Career

Teenagers Need Lessons In Human Relationships

Deccan Herald; Date: 18-Sep-08

Rishton ke bhi roop badaltehain, naye naye saanchemein dhalte hain... (Just as the nature of relationships change, their form keeps evolving as well) starts the title song of a popular Hindi soap.

We all identify ourselves with our relationships which are usually preserved in our hearts. As they say relationships are like savings in your emotional bank account. One may not have enough zeroes in her financial bank account, but can still be a billionaire (or a pauper) when measured by the wealth of her relationships in the emotional bank account.

Strangely though, study of human relationships is one of the most neglected areas in our current primary and secondary educational system. Our academic subjects explain in great detail how a butterfly’s flutter in one hemisphere could be related to a tsunami in another. But, nowhere do we study the effect of making or breaking one relationship or another.

During my interaction with high school and junior college students, I am often asked a variety of questions about relationships. For instance, a16-year-old girl wanted to know the right time to have a boy friend. Should I have one in the first place? To what extent can I get involved? Is it ok to end one relationship to get into another? Similarly, a 17-something guy was not sure if he should care about his family’s expectations before falling for a girl or vice versa? Is my life only mine or am I a part of a bigger group called family? How important are my friendships? We adults, at some time or other, have stared at the same questions. Some of us found our own answers; the rest listened to others. But, today’s youth remain as hassled and unsure as ever. Given that healthy inter-personal relationships constitute the foundation of any family (and society), it’s high time our educational system did justice to this oft-neglected topic called human relationships (HR).

Some may argue that such issues don’t need formal education and are learnt through experience; others think this is rather too personal an issue to be widely discussed in the classroom. Both the claims, however, don’t hold much water. If experience was the best teacher, we wouldn’t have been still struggling to deal with the same ancient issues in our relationships — betrayal, abuse, manipulation, selfishness, lack of trust, sense of oppression, etc. In fact, the ‘relationship index’ has plummeted too far to even remain personal. Day-in and day-out we find newspapers, magazine columns and websites brimming with relationship issues. The efficacy and need of such columns are debatable, but what is certain is the lack of youth education which goes into building healthy HR.

Alarmingly, the key factor which has contributed to deteriorating HRs is the role of family in bringing up its children. With growing economic prosperity and the I-don’t-care-about-others attitude, today’s adolescents have few healthy relationships to look up to. With the rising divorce and ‘moving on’ cases, fewer hours spent by parents with children and rapid individualization of the youngistan, today’s youth innocently fall into traps of unhealthy HRs. Teenagers get involved in relationships which they are either incapable of handling or are not that committed to. Often, it is too late to repair such relationships. Most cases end up as newspaper snippets entitled ‘cheated’, ‘jilted’, ‘abused’,‘killed’,etc.

Our education system needs to take cognizance of this fast-spreading malaise. More importantly, the educational system needs to be aligned to support these needs of our youth. In the developed part of the world, every worthwhile university has professional counselors who are dedicated to address such relationship issues amongst the youth. In India, on the contrary, very few educational institutes can boast of the same.

Further, we should include case study based syllabus to help students understand the nuances of various relationships. Since there are no fixed rules or formulas to tackle HR issues, such case-studies will help them identify with situations which they regularly face and explore various ways of handling them. Clearly, it is just as important to understand the relationship between a neutron and proton as it is to understand the bond between two human beings.

(The nature of relationships change, and so do the underlying emotions, but still the connection remains the same) ends the title song of that popular Hindi soap.

(The author is a freelance teacher at Fr. Agnels Junior College, Navi Mumbai)