Students and Their Friends
September 21, 2009
(Straight from Chap Clark’s Hurt)
Kyle, a junior on the football team, and I were in the midst of a conversation about his life, his parents, and his friends. Kyle was among the most fortunate of the midadolescents I knew. His parents were married, they seemed to like each other, and the family was as stable as any. He was cared for, and his parents were supportive and active in his life.
The longer we talked (this had been the fifth or sixth occasion we had spent time one-on-one), the more he allowed me to glimpse the tougher aspects of his life. When he talked about his father, a “man’s man” who seemed to be “more into my football than I am,” the incongruity he felt in the relationship was clear. Kyle loved and even liked his dad, but he sensed somewhere inside that, while his father loved him, at times he was more interested in his accomplishments than in him. Kyle was not observably scarred, but he saw his dad as a relatively distant driver who wanted success for his son. When it came to his mom, Kyle said she was great and “of course” he loved her. Then Kyle made the statement, “My parents don’t know me…The only people who really know me are my friends.”
Do you think your son or daughter would say the same thing? Think back on your relationship with your mom or dad. Could you say the same thing about them? Maybe, maybe not. For many different reasons, friendships are the increasingly becoming the relationships that teens put the most stock in. That’s NOT saying that the peer-to-peer relationship has the most influence on the outcome on a teen’s life, however. It is still researched and documented that parents are the number one force and factor on shaping a child’s life. What this example from Clark offers us is a glimpse into the trend of our students becoming more distant and not as relationally open with adults/parents as they are with their friends.
Teens are driven by the need to belong. The need to belong is as strong as any primal instinct could ever be. Their need to belong is a natural and needed part of the maturation process. Teens actually want to belong to their families as they grow up into adulthood. What happens, though, is that as the relationship changes through adolescence, naturally arising conflict occurs between both teens and parents, and walls form around a parent’s and a teen’s heart. Teens don’t know how to properly manage conflict in healthy ways (unless the parent can show them how to bring reconciliation into the relationship), and teens isolate themselves from parents by relying more on their friendships.
Parents and adults have to tap into that need to create a place of belonging. Teens are going to naturally gravitate towards their friendships because of the shared struggles and sense of community that their friendships provide. Friendships are heatlhy, but isolation into those friendships are not. The sense of belonging a teen feels in their peer-to-peer friendship also needs to be nurtured between the teen and the adult community.
Teens feel that their friends are the only people in the world that could ever possibly know who they really are. We, the adults, need to prove them wrong by getting to know our teens.
1. Who are their top three friends?
2. What was the last argument they got into with their best friend?
3. What’s their favorite song right now? Why? What are the lyrics?
4. What do they have hanging in their locker right now? Have you asked them?
5. What the newest career they’ve considered pursuing?
6. When’s the last time they laughed so hard they’ve cried?
Friendships are what teens need, but they need adult relationships to balance their relational sphere of experiences. We, the adults, have to have the desire to know our teens. We don’t want our teens to repeat Kyle’s sentiments if we can help it, and we can.
The Calloused Hearts of Teens
September 18, 2009
[Teenagers] have little trust in adults and therefore do not trust them with the intimate reality of their lives. These fragile young people are not pretending to be callous. They are instead wearing their toughness like a shield to protect them from further disappointment.
Adults get this feeling from teens a lot when we’re in their prescence. We may not feel outright animosity from teens; the toughness teens wear can more often than not take on a shade of indifference, a pretending of us not even being in the same room.
Maybe this shield of toughness is one of the markers that makes adults feel that teens are so full of angst and so driven to be an independent and privately owned culture. I can think of two young men that fit that profile right now. When I first began to get acquainted with them, they were stern of look, as tall as I, wore dark clothes and were fairly unresponsive to any of my attempts to communicate with them.
It took probably two months worth of them coming on Sundays, sitting and listening and observing everything that went on in our Sunday youth programming, before they opened up. I remember asking them to tell me their story, and it was only after two months of knowing them that they let me in. Their stories had elements of toughness, family confusion, trust confusion, isolation, numbness, and yet their stories still had hope. They had a steely peice to them that kept them going.
Consistency. “Being There” over a long period of time. That’s what it takes for parents and other adults to bridge the relational gap between the adult world and youth culture. They are wanting their parents and other adults to want them. They are wanting adults to be curious about them, curious about their lives, curious about their stories.
Consistency and Curiosity. Those to values, more than any other, can soften the toughness and help bring down the walls surrounding a teen’s heart. If you’re a parent or an adult wanting to connect with a son, daughter, or teen that is special to you, consider the following:
1. How curious are you about your teen’s life? How many questions per day do you ask them something about them, their life, their story?
2. How often do you set aside unstructured, purely relationship-building time with them?
3. How do you respond when you’re confronted with the walls of your teen? Anger? Pain? Confusion? Doubt that your efforts are working?
4. What is God calling you to do for your teen that you are afraid to commit to?