Being a Teenager is Hard

This past weekend I went on a retreat with a group of 6-8th grade students. After a mere 12 hours with them, I came to this conclusion: being a teenager is hard.

Over the weekend I shared that conclusion with some adult leaders by saying, “my conversations last night reminded me how hard it is to be a young person.” Immediately a parent in the room responded something to the effect of, “Oh my, don’t you just wish they would understand that things will get better when they get to high-school”?

Upon deeper reflection, I’m not sure this is true.

The Middle School students I met were struggling with everything from deceased parents to parents with cancer to parents in the military or other life threatening professions. They were worried about brothers being sent to Afghanistan and friends doing drugs and having sex. Some of them had self-image issues, eating disorders, and patterns of cutting. They told tales of excruciating, scary, painful things. So, yes, hopefully, they will get better.

Yet again, last night after the retreat I met with some high-school students. In one, low-key, average evening, these young people expressed concerns about parents fighting and possible divorce, being betrayed by friends for seemingly no explanation, the pressures of being financially accountable to their family during these precarious economic times. One of them was having surgery this week; another absent in preparation for her grandfather’s funeral. More scary, difficult things.

This past year in the life of adults I know, there have personal trials such as stillbirths of children and cancer of parents. There has been the fear of foreclosure and the loss of jobs. There has been the despair of loved ones not loving you back. And collectively, there has been shootings, and suicides, and war, and famine, and intense political negativity.

I guess the point is this: things seem to be difficult all around. And, I’m not sure that they get better as we get older. We have a tendency to criticize our young people for being, “dramatic”. I wonder, however, if it’s less of that and more that as we get older we become more desensitized to suffering. Certainly with age comes perspective and strength and emotional maturity, but perhaps it also comes with a tinge of apathy… with a quiet surrender to things that maybe shouldn’t be accepted as normative quite so easily.

The things is, 13 year olds should be scared of brothers going off to war and friends drinking alcohol in Middle School. And our obligation as adults should not only be to comfort them and support them but also to ask important questions. Questions like: What am I as an adult doing to promote peace in the world so that young men and women have no need to go to war? And, what is happening in our society that it’s acceptable and normative for young people to start taking substances long before their brains have developed?

Rather than promising our young people that things will get better merely because we hope they well mature into an acceptance of such difficult life circumstances, I wonder what would happen if we promised our young people that things would get better because we were committed to making that true. Because we were committed to making things change.

I am under no illusion that life is easy. I know that there will always be death and disease and accidents and tragedies. And yet, I am fairly confident that it is harder to be a teenager now than it was when I was a teenager, ten years ago. And so, I feel obliged to ask: what can be done? How can we help?

How can we instill hope in our youth so that they can approach tomorrow with strength and confidence and a bit of joy?