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Growing pains

Jason Gardner from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity asks what it means to grow up at a time when the boundaries between childhood and adulthood seem increasingly blurred

"Adolescence is like a tightrope walk from the secure, safe platform of childhood to adulthood. Suddenly the world becomes a difficult and dangerous balancing act – which the whole world seems to be watching." Hazel, 16

A recent foray by The Times into the world of teenagers provided much food for thought, plus a handy arsenal of quotes (like the one above) which will please analysts of youth culture no end. Penny Wark’s report – In Our Own Words: What it’s like to be a teenager (13/10/03) – revealed, in a series of interviews, what teenagers think about sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and, most importantly, growing up.

When Hazel said that ‘the whole word seems to be watching’, she can’t have known how prophetic her words would seem. In the week the report was published, Channel 4 aired Teen Big Brother – a supposedly ‘educational’ experiment in which eight 18-year-olds shared the Big Brother house for 10 days.

The teenage BB community made instant judgements about fellow contestants, accompanied by much backbiting; they also began expressing how the experience was making them two-faced, and displaying angst when nominating others for eviction – which echoed the ‘adult’ Big Brother series to the letter.

When a heavy media focus on teen life combines with our adult obsession for either living or looking ‘young’, it’s little wonder that many young people feel confused and pressured over issues of image and identity during adolescence. It’s also no surprise that many feel confused over what it means to be an adult.

If, for example, there was little difference between the way adult contestants of Big Brother and the teens behaved, should we conclude that teenagers have already reached the level of maturity our society expects of them? Or, perhaps more importantly, the level of maturity that TV and the media requires of them?

How does one, exactly, ‘grow up’? As one Times teen put it, achieving adulthood is an unappealing proposition: "Growing up – what a tedious task. Caught between wanting more freedom, more trust and responsibility, yet at the same time afraid of that responsibility and all it and growing up entails, although few will admit it," said Georgina, 16, of Stowmarket.

Do we have a clear notion of what it means to be an adult within our society? What does ‘growing up’ accomplish, and do we understand what it means to be an adult in the church?

Teenagers and children do take their cue from ‘grown up’ role models – it’s we who establish what it means to be adult. But if that’s the case, in church, for example, why do we primarily choose to employ young, mainly charismatic individuals as youth workers?

Ecclesiastical issues aside, there are many reasons why the idea of ‘adulthood’ has been eroded over the last century. Once, the move from childhood to adulthood was relatively easily marked. As the psychologist Christine Griffin suggests in Representations of Youth (Polity Press, 1993): "in pre-industrial European societies there was no clear distinction between childhood and other pre-adult phases of life. The main stages of childhood, youth and adulthood were defined primarily in relation to one’s degree of dependence or separation from the family of origin."

Adulthood came with economic ‘emancipation’ – the ability to support yourself (or contribute to the support of the family) through work or by getting married during your early teen years. Then, in the early 20th century, came the concept of ‘adolescence’ (from the French, meaning ‘to grow up’), when a limbo period of identity struggle became the norm for ‘teenagers’ everywhere.

According to Nancy Lesko in Act Your Age (Routledge, 2001), social scientists perceived a need to extend the period during which children were dependent upon adults. They deemed that in order to become fully fledged members of ‘normal’ adult society, children required more ‘training’ – and so further education was established and enforced. This was meant to provide boys and girls with a rigorous diet of learning and physical discipline, and keep them financially dependent on adults for longer. Strict education was seen as a way of instilling self-discipline within the young, helping them to guard against – and cope with – the potentially upsetting distractions of puberty.

However, this focus on adolescence served to emphasise the need to control the behaviour of young people (an obsession our society has not grown out of) and established the teen years as the difficult period we are familiar with today – helping to blur the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Adolescence became one of the early 20th century’s most enduring self-fulfilling prophecies: every parent still expects their child to turn into Harry Enfield’s Kevin, and every young person understands that angst is the coda of childhood.

Adulthood used to be perceived as a period of relative emotional and financial stability, as Nick Lee suggests in Childhood and Society (Open University, 2001). But fixed measurements such as starting work, getting married and getting a mortgage are breaking down, too. Many people don’t start work until 22 or more. A job is no longer ‘for life’; and consequently, we no longer remain in a fixed geographical location for very long. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to get your foot on the first rung of the property ladder. And with so many children witnessing the break-up of their parents’ marriages, it’s hard for them to believe that adulthood will offer any more emotional stability than adolescence.

Consumerism and media culture also generate instability by perpetuating the period of adolescent ‘identity shopping’. If you’re still searching for the real ‘you’, the chances are that you’re going to do that through spending money – by changing your taste in music and fashion, and lining the pockets of others along the way. As David Lyon summarises in Jesus in Disneyland (Polity Press, 2000):

"The most anxious identity crises tend to occur in adolescence, but it is easy to see how this stage can be exploited by marketers. Artificially delaying the arrival of adulthood, and thus extending the period of identity exploration, is an obvious ploy, seen archetypally in Disneyland but in many other contexts as well."

It doesn’t help that we have no defined celebrations of childhood’s end – only confusing distances between legal acknowledgements of adulthood: you can get married, smoke, join the army and have sex at 16, but you have to wait until 18 to vote, drink and watch what you like at the cinema.

With little tradition in our society to celebrate the journey into adulthood, is it any wonder that teens place great significance on creating their own rites of passage with peers? Rites that seek to imitate the ‘independence’ of adulthood – which may revolve around smoking, drinking, sex, drugs and joyriding.
Interestingly, Wark notes that it was the children from strongly religious families, mainly Asian, who experienced the least problem coping with adolescence:

"Six of the 36 teenagers I interviewed are Asian and each was remarkably calm – sorted, they would say. Their families are strong and structured, they live in a defined community and their religious faith means that many of the complications teenagers feel they need to address – sex, drinking, drug taking – are not options so they don’t have to worry about them – and they don’t."

Today, the journey from dependence to independence is fraught and perplexing; as adults, we stave off responsibility for as long as we can, while we encourage children to develop a taste for older fashions and increase their purchasing power. Marketers identified the ‘tweenage’ (8-12-year-old) target market, and companies have created fashion and make-up brands specifically for them.

It is possible, however, to create positive boundaries for young people – ones that have less to do with them celebrating their rights as an individual and more to do with them acknowledging responsibilities. We should encourage them to see that the journey from childhood to adulthood does not take them for dependence to independence, but to interdependence; adulthood involves acknowledging that although people have responsibilities to us, we have responsibilities to them.

The Jewish celebrations of Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah accomplish this by combining a sense of reaching adulthood with a commitment to follow God’s commandments. On the Sabbath following a child’s 13th birthday the Bar Mitzvah (son of the commandment) or Bat Mitzvah (daughter of the commandment) read the Torah aloud for the first time in the Synagogue.

This is just the beginning of a conversation. We live at a time when much communal tradition has been eradicated without anything of significance being offered to replace it. The Church, perhaps, might begin by exploring its role not as an upholder of the past at all costs, but as a community that can demonstrate the value of meaningful ritual within our culture. Celebrating the amazing journey from childhood to adulthood would be an excellent place to start.

Discussion
At your next board meeting, cell group or Sunday Service why not discuss the following questions:

What is an adult?
Without your culture, what social experiences or responsibilities help to inform a child that they are now an adult?
Within your church, what informs a child they are becoming an adult?
As adult church members, what are our responsibilities to:
Children?
Adolescents?
Young Adults?

extract from eg magazine, produced by The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC)

© Christian Family Network
is run by CPO, supported by
Care for the Family, Marriage Resource, Positive Parenting,
Care, Women Alive, Christian Herald and many others.


		RESOURCES Growing pains Jason Gardner from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity asks what it means to grow up at a time when the boundaries between childhood and adulthood seem increasingly blurred "Adolescence is like a tightrope walk from the secure, safe platform of childhood to adulthood. Suddenly the world becomes a difficult and dangerous balancing act – which the whole world seems to be watching." Hazel, 16 A recent foray by The Times into the world of teenagers provided much food for thought, plus a handy arsenal of quotes (like the one above) which will please analysts of youth culture no end. Penny Wark’s report – In Our Own Words: What it’s like to be a teenager (13/10/03) – revealed, in a series of interviews, what teenagers think about sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and, most importantly, growing up. When Hazel said that ‘the whole word seems to be watching’, she can’t have known how prophetic her words would seem. In the week the report was published, Channel 4 aired Teen Big Brother – a supposedly ‘educational’ experiment in which eight 18-year-olds shared the Big Brother house for 10 days. The teenage BB community made instant judgements about fellow contestants, accompanied by much backbiting; they also began expressing how the experience was making them two-faced, and displaying angst when nominating others for eviction – which echoed the ‘adult’ Big Brother series to the letter. When a heavy media focus on teen life combines with our adult obsession for either living or looking ‘young’, it’s little wonder that many young people feel confused and pressured over issues of image and identity during adolescence. It’s also no surprise that many feel confused over what it means to be an adult. If, for example, there was little difference between the way adult contestants of Big Brother and the teens behaved, should we conclude that teenagers have already reached the level of maturity our society expects of them? Or, perhaps more importantly, the level of maturity that TV and the media requires of them? How does one, exactly, ‘grow up’? As one Times teen put it, achieving adulthood is an unappealing proposition: "Growing up – what a tedious task. Caught between wanting more freedom, more trust and responsibility, yet at the same time afraid of that responsibility and all it and growing up entails, although few will admit it," said Georgina, 16, of Stowmarket. Do we have a clear notion of what it means to be an adult within our society? What does ‘growing up’ accomplish, and do we understand what it means to be an adult in the church? Teenagers and children do take their cue from ‘grown up’ role models – it’s we who establish what it means to be adult. But if that’s the case, in church, for example, why do we primarily choose to employ young, mainly charismatic individuals as youth workers? Ecclesiastical issues aside, there are many reasons why the idea of ‘adulthood’ has been eroded over the last century. Once, the move from childhood to adulthood was relatively easily marked. As the psychologist Christine Griffin suggests in Representations of Youth (Polity Press, 1993): "in pre-industrial European societies there was no clear distinction between childhood and other pre-adult phases of life. The main stages of childhood, youth and adulthood were defined primarily in relation to one’s degree of dependence or separation from the family of origin." Adulthood came with economic ‘emancipation’ – the ability to support yourself (or contribute to the support of the family) through work or by getting married during your early teen years. Then, in the early 20th century, came the concept of ‘adolescence’ (from the French, meaning ‘to grow up’), when a limbo period of identity struggle became the norm for ‘teenagers’ everywhere. According to Nancy Lesko in Act Your Age (Routledge, 2001), social scientists perceived a need to extend the period during which children were dependent upon adults. They deemed that in order to become fully fledged members of ‘normal’ adult society, children required more ‘training’ – and so further education was established and enforced. This was meant to provide boys and girls with a rigorous diet of learning and physical discipline, and keep them financially dependent on adults for longer. Strict education was seen as a way of instilling self-discipline within the young, helping them to guard against – and cope with – the potentially upsetting distractions of puberty. However, this focus on adolescence served to emphasise the need to control the behaviour of young people (an obsession our society has not grown out of) and established the teen years as the difficult period we are familiar with today – helping to blur the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Adolescence became one of the early 20th century’s most enduring self-fulfilling prophecies: every parent still expects their child to turn into Harry Enfield’s Kevin, and every young person understands that angst is the coda of childhood. Adulthood used to be perceived as a period of relative emotional and financial stability, as Nick Lee suggests in Childhood and Society (Open University, 2001). But fixed measurements such as starting work, getting married and getting a mortgage are breaking down, too. Many people don’t start work until 22 or more. A job is no longer ‘for life’; and consequently, we no longer remain in a fixed geographical location for very long. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to get your foot on the first rung of the property ladder. And with so many children witnessing the break-up of their parents’ marriages, it’s hard for them to believe that adulthood will offer any more emotional stability than adolescence. Consumerism and media culture also generate instability by perpetuating the period of adolescent ‘identity shopping’. If you’re still searching for the real ‘you’, the chances are that you’re going to do that through spending money – by changing your taste in music and fashion, and lining the pockets of others along the way. As David Lyon summarises in Jesus in Disneyland (Polity Press, 2000): "The most anxious identity crises tend to occur in adolescence, but it is easy to see how this stage can be exploited by marketers. Artificially delaying the arrival of adulthood, and thus extending the period of identity exploration, is an obvious ploy, seen archetypally in Disneyland but in many other contexts as well." It doesn’t help that we have no defined celebrations of childhood’s end – only confusing distances between legal acknowledgements of adulthood: you can get married, smoke, join the army and have sex at 16, but you have to wait until 18 to vote, drink and watch what you like at the cinema. With little tradition in our society to celebrate the journey into adulthood, is it any wonder that teens place great significance on creating their own rites of passage with peers? Rites that seek to imitate the ‘independence’ of adulthood – which may revolve around smoking, drinking, sex, drugs and joyriding. Interestingly, Wark notes that it was the children from strongly religious families, mainly Asian, who experienced the least problem coping with adolescence: "Six of the 36 teenagers I interviewed are Asian and each was remarkably calm – sorted, they would say. Their families are strong and structured, they live in a defined community and their religious faith means that many of the complications teenagers feel they need to address – sex, drinking, drug taking – are not options so they don’t have to worry about them – and they don’t." Today, the journey from dependence to independence is fraught and perplexing; as adults, we stave off responsibility for as long as we can, while we encourage children to develop a taste for older fashions and increase their purchasing power. Marketers identified the ‘tweenage’ (8-12-year-old) target market, and companies have created fashion and make-up brands specifically for them. It is possible, however, to create positive boundaries for young people – ones that have less to do with them celebrating their rights as an individual and more to do with them acknowledging responsibilities. We should encourage them to see that the journey from childhood to adulthood does not take them for dependence to independence, but to interdependence; adulthood involves acknowledging that although people have responsibilities to us, we have responsibilities to them. The Jewish celebrations of Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah accomplish this by combining a sense of reaching adulthood with a commitment to follow God’s commandments. On the Sabbath following a child’s 13th birthday the Bar Mitzvah (son of the commandment) or Bat Mitzvah (daughter of the commandment) read the Torah aloud for the first time in the Synagogue. This is just the beginning of a conversation. We live at a time when much communal tradition has been eradicated without anything of significance being offered to replace it. The Church, perhaps, might begin by exploring its role not as an upholder of the past at all costs, but as a community that can demonstrate the value of meaningful ritual within our culture. Celebrating the amazing journey from childhood to adulthood would be an excellent place to start. Discussion At your next board meeting, cell group or Sunday Service why not discuss the following questions: What is an adult? Without your culture, what social experiences or responsibilities help to inform a child that they are now an adult? Within your church, what informs a child they are becoming an adult? As adult church members, what are our responsibilities to: Children? Adolescents? Young Adults? extract from eg magazine, produced by The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC) © Christian Family Network is run by CPO, supported by Care for the Family, Marriage Resource, Positive Parenting, Care, Women Alive, Christian Herald and many others.