Teenagers' experiences of parent-child relationships and their level of awareness of life's meaning

The article analyzes the peculiarities of the relationship between teenagers' experiences of parent-child relationships and the level of meaningfulness of their lives. The relevance of the research is substantiated, due to the expediency of researching parent-child relationships as an important factor in adolescents' meaningfulness of life, and, as a result, their ability to consciously experience and self-regulate negative and psychotraumatic mental states. An analysis of the results of an empirical study of the attitude of teenagers to their parents and to the family as a whole is presented, according to which, in particular, it was established that a significant number of teenagers show a positive attitude towards their mother and an ambivalent attitude towards their father. It is shown that, in general, the peculiarities of the mother's attitude towards teenagers are more vividly experienced by them than the father's attitude towards them. At the same time, the data analysis shows a certain inconsistency in the perceptions of teenagers about the attitude of their parents – positive interest and autonomy, on the one hand, and directiveness and inconsistency, on the other hand, for a fairly significant number of the studied. The results of the study of the levels of meaningfulness of life by teenagers are presented, the analysis of which allowed us to ascertain the presence of a low level in more than half of the subjects, while only one in six teenagers had a high level. At the same time, statistically significant differences were found in the peculiarities of teenagers' experience of their parents' attitude towards them, depending on the level of their awareness of the meaning of life. In particular, it is about the existence of a direct, statistically significant relationship between the adolescent's perceptions of the level of positive interest from the mother and father and the level of their meaningfulness of life. In contrast, the relationship was reversed for perceptions of both maternal and paternal inconsistency, maternal hostility, and parental directiveness. It was established that such results, taking into account the low level of meaningfulness of life characteristic of almost half of the researched, testify to the presence of a significant part of teenagers in difficult life circumstances and, accordingly, in the risk zone in the context of successfully overcoming psycho-traumatic situations in the conditions of war.