“Well, back when I was in high school…”
Is that how you begin your comments to your students?
We are so good at giving advice, telling kids how to pray, who to hang out with and what to do with their time. As youth workers, it is surprisingly easy to think the training, reading and experience we bring to our work and ministry is all it takes to understand the complex and ever-changing world our kids face as they grow up.
Our words, though, can slip into the trivial bumper sticker-type of rhetoric that can end up having no impact whatsoever, or worse, being discouraging or harmful.
When we tell kids we understand their challenges because we’ve been there, we risk denying the reality that the world has been spinning fast and the landscape has become unpredictable—from relationships to technology to expectations.
Instead of claiming to know what they’re facing, sometimes the best we can do is empathize and stand with them. Every day, the adolescent maze brings more choices, and the vast majority of kids feel as if few people understand or care. Telling them you know what they’re facing because of what happened to you decades ago is no way to show you understand or care for them.
Our role is to be on the front lines of the battles they face, advocating for our kids as they move through life. To do that, we need to rise above sound bites and conventional approaches that assume growing up is the same today as it was yesterday.
That’s why we decided to take on the issue of growing up, even though we suspect some of you will read this issue cover to cover and be more confused than you were when you started.
For us at YWJ, provoking this kind of confusion is actually one of our goals: to challenge the things you think you know so you have a better sense of the battles that actually are being waged in the current state of adolescent development.
We hope you are challenged by your encounter with thinkers, practitioners and concepts in this issue and that you will be stirred to read more, study more and be more engaged in the conversation about growing up with your own kids.
Let us know what you think.
