There have been countless books on living with teenagers, yet parents don’t seem to have _________ how to get their children to pick up their clothes from the bedroom floor. It might be difficult to accept, but a new approach to dealing with difficult teenagers is for parents to look at their own _________.

“The key to getting teenagers to respect you is to respect them first,” says Penny Palmano, who has written a best-selling book on teenagers. “You can’t _________ to treat them the same way that you have been treating them for the previous years. Imagine if you’d spent two hours getting ready to go out for the evening and someone said, ‘You’re not going out looking like that, are you?’ You’d be very _________. You’d never say that to an adult, because it shows a total _________ of respect.” Palmano has even allowed her girl to hold several teenage parties at her home. “I’ve found that if you have brought your kids up to do the right thing, and then _________ them to do it, usually they’ll behave well,” she says, “I make them sandwiches and leave them alone. But I make it clear that they have to clear up any mess. I’ve never had a(n) _________; in fact, the kitchen was sometimes cleaner than I’d left it.”

She agrees that teenagers can be annoying, enjoying a world free of responsibility, yet _________ for independence. She doesn’t think, however, that they are _________ to annoy you. Until recently, it turns out that the region of the brain that controls judgement and emotions is not fully __________until the early twenties. “This would explain why many teenagers can’t make good decisions or control their emotions. __________, they may find it difficult to make the right decision between watching television and finishing their homework. It means that they do not __________ do the wrong thing just to annoy their parents,” says Palmano.

The key to __________ for all is calm communication and compromise (妥协). If you want your teenagers to be home by 11 pm, explain why, but listen to their arguments as well. If it’s Saturday, you might __________agreeing to midnight. If they are up to 20 minutes late, don’t react angrily. __________, ask if they’ve had a problem with public transport and let it pass.

Left out of society: Vanuatu’s deaf community push for national sign language

Tasale Edward Bule, a 45-year-old fisher from Vanuatu’s Efate island, remembers the day the world went silent. “I woke up one morning and remember not hearing the birds sing, or the rooster crow,” Bule says. “I asked everyone to call my name to see if I would hear them – it was then I realised I had _________the hearing in both my ears.” The illness that took his hearing has never been clearly explained to Bule by a doctor. But at 14, and with no _________sign language or disability support, he left school, despite dreaming of one day becoming a pilot or an engineer.

Bule’s story would be _________ much of the deaf community in the Pacific country of Vanuatu. With no national sign language, most people have to_______their own ways to communicate. Some use signs they’ve developed with their families and communities, but then _________to communicate outside this group. Others, like Bule, rely largely on lip-reading to _________.

Disability advocates say this leaves the deaf community unable to participate fully in society. The group are also more _________during natural disasters, frequent in Vanuatu. Thus people are seeking to create an official language in the hope of _________life for the hard of hearing community in the Pacific nation.

_________, the government hopes to fix this too. It is currently developing a national sign language, to be called Storian wetem han, or “using hands to communicate”.

The initiative, which is funded by the Global Partnership for Education and the World Bank, has seen __________travel the country collecting signs from deaf people, and filming deaf people signing different words, which will be __________to a sign language dictionary software program and turned into a national sign language.

Once developed, Vanuatu would join Fiji, Kiribati, Samoa and Solomon Islands as Pacific nations with a national sign language, though at present Papua New Guinea is the only country where its sign language, Auslan-PNG Sign, is an officially __________national language.

The government hopes that Storian wetem han will be able to be __________fully across the country in 2024.

For now though, Arthur Simrai, a field officer for the Vanuatu Society for People Living with DisabilitySimrai, says that many of those living with hearing loss don’t __________sign language on the rare occasions that they see it. “Most of the people who can’t hear, they don’t know the sign language on the screen,” he said. “They have their own sign at home … with their family to signal or communicate what they want … but not everyone in the community know.”

If Vanuatu is able to make a __________of its national sign language, Simrai says, it would make an enormous difference to the lives of people who are deaf across the country.

As a general rule, all forms of activity lead to boredom when they are performed on a routine basis. As a matter of fact, we can see this ____ at work in people of all ages. For example, on Christmas morning, children are excited about playing with their new toys. But their ____ soon wears off and by January those ____ toys can be found put away in the basement. The world is full of ____ stamp albums and unfinished models, each standing as a monument to someone’s ____ interest. When parents bring home a pet, their child ____ bathes it and brushes its fur. Within a short time, however, the ____ of caring for the animal is handed over to the parents. Adolescents enter high school with great ____ but are soon looking forward to ____. The same is true of the young adults going to college. And then, how many adults, who now complain about the long drives to work, ____ drove for hours at a time when they first ____ their driver’s licences? Before people retire, they usually ____ to do a lot of great things, which they never had ____ to do while working. But ____ after retirement, the golfing, the fishing, the reading and all of the other pastimes become as boring as the jobs they ____. And, like the child in January, they go searching for new toys.