2) Children don’t pay any attention to their parents, only to their peers.

When you’re a teen, it’s only natural to prefer talking to your peers than your parents. Your parents are old and tell the same stories over and over; with your friends, you hear new, funny stories every day. Technology enables us to keep in contact with our friends at all times. When you’re at school or college, you see your friends in person, and when you’re at home, you’re SMSing, Facebooking, tweeting, or Skyping them. It’s a never-ending cycle, which leaves us with close to no time to spend with our parents.

3) Children use slang on purpose to confuse their parents

Secondly, teenagers’ language and their wish to hide information from their parents or a desire to show off speaking like a stranger. Perhaps one of the worst things is that some of teenagers speak in unknowing slang or use Internet terms a lot. Just as parents were beginning to get the hang of “LOL” and “OMG”, their smart children started running around screaming “LIKE A BOSS!” after every spoken verb and grinning (creepily), “YOU MAD?” Parents also don’t understand how children can sit listening to this weird, repetitive Pop Tart cat song for hours on end. New generation is a really confusing bunch.

Even modern magazines try to knock into teenagers’ heads that parents are not monsters that forbid everything in order to enjoys the parental authorities, parents are people who will love and care for their offspring despite everything.

There is an extract from teenage magazine “ Teen People” that can help adolescents to improve their relations with parents. “If you genuinely want to improve your relationship with your parents (and give them a big shock in the bargain!) try listening to them, treating them just like you would listen to a valued friend. Instead of always whining, 'You don't understand me", stop and think. Do we ever try and understand them? Parents are under a lot of stress, too. When we are worrying about our upcoming Math exam, they are worrying about the boss in the office, and just how they are going to pay for our braces. Like us, they have days when someone humiliates them at work. Sometimes, they don't know where the money for all the applications you send to foreign universities is going to come from. Your mom may seldom have a chance to go out and enjoy herself. Your dad's colleagues may deride him because he cannot afford membership to a club.

Yes, weird though it may sound, parents are human too. They may have dreams they've sacrificed because they want you to realize yours. Once you step into their shoes and try to look at things from their point of view, two wonderful things happen; one, you feel a new respect for them, and two, you will find that you can actually get your own way without heated arguments”.

Conclusion

We can’t blame anyone for the generation gap, neither the elders nor the young generation. But by making certain efforts, generation gap can be reduced to some extent. Most efforts must come from the parents as they have the wisdom and patience to deal with the children.

Generation gap is basically created by the people themselves. They don’t talk to their children and share their own points of views with the children. The point is that the parents are just so busy with their work and jobs that they don’t have time for their family and their children. And they realize it when there has a huge distance between the kids and the parents. The point is if parents give their children some time from their busy schedule then there would be no such problem. At times you need to act as a friend to your children in order understands them more nicely.

Personal View

I believe that the most important responsibility for parents apart from bringing up children, providing for them etc is instilling values in the children. Value systems are the building blocks to character which is probably the best heirloom that children can inherit from their parents.

So there will be a generation gap if value transfer stops. But it is very fashionable to take trivial things as the basis for generation gap as it exists today. What people take to be a generation gap is often the different metrics people use for the same values. Values are fundamental but I think everyone can have his or her own metric to measure the values. My parents instilled values in me but I can see before my eyes how they measure the same values are sometimes different from mine and of course the eventual tensions accompany them. I know that my kids will raise hell when the same comes to them, but I know the challenge is to ensure that the difference lies only in the metrics and not the values.