How to Encourage a Teenager to Take up a Hobby

Having a hobby can greatly enrich a teenager's life. Hobbies can increase physical activity and social interaction, provide stress relief and teach valuable skills.【小题1】Even so, you can use some gentle guidance to help your teens to explore their interests and find their perfect hobbies.

You can ask your teens what makes them feel good about themselves. One way to help a teenager find a hobby is to focus on their strengths and what makes them feel good. Many teens may only focus on weaknesses or things they have failed at.【小题2】

You can determine if your teens already participate in hobbies. Teenagers spend much of their life away from the eyes of parents and don't always offer up information.【小题3】Your children may be developing hobbies away from home, so you may not have to encourage them to adopt new ones. Instead, you can support their current hobbies.

【小题4】After brainstorming(头脑风暴), have your teens write down a list of interests they would like to pursue or be curious about. Then, have the teens rank the interests on a scale from 1 to 10, with I being most likely to try and 10 being least likely.

You can analyze the teens' personality.【小题5】Think about your teens. What are their character traits(特点)? What things do they get in trouble for doing? What do they gravitate towards? The answers to these questions can help them come up with ideas.

This year at the Olympic Games in Rio, you might stumble across a pretty interesting sight outside of the various stadiums holding competitions around the city.

Meet Chen Guanming, a 60-year-old Chinese farmer who pedaled his rickshaw (人力车) all the way from China to Rio. He calls himself “Olympic madman,” and surely he deserves it: this is the third Olympic Games he rode to. Brazilians welcomed him with the best friendship and a splendid show after he arrived in Rio a week earlier.

Seventeen years ago, he embarked the crazy adventure as an Olympics chaser: he toured around China before attending the Beijing Olympics in 2008, then made it to London in 2012, and now he’s in Rio. He plans to finish his global journey in Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics.

He doesn’t really have money, but strangers he met on the road have been pouring support to him: a heartfelt encouragement, a warm meal, or a lift up a hill — the rickshaw, his good buddy, carries all his luggage and weighs as heavy as 400 pounds.

Zsofia Korodi, a Hungarian living in London, set up a Facebook fan page after being “inspired by his actions,” so that supporters keep track of him. That way his journeys are pieced together, and people call out the next town to look out and take care of him. When there’s water to cross, people he met fly him over, and he will patiently wait for the rickshaw to arrive by ship.

Chen spent two years, traveled almost 40,000 miles to get to the London Olympics. For Rio, he hopped a plane to Canada and then made his way from Canada through the US, South America to Rio. Chen said he does it all to enhance the Olympic spirit. “My biggest hope is to encourage the vulnerable, the weak, and those who are afraid of challenges.”

In Rio, he’s apparently becoming an Olympic celebrity— a sportsman that compete out of the fields, with himself and gets stopped wherever he goes to take pictures. Even though he couldn’t watch the games at the scene, he’s completely happy by helping to pick trash and clean the surrounding areas of the stadiums. That’s what the Olympics is about. “It is to challenge the boundaries, to compete in a friendly manner, and to win the honor of the higher calling.” He said.

See you in Japan in 2020, Mr. Chen!

It used to be a matter of fact when Peter Pan – a character from James Matthew Barrie’s 1911 book – said: “All children, except one, grow up.”

But this “fact” doesn’t seem to apply to today’s world anymore.

According to the NPD Group, a US market research company, sales of toys to adults in the UK increased by more than 20 percent in 2016, three times the pace of the children’s toy market itself. These toys ranged from puzzles and Lego building sets to vehicle models and action figures. And more than half of the sales came from millennials – people born between the 1980s and 2000s.

“Adults of the 21st century are channeling (疏导) their inner child, one toy at a time,” commented website Koreaboo. This is also why these adults are sometimes referred to as “kidults”.

According to Frederique Tutt, an analyst at NPD, the motivation of these grown-ups is to escape the stress of today’s fast-paced world. They are driven toward the more immediate pleasures brought by toys than those brought by, say, getting a promotion, which is far less easy to achieve.

“It reminds me of the playful side of life,” Rob Willner, a 25-year-old PhD student in the UK, told The Telegraph when talking about his love for Lego, which he said brings him both comfort and entertainment.

Despite this, some social scientists see the trend as disturbing. To Frank Furendi, a professor at the University of Kent in the UK, the fact that so many adults are pursuing “the thrills (刺激) of youth” is the evidence that “adulthood has got nothing attractive about it anymore”, he told The New York Times.u “That’s actually quite sad.”

But scientists are probably just worrying too much. According to Canadian comic book artist Todd McFarlane, collecting toys could simply be a way for people to express their individuality (个性).

“It’s just pop culture stuff. It’s stuff that says, ‘I like a little of this and I like a little of that’,” he told ABC News. “[It’s] no big deal.”

So now that over 100 years have passed since Peter Pan, perhaps it’s time to introduce a new “fact”, as stated in the tagline (品牌宣传词) of the UK fashion brand KIDULT: “Growing old is mandatory (强制性的), but growing up is optional.”