The Best of Friends
The evidence for harmony may not be obvious in some families. But it seems that four out of five young people now get on with their parents, which is the opposite of the popularly held image(印象)of unhappy agers locked in their room after endless family quarrels.
An important new study into age attitudes surprisingly shows that their family life is more harmonious than it has ever been in the past.” We were surprised by just how positive today’s young people seen to be about their families,” said one member of the research team.” They’re expected to be rebellious(叛逆的) and selfish but actually they have other things on their minds; they want a car and material goods, and they worry about whether school is serving them well. There’s more negotiation(商议) and discussion between parents and children, and children expect to take part in the family decision- process. They don’t want to rock the boat.”
So it seems that this generation of parents is much more likely than parents of 30 years ago to treat their children as friends.” My parents are happy to discuss things with me and willing to listen to me,” says 17-years-old Daniel Lazall.” I always tell them when I’m going out clubbing. As long as they know what I’m doing, they’re fine with it.”Susan Crome, who is now 21, agrees.”Looking back on the last 10 years, there was a lot of what you could call negotiation. For example, as long as I’d done all my homework ,I could go out on a Saturday night. But I think my grandparents were a lot stricter with my parents than that.”
Maybe this positive view of family life should not be unexpected. It is possible that the idea of agers’ rebellion is not rooted in real facts. A researcher comments,” Our surprise that agers say they get along well with their parents comes because of a brief period in out social history when agers were regarded as different beings. But that idea of rebelling and breaking away from their parents really only happened during that one time in the 1960s when everyone rebelled. The normal situation throughout history has been a smooth change from helping out with the family business to taking it over.”
小题1:What is the popular images of agers today?A．They worry about schoolB．They dislike living with their parentsC．They have to be locked in to avoid troublesD．They quarrel a lot with other family members小题2: The study shows that agers don’t want to ___A．share family responsibilityB．cause trouble in their familiesC．go boating with their familyD．make family decisions小题3: Compared with parents of 30 years age, today’s parents___.A．go to clubs more often with their childrenB．are much stricter with their childrenC．care less about their children’s lifeD．give their children more 小题4: According to the author, age rebellion____.A．may be a false beliefB．is common nowadaysC．existed only in the 1960sD．resulted from changes in families小题5:What is the passage mainly about?A．Negotiation in familyB．Education in familyC．Harmony in familyD．age trouble in family