In today’s world, honesty has become very dreadful, most importantly in teenagers. “No Legacy is so rich as honesty” by William Shakespeare. Teenagers these days tend to adapt to dishonest attitude, they mostly lie for everything even if it is not necessary in a particular situation. Teenagers lie because they fear punishment. In other words, teenagers are afraid to tell the truth because they think something wrong or awful will happen to them if they speak the truth. There are few reasons why teenagers these days are more on a dishonest side rather than an honest side.
Firstly, competition among teenagers creates lack of honesty. In order to compete and win, teens exhibit means which lack honesty. In the first place, academic performance lead to dishonesty in teenagers, this is because competition is too tight in academic field. “Academic misconduct continues beyond the classroom to include falsify or writing a paper for a student, and detrimental or concealing library resources”, Christensen Hughes & McCabe, 2006. Not only that, competition leads the students to any point to achieve their goals in life. Furthermore, teenagers tend to fight to get a good name in society, which is also believed to decelerate honesty in teens. As an illustration, goals are very important in teens life, but they should achieve them in a positive and honest way. On the other hand, parents are also the cause for teens for poverty in honesty. Parents must know how to educate their children in a decent way and construct understanding between them. Parents often compare their children to other children mostly in academic field, and this will eventually divert their positive and honest mind to dishonest thoughts. This is because, the expectations of parents on teens and the respect teens have on their parents. Usually, teens have this perception of not disappointing their parents and end up leaning to dishonesty. When parents have too much expectations and always compete with other children, teens will be afraid to voice out because they are anxious to disappoint their parents. Parents should know the capability of their children before getting into competitions or conclusion. Parents should not be expecting their children to excel in everything, there is always ups and downs in life therefore, parents should enlighten their children to face the situations and go through it in an honest way. Not only competitions in academic and parents are tarnishing honesty in teenagers but relationships also tend to devastate honesty in teenagers. These generations are way too advanced and not like people from 30 to 40 years back, some teenagers get into a relationship when they are hardly even in their twenties. As for that, in a relationship teenager these days tend to be dishonest to keep the relationship going. “If you don’t have honesty in a relationship, then there is no relationship”, said Mary A. Garza, 2015. They get very unreal and dishonest because they often feel like it is a trend to have boyfriends or girlfriends these days, and if you don’t have one you’re counted as a loser or left out. They lie and become very dishonest because of insecurities, they are in a mind set where there should not be anyone prettier or more good looking than them. This leads to dishonesty, because there will be situations where they will have to lie to their partners about something or someone so that they stay in the relationship.
Beside this, media shows another factor that brings teenagers tend to adapt dishonest attitude to themselves. Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and news has been influence teenager’s daily routine in these days. One of the examples is, glorification can be praised in either positively or negatively by different perspective of various people. For teenagers, they might feel weird if they think that particular person should not be truly praised by other people. For example, teenagers see the news in social media which is about people keep praising the bad person for using violence to solve the problem in order to protect the peacefulness of world. In this situation, it will only motivate and encourage them to become vexatious in doing everything. According to Kageyama (2018), praise is something that depends on how the person do it, to whom when the person is doing it. In nowadays society, glorification gives a different perception on the reality. So, getting praise from people will increase the confident levels of teenagers but the society need to identify whether the praising is in the right ways or wrong. Sometimes, poor quality human beings are being successful in their life and teenagers might confuse why that kind of people can be so successful in future. This will influence them to determine whether the value of them is positive or negative in judging their things and opinion. For an instance, the money game players are usually successful in doing their business, but from some normal people’s perspective, they know that this type of business is not a logical way to earn the money. Based on this situation, it bucks up teenagers to follow the wrong direction and influence them to do something that is not encourage able in order to earn the money. False news in social media will also influence teenagers to behave dishonest attitude. When teenagers know about something which is true, but it was given with the fake news, this will sure decimate teenager’s hopes and trust in believing something. According to Rajan (2017), fake news belong to the deceptive problem and it causes teenagers started to wise up to it. Not only the trust built in teenagers will drop, false news also conceives a bad impact on individual. The great spread of fake news can bring a serious negative impact on society include individuals (Shu, Sliva, Wang, Tang and Liu,2017). It causes teenagers have to aware of news they have seen and they become not easily to trust to everything. As a result, teenagers tend to be dishonesty behaved due to the media influence around them. Some of the human and media have the tendency to converse the true news into fake news which inspires teenagers to vanguard negative paths.
Moreover, peers among parents and friends are also represented an important character which will bring to a big impact on teenager’s life. As we know that when teenagers enter adolescence period, teenagers will become more rebellious and easily get influences by other same-aged people and friends. Due to lack of parents accompany, sometimes they might feel lonely, started to believe that no one is really know and care about them. In this situation, teenagers probably would like to have some kind of sense of belonging for them. They began to set an opinion in mind that is to make their own decision without further thinking and disregard other people’s perspective. Keep up with trends are being first in their mind rather than follow their truth hearth to go with it. According to Richard (2017), teenagers who have the sense of belonging to a specific group will learn some lessons from the interaction within that particular group. It is true that the teenagers will become more passionate in judging everything that have been appear to them as they have an incorrect concept which is set in their mind set to claim that every decision they have made are correct and reasonable. This concept will urge them always to indicate and prove themselves are doing the right things but not the wrongdoing. Beside this, the peers here are also referring to strict parents of some teenagers. Every parent in this world usually hopes their children can be a useful people in one day, but putting excessively hopes to teenagers will cause a negative effect on them. The situation refers to those parents who have a very high hope in their children. According to research news American Psychological Association (2015), academic performance of the children can be improved by parent’s aspiration but it can be poisonous if parents put too much aspiration on them. For instance, parents have set a higher expectation towards their child and want them to get the best results during the examination. At the moment, it causes teenagers to have a feeling of stress in their studies and bring them to behave immorality negative behaviour such as cheating in the exam. Some strict parents might restrict their child from going out to mix with friends and always reject their child’s request all the time. This will bring to the result of teenagers talking lies to their parents as they too bother of their children’s whereabouts. Other characters who will give a big influence to teenagers are friends as they are the accompany people of teenagers most of time at school. If teenagers make the wrong friends, they automatically will be motivated in wrong direction. Teenagers might tend to break the school rule that is brought electronic devices to the school because of the influences of friends. Bad friends can change a person’s perception, manners, lifestyle and even destroy he or she life (Vicodar,2014). Sometimes, teenagers tend to being dishonesty because they are anxious of being isolated in the particular group of friends. Soon, talking lies to friends become a good communication way for teenagers in order to maintain the relationship with their group of friends. Peers which involved parents and friends are also show the important sources for teenagers to adapt their behaviour in daily life. Therefore, love, trust and respect are needed in teenager’s life so that they can behave the ways on the right track.
Then comes another part of honesty which is role model among teenagers. Every teenager normally at a stage where they do not know what they want to do, be or how they want to act. But it is within everyone that having different personalities to different crowd of people is common, and those personalities are adapt within what teenagers see from their everyday life. Exhibit A, most common is the parents, teenagers tend to carry on their parent’s attitude whether if its good or bad like the quote “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Parents tend to say or do things without realising it in front of their children. They may lie in front of their children and some of it can be unfiltered lies, some children are smart to figure it out but also they tend to just keep quiet and not interfere their parent’s business. Also, not having moral values even the little things count. Parents need to constantly educate their children about moral values, being civilised, having to think and know what is right and what is wrong. Therefore, parents need to spend more time with their children, always having to look out for them regardless of any excuses. Their children, their responsibilities. Less education in moral values is due to less time spent with the family. Other than just parents as role models, there is Exhibit B which is celebrities. The entertainment world is huge and out there, teenagers can just adapt their personality or behaviour due to their favourite actors or actresses that they idolise. Whether its from a movie, television series or even by their favourite singers, but there is always a bad side to a good. Some celebrities can come out as a more violent character, a rebel type and these are the ones that catches the youth’s attention. Teenagers are lost, that is normal and they are trying to figure out themselves, while trying to figure out themselves they look up to their famous idols the ones on screen. They observe and as time passes by they start to adapt and start acting like what they see on screen; they may not realise it but it happens. As you can see a lot of celebrities gives out messages for teenagers and most of it are positive ones because they do realise that they are being idolised and for their own good image and publicity they have to give out a positive output for the teenagers to see the world in a bigger picture. On a more taboo topic, Exhibit C would be for politicians. Politicians are leaders that guides not just teenagers but adults and their responsibilities are huge so they must give out the positive in everything. It may seem like teenagers don’t really know what is going on in the politics world or they are too young to understand but as time will pass by these current teenagers will be the one leading the country. Leaders of the country are not shown as the protagonist but instead its shown as the antagonist, these leaders plays a huge impact in their country and the future and we only want the best for the coming generation so they could look up to the elders on what they have done and sacrificed for the country. In politics it is about the love and scarification towards a country, we want our younger generation to realise that it is important to have patriotism within them. Therefore, it is important for our current leaders to show good impact this will lead to a better generation and future for the country and the people. To look at it in the bigger picture parents, celebrities and politicians are people mostly teenagers look up to; therefore, these people will definitely give an impact in teenagers lives.
In addition, lack of family bonding sessions also leads teenagers to be dishonest. Family plays an important role in teenager’s life because families are the one who spend more time with teenagers. Sharing is a very effective way for parents to get in touch with their children. Moreover, sharing leads to more understanding and trust between families which is in lack in this era. Mostly, parents do not appropriately share their own feelings and disappointments to have a two-way communication rather than just ask a question. Not only that, teens usually never share their point of view and often assume things in various situations. For instance, teenagers don’t clarify things and leave with a doubtful thought. On the other hand, balancing relationship with families is also an important factor for an honest teenager. Teenagers these days are dishonest because there is no balanced relationship between parents and teenagers or any other family members. For instance, there are no formal opportunities for communication, as an example such as family occasions. Teenagers are not given a chance to communicate with their relatives about them or to share about anything. Not only that, some parents these days also often don’t ask questions in a relaxed manner , which can encourage teenagers more and lead to a better communication with their children. Above all, the whole family plays an important role on teenagers being dishonest. Most families don’t encourage teenagers for an one on one or whole group communications especially with a resistant teenager in mix. Essentially, families consider that teenagers shouldn’t get to know what are the elderly’s are talking about, because they would get influence. Of course, but sometimes they will have to know what to talk in front of teenagers and what not to. With that in mind they can mingle better with teenagers, not only that teenagers can also feel wanted and affectionate towards family members which leads to being honest to them because they wouldn’t be afraid of speaking the truth to them. Above all, building trust and reducing manipulation helps teens to solve problems. When family members tend to be closer and trustworthy, teens will get more comfortable and true to them, rather than being dishonest and scared to spill the truth or share something that has been bothering them. With that, family members should keep in mind that teenagers are also growing and they need attention and need to know things that happens in life.
In conclusion, teenagers lack in honesty due to many reasons. It’s time for all the important roles in teen’s life to realise their responsibilities and start educating the teenagers the importance of moral values in life. By doing so, teens may come out of the trap.