By Victoria, Peer Health Educator
A healthy relationship isn’t only possible between two people who are boyfriend or girlfriend, or husband or wife, but rather with anyone you have any type of relationship. This relationship could also be between you, your mother, father, brother, sister, and teachers. So what makes a relationship a healthy one?
Healthy relationships do take a lot of mutual work, but all the effort is worth it in the end. I’ve come to learn this through personal experience. My mother and I are always with each other, every minute of the day. I do enjoy it and we have our laughs here and there, but besides all the happy times we do bump heads. I thought it was the typical mother and daughter friction until recently when I noticed that it had been happening a lot more. I decided to talk to my mom and ask her why she believed this was happening more often. Turns out that a lot of it has to do with my behavior, and what I’m not doing.
My mother mentioned to me that there were a few things that could helpimprove our relationship:
- Respect – Respect could be many things. In my case, the respect that I needed to practice was to avoid being narrow-minded and to understand that my mother’s views and my own aren’t always going to be the same, but that’s okay.
- Accountability – Accountability is taking responsibility for your actions. I didn’t take responsibility in my actions because I saw them as something normal, when in reality they were things that were harming the relationship that I have with my mother.
- Trust – Trust is putting faith in the person with whom you share a relationship. I had to put trust in my mother to tell me what I need to work on to improve our relationship.
- Communication – Communication is exchanging opinions or information with another person. For one of the very first times, my mother and I decided to talk about what was happening in our relationship, and honestly it did benefit us.
Keeping these things in mind could help you have a healthier relationship, just like they helped my mother and me. You can also learn more about having a healthy relationship with your family at teensource.org.