Popular New Year’s resolutions for teens this year

Teen Columnist, The Friday Flyer

Everyone who has ever attempted one before knows this simple fact: New Year’s Resolutions are hard. Hard to stick to, hard to complete and hard to achieve overall. The most popular New Year’s Resolutions for teens are: to get healthy, be a better person by volunteering and supporting charities, to show more love for families, to be a better friend, to get better in school, to be a role model and to make some money.

There are many ways to keep your New Year’s resolutions, but the biggest challenge for a lot of people is getting over their own minds to achieve their goals. Temptations make people forget all about what they want for themselves, so in order to complete a resolution, a person must keep in mind how they will feel when they do. One action you make throughout the year to break your resolution will not be remembered as the feeling of achievement will be.

One way to volunteer more as a teen is to go to your school’s career center where community service opportunities are constantly posted. Community service takes a lot of hard work and focus, but in some ways it can also be fun. When performing community service opportunities, inviting friends can make it a lot more fun and enjoyable. When something turns out to be fun, it is a lot more tempting to go back so trying to enjoy oneself while doing community service will most likely lead to more volunteering in the future. Also, to support a charity in the community, a person should do plenty of research before donating and helping to see which charities will be the most helpful to people. At some schools it is a requirement to have 40 hours of community service, but if this is your resolution you should try to go beyond the requirement.

Showing more love for family is a resolution I have attempted before. I got through the beginning of the year pretty well but began to forget about my goal as the year went on. Even if your family annoys you at times, you need to put that at the back of your mind and remember all the things that they have done that you should love them for. As a teenager, disrespecting your family and getting annoyed by them is very easy to do. It just naturally happens and no one ever has an intention to hurt their family or be disrespectful, but it is something we have to get control of. Making this your New Year’s resolution will help a lot with controlling feelings and having a better at-home life.

Being a better friend is kind of a hard thing to wish for. For a person to be a true friend, they need to accept you for who you are and not wish you were something else. However, if you are mistreating someone who really is a true friend this is a good resolution for you. If you can tell that saying some things or playfully making fun of a friend hurts their feelings, it needs to stop because that could potentially mean the loss of a really good friend.

Getting better in school is all in the head of the person who made the goal. They are in control of most of their school life and the choice to do well or not rests on their shoulders. One way to improve in school is working harder on homework. Homework is mainly the base for all classes. Sure, the homework category is usually smaller than the test category, but missing assignments do not only affect that category. Missing homework also means less practice for the tests. One way I motivate myself to keep studying when all I want to do is go to sleep is to tell myself that at the end of the week when I get two days off I will be really proud of myself for just making it through the week with all of my assignments completed and successful scores on all tests. Once you start improving on tests and grades go up, you will be motivated to keep it going.

Finally, a big resolution for teenagers is to make more money. Of course, the easiest way to do this is to get a job. Getting a job can be hard for a teen because they need to work out their schedule with their workplace. Teens need to find a workplace that is supportive of changes to their working schedule to keep school as the first priority.

Once again, New Year’s resolutions are very difficult, and will forever be a challenge to anyone who decides to attempt one, but if you stick to it, it can change your life for the better.