You take a picture on your camera or phone, and you see the result instantly. You hear a song on the radio, and you can instantly download it. You want to buy something? Browse instantly online, click “Purchase Now” and wait a day or two for the item to arrive.
These developments are a major reason middle schoolers don’t have a willingness (or the ability) to wait for anything. Our culture has trained them to expect everything instantly. Patience is a rough one; delayed gratification is a foreign concept; and slowness can have a profound impact on their lives as it’s something they simply do not experience daily.
A Culture of Information
We all live in a culture of information; so in a sense, this is not unique to middle schoolers. What is unique is that this reality is shaping them during their early adolescent development in ways that wasn’t true prior to the last decade. What’s unique is that they always have lived in a culture of information.
Almost every bit of information needed (and excessive quantities of information that aren’t wanted) is available with the click of a mouse in ways that shape our worldview. The access of information shapes middle schoolers’ culture of immediacy, their sense of entitlement and their work ethic. The onslaught of information has a numbing effect. Because everything a middle schooler needs to know is readily available, and because they are bombarded with suggestions and data of all sorts, they are less attentive to the data they encounter.
A Disposable Culture
Along with everything being accessible instantly, we live in an era of disposability. Some things, such as disposable contact lenses and printer ink cartridges, are only interacted with as throw-away items. Many more things have a sense of disposability to them, from cell phones to iPods to laptop computers.
This “use it a bit, then toss it” mentality has, as we said with other aspects of the middle-school world, been the norm for kids their whole lives. So, it naturally flows into other realms of their thinking in ways that are new to this generation.
Relationships have a sense of disposability to them these days. Knowledge has a sense of disposability to it these days. Beliefs have a sense of disposability as do affiliations, trust and truth.
A Culture of Consumerism
It’s time for us to own our complicity within the culture where middle schoolers live. Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to consumerism.
A significant portion of the still-forming identity of today’s middle schooler is just that: I am a consumer. They have learned this from the obvious places, such as advertising everywhere. (Do you remember when major sports arenas weren’t sponsored or the era before ad revenue fueled the Internet?)
Training in being a consumer comes from much more than those people in the marketing world. Almost everything and everyone in the life of young teens treat them as consumers.
Treating young teens as consumers (ready for the “ouch”?) is what most of our churches and youth ministries do, too.
This is one of those “less neutral” parts of middle-school culture that we can work to undo. Or, at least we can be intentional about not adding to it.
We adults largely created the culture in which our middle schoolers are now swimming (or drowning). Will you now help them deal with it in proactive and redemptive ways?
