How a teenager to survive a move to another country: the advice of a psychologist to parents
'27.05.2021'
Source: Today
At the age of plus or minus 11-16, a teenager is dependent on his parents, and emigration issues, as a rule, are not discussed with children. What are the implications of this decision for adolescents? What problems and challenges will the family face? How can you effectively overcome them? Family psychologist Natalia Gaevskaya reports.
Natalia told Todaywhat problems can overtake parents and their minor children in connection with moving to another country.
While still at home, the child is experiencing a forced break in significant relationships: relatives, friends, classmates - everything that was familiar and close will have to be left. Upon arrival in a new country, adolescents do not immediately develop relationships with their peers, which can lead to chronic stress and psychological problems of the following types:
1. Whatever good relationship between parents and children, after moving to a new country, they change. One of the reasons is that children see what difficulties their parents have to face on the way to adapt to a new country, and do not want to add their own problems to them.
This is especially true when parents rush to extremes: they focus only on building a successful career, actively arrange their personal life, or, conversely, give up their hands from impotence, experience depression. Later, already in adulthood, this is fraught with the ingrained opinion that “you have to pay for everything,” “you need to suffer your happiness,” and so on. Therefore, even having all the attributes for a happy life, it is difficult for such children to experience pleasure from it.
In adolescence, comparison with peers becomes relevant. Additional conflicts may arise from parental rejection, for example, their child's new clothing style or new preferences.
Shifting the roles of parents, as well as replacing roles, negatively affects relationships with children. Some of them were accustomed to the fact that their parents held high positions before emigration, their material and social situation was quite good. However, it often happens that at the beginning of emigration, parents receive social assistance or work in low-skilled jobs and cannot fully satisfy all the needs of their children.
Children of emigrants, as a rule, have a faster and shorter adaptation period than their parents: they did not have time to establish themselves as individuals in their homeland, they learn the language better (due to age characteristics), they need to go to school, which also contributes to faster integration. Often they are the ones who jump ahead and begin to take leading roles in the family due to better competence, in fact, becoming “parents” for their own parents, and also often try to free themselves from their incompetent, often dumb, “ancient” parents, thereby exacerbating relations in family.
Sometimes they even shy of their parents in front of new friends. All this is not conducive to family cohesion with the goal of successful adaptation in a new country.
2. Relationship teenager with classmates. In the USA, for example, a different education system than in Ukraine, which is not always initially positively perceived by adolescents from immigrant families. Firstly, because the level of knowledge of the English language among the newcomers is not always at the proper level, they have to urgently master both the language and, in parallel, school subjects. This provokes a distance between a teenager and other children in school. It is much easier not to speak with other children at all due to poor knowledge of the language, in the end a teenager may be isolated.
And this is precisely in that period of his life when contacts with peers and the conquest of his place under the sun among them come to the fore.
Secondly, at the very beginning of their studies, the newly arrived adolescents do not have such success in school, to which they are accustomed, which can lead to a decrease in self-esteem and a negative perception of their own “I”.
Thirdly, despite the easy curriculum, in American schools, in comparison with Ukrainian schools, the learning process itself requires greater independence and responsibility from children, and not everyone is ready for such peculiarities, especially when a teenager is used to the fact that “everything is for him. will decide ”. This often leads to frustration - and two paths open up for the teenager: either to learn to play by new rules, or to completely go astray.
3. Improper child self-perceptionwhen he does not receive sufficient support from the family, and also does not enjoy authority among peers, can lead to a decrease in self-esteem and, as a result, to problems with socialization, aggressiveness, and deviant behavior. Often, adolescents from families with low incomes are at risk, because when they find themselves in a new social and material environment, they have an internal conflict due to the discrepancy between the level of needs and the level of opportunities. They see many new things for themselves that are inaccessible to them, but so desirable.
Also, adolescents are characterized by the formation of ideal ideas, they paint themselves a picture of a new life in a new country - and when this picture gradually collapses, this can result in aggressive, socially unacceptable behavior or, conversely, suppressed or even aggressive behavior.
Remember that support in the family, parental understanding of what is happening to him is extremely important for a child. In the whirlwind of your own affairs, try not to forget about the most difficult changes that your children have to go through - participation, attention and a kind word will give a much better result than the prohibitions and resistance of parents to the behavior of a teenager.
