3 Big Questions That Change Every Teenager

Making the Most of Your Conversations and Connections

• Editorial: Baker Books
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781493430314
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Ministry

Today's teenagers are the most anxious, creative, and diverse generation in history--which can make it hard for us to relate. And while every teenager is a walking bundle of questions, three rise above the rest: - Who am I?
- Where do I fit?
- What difference can I make? Young people struggle to find satisfying and life-giving answers to these questions on their own. They need caring adults willing to lean in with empathy, practice listening, and gently point them in the direction of better answers: they are enough because of Jesus, they belong with God's people, and they are invited into God's greater story. In this book, which is based on new landmark research from the Fuller Youth Institute and combines in-depth interviews with data from 1, 200 diverse teenagers, Kara Powell and Brad M. Griffin offer pastors, youth leaders, mentors, and parents practical and proven conversations and connections that help teenagers answer their three biggest questions and reach their full potential.

Part 1

1
The Big Questions Every Teenager Is Asking

I’ve been slowly reflecting more on what it means to be a Christian, and I feel like I still don’t know where exactly I fit into everything.

In middle school, I used to see everything as right and wrong because I was just learning the foundations. But as I eventually moved to high school and started learning critical thinking and that kind of thing, I’ve been slowly exploring the in-between areas. So I feel like I’m still trying to figure out my faith.

Lilly

As a twelfth grader, one student took a big risk and faced some big questions.

In ninth grade, she had been driven by one singular question: How can I successfully navigate my new twenty-five-hundred-student high school? Other than a few junior varsity swim meets when her fairly desperate coach dubbed her temporary (and last-minute) cocaptain, leadership wasn’t in the picture. Surviving her growing homework load and shifting friendships were accomplishments enough.

As a tenth grader, with a year of classes and friendship under her belt, she started wondering, How can I be a leader on campus without risking an election loss? She found failure (public or not) unnerving. Gratefully, that question was answered when she applied for and was selected by teachers to serve as class secretary.

The next year she interviewed and was chosen by the student senate to be secretary of the school’s student body. Then her English teacher asked her to be coeditor of the school paper. Between the newspaper and student government, she viewed herself—and was known to others—as a visible and active leader on campus.

Few eleventh graders had climbed so high up the school’s student leadership ladder without winning a single election.

That streak ended senior year when she decided to run—in an election—for student body president. She and her campaign team gave away handfuls of candy, all plastered with creative slogans. While she still feared the humiliation of an election loss, underclassmen’s widespread promises to vote for her made her optimistic she would triumph.

That hope disintegrated as soon as results were posted. Not only did she not win—she came in third. Out of three candidates.

This was no flubbed interview behind closed doors. This felt like public shaming. As adrenaline rushed through her body and she felt her face growing warm, one question flooded her mind: Where can I hide?

She drove home, ran upstairs to her bedroom, slammed the door, and curled under the covers. She had never tried this hard and failed this big. Half a dozen friends reached out to console her, but she was too embarrassed to talk.

Her bedspread was no shield against the core questions about herself, her relationships, and her future racing through her mind.

Who was she if she wasn’t a student leader?

How could she face her friends, let alone the entire school?

And after this disgrace, could she ever lead anything again?

Every Teenager Is a Walking Bundle of Questions

Every teenager is a walking bundle of questions. For this student huddled in her bed, the questions were largely about leadership and risk. For students you know, the questions in their driver’s seat may be about friends, race, money, grades, abuse, justice, sports, future, family, social media, or mental health.

Sometimes kids’ questions leak out and are muttered aloud. More commonly, they remain bottled inside a teenager’s curious mind and conflicted soul. Either way, we’ll never activate this generation if we don’t understand their most pressing questions.

You’re likely reading this book because you want to understand teenagers and have better connections and conversations with them. You are a mentor, teacher, youth worker, small group leader, parent, stepparent, grandparent, pastor, church member, neighbor, aunt, or boss who wants to help address the questions of young people in general—and likely a few young people specifically.

At the Fuller Youth Institute, we love listening to teenagers’ tough questions, as well as the (equally tough) questions about teenagers asked by churches, ministries, and families. Over the last couple of years, we’ve conducted surveys and focus groups with over twenty-two hundred teenagers, as well as in-depth multi-session interviews with twenty-seven youth group high school students nationwide (whom we will describe further in chapter 2). Among the questions tumbling through any teenager’s mind at any time, the following questions often float to the top.

How Do I Manage Anxiety and Stress Better?

The two of us rarely go a day without a leader or parent asking us about young people’s stress, anxiety, and depression.

That prevalence makes sense given that anxiety is the most common psychological disorder in the US, affecting nearly one-third of adolescents and adults in their lifetime.1 So if you are a leader of twenty students, somewhere in the neighborhood of seven of them may suffer from a diagnosable anxiety disorder.

We’ll further explore the causes, symptoms, and your best response to anxiety in chapters 4 and 5.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health challenges skyrocketed in the US. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, anxiety tripled (from 8.1 percent to 25.5 percent) and depression almost quadrupled (from 6.5 percent to 24.3 percent). Approximately half of young adults ages eighteen to twenty-four during the pandemic were wrestling with anxiety or depression.2

Suicide is currently the second leading cause of death for US young people ages ten to twenty-four. What’s more, approximately two out of every three young people who have suicidal thoughts never get help.3

I try not to think about it, but my life is very stressful. I changed schools to be in a better music program. Fear of not doing well in my new school is making me stressed out. It’s also making my parents stressed out, and everybody who’s rooting for me is stressed out. So that’s a lot of pressure on me, because I have to do well to stay in this program. And it’s just a lot. —Simone

A few of the twenty-seven students we interviewed had contemplated or even taken specific steps toward killing themselves. One eleventh grader who’s active in his church remembered feeling emotionally swallowed up by academic and social pressures: “On school days, I couldn’t even make it until 10 or 11 a.m. My anxiety was crazy. It got to the point that I wanted to kill myself. I called a suicide hotline and was put in a hospital with security guards around my bed to make sure I wasn’t going to harm myself. That was my lowest point.”

Poignantly, the help he received during that hospitalization helped him peer behind the curtain of his emotions and discover what he ultimately longed for: “I finally realized in that hospital bed that I really didn’t want to hurt myself. I just needed someone to be there for me.”

Technology? We Don’t Have Many Questions. We Kinda Get It.

If you’re like us, whenever you have tech problems, you hand your device to the young person nearest you (resisting the impulse to throw it out the window instead). Today’s teenagers have mastered—and are now pioneering—new paths forward in technology.

According to the latest research, nearly all (95 percent) of US teens have access to a smartphone, and about half say they are “almost constantly” on the internet.4

Almost three-fourths report often or sometimes checking for messages or notifications as soon as they wake up, and approximately four out of ten feel anxious when they do not have their cell phone with them.5

Roughly half of thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds are worried they spend too much time on their smartphones.6

Sixty-eight percent of young people who are active on social media have received support in tough times through those channels.7

With ubiquitous technology comes new temptations and conflict. In one survey of teenagers, 32 percent admitted to intentionally accessing online pornography; of these, 43 percent did so on a weekly basis.8 During the course of our interviews, an upperclassman revealed his struggle with online pornography from sixth to ninth grade: “I was inundated with social media and introduced to all sorts of heinous stuff, you know, like porn. There was a whole bunch of mess that I got sucked into. No one knew what I was doing. I just deleted my online history. I was watching things I shouldn’t have been watching. It was horrible for me.”

In chapters 4 and 6, we’ll further explore the opportunities and challenges that technology introduces into young people’s conversations and connections with you and our world.

Turning to another downside of technology, a junior we interviewed was one of the 15 percent of US high school students victimized by electronic bullying.9 She was an African American minority at her school, and other students used her race as a weapon against her. No fists were thrown, but because she was different, insults were tossed her way both at school and in the digital world.

While this eleventh grader shared in specific detail about other aspects of her life, she didn’t seem to want to give many details about this painful part of her history. I (Kara) asked her to tell me more about the bullying she had ex...