Elevate

Youth Ministry in an Age of Delayed Adulthood by Chap Clark is probably the clearest article that I’ve read yet to day about this stage in development called “adolescence.”

If you want to read only one article about adolescence, make it this article. It will expand the way you look at anybody from age 10 to the mid-20′s.

Quotes:

The problem is that when a culture lacks rites of passage designed to prepare and train young people for adulthood (like ours), and then removes almost every definable ritual signpost from childhood to adulthood (like ours), it’s very difficult to agree on when adolescence ends and adulthood begins.

David Elkind of Tufts University (Ties That Stress: The New Family Imbalance), a leading voice in cultural change, argues that most relational, social rules are passé and postmodern parents and adults have abandoned kids and adolescents in order to “take care of their own needs.” Thus in a postmodern world, where kids have been on their own to discover what it means to live, relativism is the emerging philosophy of the day—and adulthood is a distant, unattractive endgame of adolescence. And the young float through life trying to survive one day at a time.

Posted in: cultural radar