By IANS,
Washington : Teen years can be tumultuous, when adolescents begin to flex their mental muscles, testing boundaries and turning to peers rather than parents for advice.
A new University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) study, which followed 183 newly homeless adolescents over a two-year period, has found that common stereotypes of homeless youth are largely inaccurate.
Norweeta G. Milburn, research psychologist at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour and colleagues, said: “The importance of a supportive mother is striking and appears to be especially influential for the teen.”
“A majority of the newly homeless adolescents in this sample reported having a mother from whom they could receive emotional support.”
“Our finding goes against the grain of what most people envision a homeless teenager’s life to be – a life filled with maltreatment, substance abuse, disorganisation, conflict and violence,” Milburn said.
“While that is certainly true of chronic runaways, in fact, more than two-thirds of newly homeless youth leave the streets, resolve their family differences and go home.”
“Further, the key appears to be that a family intervention, no matter how brief, can improve the chances that new runaways will go home and stay home,” added Milburn.
Most research has focused on the one-third of adolescents who chronically run away. A frequent cause of that, Milburn said, is indeed family abuse, said a university release.
“Parents of adolescents who become long-term homeless often have a history of substance use and physical abuse that lessens their ability to parent effectively and increases the propensity for conflict,” she said.
The family, however, can play a positive role in the lives of homeless adolescents, Milburn noted, especially newly homeless adolescents.
These findings were published in the current edition of the Journal of Research on Adolescence.