How Good is Your Parent(s)?

There are various causes for teenage social development but what is the real cause? Sure TV, radio or magazine articles can seem persuasive but is it the real reason, but wait what about the parents? Since children from the age of zero to eighteen live with their parents, they pretty much are under their influence their whole eighteen years. Not all parents are the bad cause for teenage social development, but some are and that’s what I’m getting at.
According Suzanne T. Eller, author of Real Issues, Real Teens most teenagers acquire 75% of their parent’s habits and characteristics and apply them as their own. Many parents believe they are doing a good job raising their teenager and allowing them to become a nice well rounded adult but is that really true? Sure each one of us has our own opinion about certain specifics in life but are they the things that are worth having a narrow-minded opinion on? Such as a bed time and when it should be for a teenager, how to treat men or women, how to treat any authority, how to communicate with other people, or how to do a common household job. I know as a nineteen year old boy I was raised to respect and view women better than myself but not all boys view women the same way I do. I’m not saying they are wrong, but where is the fine line to set a standard?
Kerry Patterson words it perfectly in the book Crucial Conversation Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, “parents are like the “Bill of Rights” in the household. They tell their kids what’s right, wrong, smart, stupid, respectful and not, how to behave and how to wash their hands”. This is very true; if a parent isn’t suppose to be this guide then who is or what is? As little as three years old we look up to anyone who appears bigger than us to help or direct us in the right direction. We never knew if it was “right” but we had the subconscious faith it was. Again since we live with our parents, not the animals down the street or have headphones strapped to our heads all our lives, we must rely on our parent’s judgment to be the good and just answers.
I talk about this stating a problem, so is a there something I can do or we can do to change the view points of faulty parents? Funding for parenting classes, more books with relating stories, more advertisements, maybe inspiration music? As a nineteen college student, I don’t have experience to say what would be the most effective to a parenting change, but as a reader, assuming you’re a parent, can have the most influence on a positive change in parenting to help the social development of our new and growing teenagers. So it’s not a radio host that dynamically alters the minds of young people or the spark that comes from a magazine page but the adult parents the teenager lives with for so many years that influences the possible errors in social development.