The younger generations over time have always been criticized to not have many goals in life, usually getting told they’re more lazy in nature than the preceding young generations. Although they are target of bad publicity, some young generations are not brought up with the culture of setting goals. And I’ve seen this happen in schools. Although my view is quite biased, at my college, we were encouraged to set our own goals for personal and academic achievement – because we were in charge of our own learning and lives. Teachers were merely there to help us achieve our goals, rather than force them onto us. From practice, it can be seen that teenagers are less likely to achieve goals that have been set for them by others.
My tip is to sit down with your teen and go through a number of goals they can set for themselves to achieve over a certain period of time. If your family culture is based on results-get-praise, set out a number of ‘rewards’ you can afford (don’t necessarily have to be materialistic – something like an extra half an hour of pro-longed curfew can also go a long way) once they reach their goals.
The pure exercise can help them better understand the need for constant self-improvement. Just sit down with them, and on a single sheet of paper, come up with a number of monthly goals for the next three months they can achieve for their personal, academic and work life. It’s important to be there as a sounding board to guide their thinking, but not come up with the goals themselves. If you feel they may not have set enough, prompt them to think up of other goals they can achieve, but be careful not to make it about you. Offer advice if they ask, but at the end of the day make sure everything they set for themselves seems realistic TO THEM, and they are the ones that initiate the progress happening.
