Family means more to teenagers than they admit

NEW YORK -- Sure, teenagers might prefer to read about a fantasy world like Harry Potter lives in, but when these youngsters write, they write about reality: their families.

Shannon Burke, 18, used a journalism class assignment to write a personal narrative as a cathartic experience to remember and honor her father, who died of cancer a few months earlier.

"Sometimes it does take horrible things to realize how much people mean to you. For me, I'm lucky that it didn't take something so startling to realize how much I value my family," she says during a recent phone interview.

"My dad knew how much he mattered to me, and when he got sick, I realized even more what I was going to be missing without having a dad."

Meanwhile, 15-year-old Crystal Fernandez wrote an essay about her quest to convince the adults in her family that she was old enough to help make decisions about her grandmother's health.

She turned it in to a creative writing teacher at her school in New Haven, Conn., who then entered it in a nationwide contest for Teen Ink, a monthly magazine written by and for teenagers.

Teen Ink's editors, adults John and Stephanie Meyer, and Peggy Veljkovic, then took the best essays and put them into a book called "Teen Ink: What Matters" (HCI).

What's important to teenagers today?

The book aims to answer the question, "What's really important to teenagers today?"

Veljkovic, a former teacher, says she was "astounded" by the depth of the teenagers' thoughts when it came to the subject of family, which many adults assume is a topic usually avoided by the younger generation.

The teens "have a deep understanding about family, about the importance of not taking mom and dad for granted, and a lot of people wrote about their grandparents," Veljkovic says.

"There are a lot of good kids out there who are listening to their parents and their grandparents," said Veljkovic. The teenagers are listening to the important life lessons of their elders.

For Crystal, it was her grandmother who first recognized that she was making the change from child to young adult.

"All the adults still considered me one of the little kids, but my grandmother, who used to baby-sit me, was cool to hang out with. She'd let me help cook," Crystal says.

When her grandmother first began receiving cancer treatments, Crystal was 12 -- and she was shut out of conversations about the grandmother's care.

"I understand where my family was coming from, they were trying to protect me from feeling bad or worrying that my grandmother was going to die, but sometimes I wish they'd just tell me what was going on," says Crystal.

Included in decision-making

Once she began to make daily visits to the hospital, though, her mother and, eventually, the rest of the family started to include her in the decision-making.

Crystal gives this advice to peers who want to be taken seriously: Offer to do the family's grocery shopping, take the initiative in doing chores, ask to keep adults company as they run errands -- basically anything that proves that you're willing to pull your weight in the family.

Atoosa Rubenstein, editor in chief of CosmoGirl magazine, says parents and other family members are "much higher in the pecking order of their children's lives than they think."

"Teens cherish and love their parents, but, unlike boys at school or even their friends, the teenagers don't have to chase their parents so they don't necessarily seem that interested. Teens just expect their parents to be there for them," Rubenstein explains.

To maintain an active role in their teens' daily lives, Rubenstein advises parents to try to engage their children in daily conversation but not to pry. "Day-to-day communication about the little stuff is what makes the big stuff easier."