With her permission, I’d like to tell you a bit about my daughter, Liesl. This feels a bit scary for me (because I like my daughter, and I fear – if I’m honest – that you might judge her or me). But I think it might prove helpful.
Liesl is a unique one. She has dreadlocks. Her only birthday wish when turning 18 was to get a tattoo. She has a few more piercings than I would prefer, including some in her ears that we have battled over, due to their size (of the holes, that is, not the earrings). She has what could only be described as a very unique dress sense, consisting mostly of second-hand and personally modified clothes, and a stuffed sheep backpack that she carries with her everywhere (it even has its own Facebook page). Liesl was sent home from school more than once, has caused us a few sleepless nights, lied to us, was arrested once, and has one of the messiest rooms I can imagine. And, wow, have we struggled (translation: fought) over homework.
Liesl is fairly happy. And I’m glad about that. But our primary parenting goal was never that she would be happy. Liesl is fairly ambitious and resilient, which are great traits that will serve her well in life. But ‘success’ born of ambition and resiliency have never been our primary parenting goals. Clearly, as you can tell from my description of her, Liesl is creative and unique. I love that about her. But it was never our primary parenting objective that she turn out creative and unique.
Our primary parenting goal, particularly through her sometimes-turbulent teenage years, has been that she would become an adult. She has become an adult (an aspiring adult, maybe, or an apprentice adult), and I could not be more proud.
Extended adolescence
In the last ten years, adolescence has extended so quickly that it’s almost impossible to pin it down for description. With puberty starting at younger and younger ages (ten or ten and a half is the average for girls these days), the entry point into adolescence has dropped. Of course, culture (and media, particularly) has added to this drop. But the upper end of adolescence has shifted even more dramatically.
Even 20 years ago, the upper end of adolescence in the States was firmly planted at the combination of turning 18 and graduating from high school (this, by the way, was already an extension from the cultural norm earlier in the 1900s, which had adolescence ending at 16 years old). And the ‘normal distribution’ (that bell curve which describes the 80 per cent who would be described as ‘normal’) was very narrow. Once you hit 18 and graduated, the cultural expectation was that you would start to take responsibility for yourself and function as an adult. All kinds of laws, freedoms and expectations came around that age to solidify it: the right to vote, the age one can join the military, the right to represent oneself in court or sign a legal document, the responsibility for one’s own medical care, the right to get married without parental permission, the legal drinking age (for many years.)
But massive shifts in culture at large, parenting, economics, and other forces, have extended adolescence well beyond the teenage years. Dr. Robert Epstein, a noted psychologist and former editor of Psychology Today wrote a radical book a few years ago called Teen 2.0. In the book, Epstein writes:
‘Until about a century ago…adolescence as we know it barely existed. Through most of human history, young people were integrated into adult society early on, but beginning in the late 1800s, new laws and cultural practices began to isolate teens from adults, imposing on them an increasingly large set of restrictions and artificially extending childhood well past puberty. New research suggests that teens today are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as most adults, and adulthood is delayed until well into the 20s or 30s. It’s likely that the turmoil we see among teens is an unintended result of the artificial extension of childhood.’
Hold onto your seat for this next bit: adolescent specialists now say that adolescence, on average, extends to 30 years old. In fact, adolescence is so long that it’s talked about in three stages:
Young teen (11 – 14)
Late teen (15 – 20)
Emerging adult (20 – 30)
Of course, the normal distribution (that bell curve of normal-ness) has flattened without the cultural agreement we had around 18 years old. So today we have 21 year-olds who are fully functioning as responsible adults, and 35 year-olds who are still stuck in a cycle of extended adolescence.
When I talk about this shift with parents and youth workers, they usually respond that the primary reason must be economic; that it’s more difficult for a young adult to be financially independent than it was even a decade or two ago. Certainly this is a factor, but I don’t think it’s the biggest factor (nor do those who study this).
Really, the shift is easier to understand than it might first appear. Think of it this way: if the definition of adulthood is ‘owning responsibility for one’s self’, then wouldn’t it make sense that the giving of responsibility is the thing that’s missing? It’s not (primarily) the fault of young adults and teenagers that they don’t ‘take’ responsibility. Responsibility is more often given than taken. The major shift, then, has been that we no longer provide meaningful responsibility (and the expectation that goes along with it) to teenagers and young adults. In our misguided ideas about ‘protecting’ our children, we often remove the consequences to their choices, which completely undermines the learning about responsibility that consequences provide.
The other major factor contributing to extended adolescence is the isolation of teenagers and young adults. Teenagers spend almost every waking minute in a homogeneous grouping of peers. Today’s teenagers have almost no opportunity to spend time with adults in the world of adults (the only time they spend with adults is when the adults come into the world of teenagers). As a result, teens and young adults have little opportunity to practise being what I like complex and unnerving implications for how most of us approach youth work! When teenagers spend time with adults in the world of adults, their brains are shaped, and neural pathways which serve responsibility and other adult functions are strengthened.
Too much control
So why is it that we don’t offer meaningful responsibility to young people, or opportunities to partake in the world of adults?
One word pretty much sums it up: control. Maybe it’s due to the fear so many people live with when it comes to teenagers, a fear that our world is changing so quickly, and many of those changes involved some kind of threat. I was reading Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon’s recent non-fiction book, Manhood for Amateurs, and was struck by his description about teaching his daughter to ride her bike. Chabon writes:
‘Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it – nowhere I was willing to let her go…Soon after she learned to ride, we went out together after dinner, she on her bike, with me following along at a safe distance behind. What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn’t encounter a single other child.’
I’m all for boundaries. But I want teenagers to have a rich diet of experiences and challenges and obstacles and scrapes and ‘should I or shouldn’t I?’ moments that will prepare them for adulthood. I was sitting with Dr. Robert Epstein (the author of Teen 2.0 I mentioned earlier), chatting about extended adolescence and parenting. I asked him how these ideas were shaping his own approach to parenting. He responded by saying he was trying to shift from parenting by control, to parenting by facilitation, where facilitation meant ‘identifying and nurturing competencies’. Wow - what a different and healthy mindset. What a fantastic and re-orienting approach to youth work, preparing them for adulthood.
Control is not relational. It’s mechanistic. And it doesn’t, ultimately, provide you or the teenagers in your midst with the relationship you both desire. At the end of the day, you might be able to control some aspects of a teenager’s life and behaviour and belief, but it’s a dead end that doesn’t deliver on its promise. Once you lose relationship, you hand teenage faith development over to every other shaping force in our world. But engagement delivers, because it consistently puts you both in moments of triumph and in moments of pain and failure, alongside teenagers. Relational engagement isn’t easy; it takes intentionality and time and compromise and flexibility and apologies and a willingness to be awkward. Running programmes, quite frankly, is easier and less messy.
Too much freedom
In order to grow in ‘processing strength’, teenage brains desperately need the opportunity to explore, risk, test hypotheses, and experience failure. So some amount of meaningful freedom is essential. Even young teens need to begin experiencing a certain amount of freedom as they move into the early stages of abstract thinking and exploring both how the world works and their place in it. But freedom without any boundaries at all is overwhelming and damaging to the development of teenagers.
Take the following example. When a wild animal is threatened, it has three possible responses:
• Flight. In this state, the animal, assuming the threat is more powerful, high-tails it.
• Fight. This one’s pretty obvious, right?
• Freeze. When there’s confusion on the part of the animal, as to whether it should run away or fight, it can get stuck in this state. This is the ‘deer in the headlights’ moment, and is often a source of trauma.
I offer this metaphor, because I think it explains why both freedom and boundaries are so important for teenagers. They need to be given the space to explore their world, but too much freedom can easily move teenagers either into horrible choices with enormous life-long implications (this part is more obvious), or a freeze state of not being sure how to proceed.
I have seen both ends of the spectrum – control and limitless freedom - hundreds, maybe thousands of times in teenagers. Youth ministries which attempt to control teenagers’ experiences don’t allow for the learning that comes from exploration (which should naturally lead to the learning that comes from orienting, flight, or fight). On the other hand, youth ministries which provide no boundaries at all (or boundaries that are way too wide, developmentally) can damage growth by putting young people in a place of being overwhelmed (freeze).
Tackling adolescence
I want to wrap up with a summary of sorts, in two parts. I’m wrestling with this stuff in my own practice of youth ministry, and I hope you will also.
1. I am not willing to concede that extended adolescence is a new norm. I long to see young adults who are thriving and moving fully into engaging the world around them as adults, and who take ownership of themselves.
2. I want to practise youth ministry in the tension between real ministry in the ‘real world of today’ teenagers and young adults while concurrently being counter- cultural and believing that ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’.
With that in mind:
I want to reimagine youth ministry as a developmentally appropriate on-ramp to adulthood (and all that entails – adulthood in the best sense of the word). I want to re-introduce the on-ramps to adulthood that our culture has removed.
I want to be proactive in consistently finding ways to give teenagers meaningful responsibility so they can ‘try it on’ and learn from it.
I want to provide teenagers with opportunities to spend time with adults in the world of adults.
I want to work against the constant ghettoisation of teenagers in our churches.
I want to be a champion of inter-generational relationships. And I want to integrate teenagers, whenever possible, into the life of the whole Church.
In short: let’s have a long-view, playing a key role during the teenage years, but considering the whole span of life. Let’s give teenagers the tools for a lifetime of maturity as adults.
