Growing Pains

'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 ten days.
Mainly, we learned that teenagers are as abusive to each other as they are towards
adults. But it was interesting to see how they take their cue not solely from adults or
peers but also from the media. 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, 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 often choose to employ young, mainly charismatic individuals as youth
workers? They are often not accepted by the church as bona fide members of the
adult congregation, so how do we expect them to model adulthood and build bridges
between young and older? This is especially true if we continue to carve out separate
spaces for young people in our churches, rather than allowing them to interact with
adults.

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 that 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 on 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 problems 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 from dependence to
independence, but to interdependence; adulthood involves acknowledging that
although people have responsibilities to us, we have responsibilities to them.
The Jewish celebration of Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah accomplishes this by
combining a sense of reaching adulthood with a commitment to follow God's
commandments. Bar Mitzvah means 'son of the commandment'; Bat means daughter
and refers to the sabbath following a child's 13th birthday when they read the Torah
aloud for the first time.

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.

Jason Gardner
This article first appeared in LICC's Eg magazine, December 2003.

Discussion

At your next board meeting, cell group or Sunday Service why not discuss the
following questions?
What is an Adult?

• Within 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?

Archive...

Comments

There are currently no comments for this article.

Leave a comment

Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in /var/www/vhosts/licc.org.uk/application/default/controllers/ArticleController.php on line 160