Teenager Crisis

While I was away for two weeks of holiday many years back, I read a book by David Elkind describing the lurching number of kids who lack the adult steerage and support they have to make a healthy transition into adultness.

His choice of title was acceptable : All Grown Up and No Place to Go.

The book goes to the guts of the issue and addresses the breakdown of parental security and stability. Deluged in the tide of social change and soaked up in their own excursion, looking for self-fulfillment and private discovery mums and dads are usually so overwhelmed that they’ve just minimal energy to speculate in their teen’s struggles.

And when you add the incontrovertible fact that today’s fogeys are caught in the crossfire of social philosophies, moral standards, and contrary price systems, even committed and well-intentioned oldsters ( particularly people who wish to lead with fairness and toleration ) regularly lack the decisiveness youths need and expect. Failing to act, we force our youths to do so, before they’re prepared.

as we are disinclined to take a firm stand, we reject teens the advantage of our parental concern and we impel them into early adulthood.

As a pa who reared 4 kids thru their teen years, I was naturally interested by any trustworthy and judicious endorse to help in making this journey as smart yet pleasing as possible. While I may not applaud everything Elkind recommended, I did find his words provocative. While gnawing on and digesting them, I was struck with a fascinating analogy between today’s kids and teen Christians. By that I mean a follower who is somewhere between youth and maturity. It’s not possible to determine this individual by years—some Christians are in the teens 2 years after conversion, others are not there until they have been in Our Lord God’s family for twenty years or longer.

But it appears that all who press on to maturity must endure such a turbulent passage. It’s tough enough to deal with the changes and handle the peer pressure and make more right calls than wrong ones during those susceptible years. I’m almost certain that it’s the teenaged believer, attempting to reach a measure of religious equilibrium, who becomes the most disillusioned when one of their “spiritual parents” defects or lives hypocritically. And that explains His eloquent caution about hanging a millstone round the necks of adults who cause people who are growing to stumble. I mostly questioned why He spoke those words with such severity. Stumbling, disillusioned followers of the frail teenage years simply lose their way en path to maturity. Perhaps that is the reason why so many in the “family” find themselves all grown up with no place to go. Growing young Christians are watching you. How much stability, integrity, and decisiveness are you demonstrating?