IN one week, the majority of adolescents who took part in a study did not talk at all with their parents and said they would not turn to their parents for help when faced with problems. This was one of the findings in a paper presented to the International Conference on Family and Community Care by Helen Ho Kit-wat and Tse Man-hang, both lecturers in the department of applied social studies, Hong Kong Polytechnic. In their study ''Perceived Parental Support and Adolescents' Problem Solving'', 56 per cent of parents said they did not talk with their children during the week of the survey. Fifteen per cent spoke for between one and 10 minutes and 10 per cent for 11 to 20 minutes and 20 to 30 minutes. A total of 2,362 secondary students from Forms One, Two and Three and their parents completed questionnaires for the study. Ms Ho said that there were two implications. Either parents really did not talk with their children or they did but in the presence of other people in the family. ''Chinese are not used to talking to their children one by one,'' she said. But she was still surprised that there was so little conversation. The study also found that, for all types of problems, less than half the students would seek help from their parents. For emotional and relationship problems they would be more likely to turn to a confidant than family for help. The research showed that parents underestimated the nature and intensity of their children's problems, in particular those related to personal relationships, faced by their adolescent children. Students ranked academic problems as their most intense, followed by worries about the future, relationships, financial and then family. Parents also put their children's academic problems at the top, but at a less intense level, followed by financial and family problems. They rated worries about the future and personal relations as less serious. The report said the findings confirmed a previous study by Caritas, which showed that: ''Parents attended mostly to the physical and material needs of the youth. They also reacted to their overt behaviour but much less to their feelings or emotional aspects of daily life. ''Parents should pay more attention and time to their children so as to understand them more and identify with their problems,'' the polytechnic report concluded.
