Would You Open Up to Your Parents?
As a teenager, your emotional capacity is still fragile and not fully-developed yet. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality an individual experience. Emotional well-being is influenced by a variety of demographic, economic, and situational factors. Every child grows up in different circumstances and each one of them has various upbringings. One can grow up closed-off from his or her environment and another can grow up open and capable of sharing his or her feelings to anyone he or she interacts with. Growing up, you might unintentionally create boundaries between you and your parents. Be it secrets about your school life, or personal life you keep from your parents. In several occasions, as a teenager you also perceive your emotional well-being as something that should be hidden and kept from your parents or guardians. Opening up and actively communicating with your parents is important to strengthen the bond between you and your family. But there are also disadvantages to children who grow up in a toxic environment. By accounting these points, we can see that opening up to parents about your emotional well-being can either be a good and bad idea.
Logically speaking, there are several advantages you can acquire by opening up to your parents. First of all, by opening up and communicating to your parents about yourself emotionally, your parents can help you sort out your problems. Parents and children usually have a connection that makes children feel at ease opening up to their parents. By opening up, you learn to be stronger, less insecure, and more confident about yourself. You also learn to be more durable in facing inevitable life problems be it your studies or — if you happen to have one — your love life. More importantly, opening up to your parents allows your parents to know more about you. You don’t need to keep secrets that you previously thought might unnerve or anger them. By having verbal conversation with your family about how you feel and how’s your perceptions and stances on stuffs that matter, you can build up your relationship with your relatives to be even sturdier.
But, opening up to parents might come off as destructive to some. This applies to those who lives and grows up in a toxic and unfriendly environment. this type of environment emerged because of parents’ behaviour itself. Some parents demand their children to be strong emotionally by being strict on their children. In one instance, if children who were born in this kind of family try to open up about his or her emotional unwell-ness, the parents might not even try to comfort them or find a reasonable solution, but rather resort to blaming their child for being unable to cope psychologically. This kind of situation results in a child’s family being the reason of his or her emotional unwell-ness. Said child will avoid communicating with his or her family and open up to other people who he or she deemed close.
In brief, everyone’s situation could be different. If you grew up in a friendly and supportive home, opening up to your parents is good for strengthening the bond and level up mutual understanding between families. In another case, if you are surrounded by toxic family members, opening up will potentially worsen your emotional well-being and it would be better to find a third party to open up to. In my perspective, opening up about your psychological and emotional well-being is very important because not only it can help your relationship with whoever you’re opening up to, it can also help your parents understand you and give you the right advices because they would understand how you handle problems in an emotional perspective.