instrument in bridging the generation gap. Family outings, vacations, tours, to picnic-outings, often with the family etc can be effective ways to initiate intimacy between parents and children. Watching movie and discussing them, move forth the different viewpoints can be a beginning to inculcate the habit of a healthy dialogue between members of the family.Such small things and step can do wonders in initiating a healthy family atmosphere and reducing friction between two generations that are right in their own respects. Their only fault is that they are viewing the same object from opposite directions. Age, time and experience or the lack of it, forces them to do so. Generation Gap Summary It is a fact of life that the generation gap or clash is something that has existed and will continue to exist as long as man exists on this earth. It is not restricted to certain parts of the world, to certain times of human history or to certain cultures.That is why this clash is a fact of a life accepted by all generations, all over the world and through all time. Generation gap is a more modern term for the difference between generations, or milder than the extreme definition which calls this difference as the clash between the opinions, the attitudes and the behaviors of the younger and the older generations. The inevitable progress of time and technologies makes the introduction of new ideas, new believes, and new values unavoidable.As a result this difference in the general outlook at life arises which is manifest in the difference of opinions and social values, in addition to the difference mannerism and behavior between young people and older people within the family as well as within the social contexts. Perhaps, the gap generation that exists now between the younger and older generation can best be indicated by the difference of ideas betwe en the young people and the older people in the family, namely the grand parents and the aunts or uncles who might be much older than their nieces and nephews, as is the case in such societies.Where bigamy is legal. The technological advances play a great rule in enlarging the gap as the younger generations are quicker to accept and adopt these technologies so that they consider the conservative and technologically suspicious elders of their families very old fashioned in their, tastes, opinions and out looks toward life. On the other hand, the older people despise the modern values which they call the internet and globalization values.They consider the young generation shallow, lacking knowledge and moral depth. This difference can best be seen in the difference of interests and hobbies. The young people of today get their knowledge from the internet, and they hardly read other than light magazines, while the elders of their hard-earned, profound book found knowledge. The differen ce includes the moral and social values, as the different generations see notions such as marriage, love, happiness, decency, and decorum from different perspectives.