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Selfish vs. selfless: if you're stuck between trying to get what you want & feeling pressure to let others get what they want, it's time to learn the art of compromise!

Article Excerpt
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Shortly after he finished the sixth grade, Ben Elliot's family situation changed dramatically. That summer, he and his mother moved from New York City to Pennsylvania with his soon-to-be-stepdad and stepsiblings. Before that, Ben had lived with just his mother and father. For Ben, the challenge of sharing space and attention with a new brother and sister was sometimes difficult.

"It was definitely a weird transition to suddenly be living with two other kids," Ben, now an 11th-grader at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania, tells Choices. "We'd bicker a lot when we first started living together."

One early source of tension involved choosing bedrooms. In New York City, Ben had a large bedroom, but in the new house his stepsiblings, Gus and Vera, got first dibs. Ben ended up stuck with the smallest room. "My room's all right, but it is smaller than the rest of them," Ben says.

Struggle Within

In Ben's case, it would have been easy to act selfishly and turn the bedroom situation into a major fight. Teens face situations all the time among family and friends where they have a choice between being selfish, which is getting what they want at the expense of others, and being selfless, which is giving up what they want to make others happy. There is, however, a third option: working out a solution so that everyone involved wins in some way.

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Believe it or not, every teen can learn how to make the third option happen. It comes down to learning how to look at problems from viewpoints different from your own. That is challenging for teens because "toddlers and teenagers go through a very similar phase called developmental egocentrism," says Dr. Sara Fraser, a clinical psychologist who works with young people and families in Los Angeles, California. "For toddlers, they truly believe statements like 'the sun sets because I go to bed.' Whereas a teenager believes, 'I've got a zit on my chin, everybody must be staring at it and everybody must be talking about the zit on...

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