Despite what parents may think, children value their relationships with them, writes Claire O'Connell
PARENTS TAKE heart. The good news is that your teenage children still respect you. And there's more: data shows that levels of smoking among school-age children in Ireland are coming down, while health messages about diet and tooth hygiene appear to be getting through.
Those are some of the conclusions drawn by the Irish team on the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC), an international study involving 41 countries and endorsed by the World Health Organisation.
They collect questionnaire data from thousands of school-children aged 10-17, explains principal investigator for Ireland, Dr Saoirse Nic Gabhainn.
"We have done three separate surveys, in 1998, 2002 and 2006," she explains.
"We cover the standard health behaviour like smoking and drinking and cannabis use, bullying, food intake and physical activity.
"And, in addition, we look at health perceptions - whether children think they are happy, how they report their quality of life, how they feel about themselves."
Across the surveys they have charted some welcome trends, according to Nic Gabhainn, a senior lecturer in health promotion at NUI Galway.
"The really obvious one is that smoking is down; that has been a big change. Bullying and sweet-eating are down, while tooth-brushing and physical activity are up," she says.
The survey also asks children about their relationships with family and peers.
A salient finding was the importance of spending time with friends in person rather than by phone or internet, notes Nic Gabhainn.
"Children who spend a lot of time with their friends are exposed to increased risk behaviour but they also get a lot of benefits from it in that they are learning about social behaviour and they get a lot of immediate feedback about who they are and what's appropriate," she says.
"For children who have elevated rates of electronic communication with their friends - telephone, e-mail and texting - their rates of risk behaviour are reduced as we would expect but their rates of happiness and self-reported health are also reduced."
The survey has also found that children value their relationships with parents, even at perceived breakaway ages.
"Traditionally, a lot of parents think that when children hit 14 they no longer have much influence but they do.
"Parents have underestimated their importance in even older adolescents' lives.
"The quality of the relationships with parents and teachers does have a protective effect," says Nic Gabhainn.
"We can see that children who have good relationships with their parents are much less likely to be involved in risk behaviour, in fighting, smoking, drug taking.
"And it's a great experience to be able to show them quantitatively - it's a very clear pattern.
"It's not a sort of a pattern, or a maybe pattern, it's a 'we-have-the-evidence' pattern."
For more details see www.nuigalway.ie/hbs