Characteristic of Teenagers Today: Know Their World

One of my exhilarating learning activities while here in the "land of free and the brave" is speaking to parents of teenagers. I've found that the older and younger generations here don't differ very much from those back home. They have the same pressure, the same concerns and the same desires for their children.

Have teenagers really changes? Socrates, in about 500 B.C., described adolescents this way: "Youth today love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, no respect for older people, and talk nonsense when they should work. Young people do not stand up any longer when adults enter the room. They contradict their parents, talk too much in company, guzzle their food, lay their legs on the table, and tyrannize their elders."

With a few minor differences, we can agree that teenagers today are a lot like we were at that time. Teenager behavior today is nothing new. what has drastically changed for our youth is the world they live in. That's the big difference, and this we need to understand in order to feel what our children feel.

What kind of a world do teenagers find themselves in? Here are four characteristics:

1. Relational deprivation.  In the past most children grew up in two-parent families, and only one had to work. The extended family - aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, other relatives surrounded them and lived in the same place most of their lives. Today, many children have to live with working parents, with single or divorced parents. There's so much mobility due to work or educational demands that children are thrust in new social milieus bringing on loneliness and relational loss.
2. Information overload.  Technology has brought with it blessing and curse, especially to our youth. What in the past they have only heard about, today they know and see- violence, drug, hard-core pornography, "secret" lives of celebrities and public officials, deviant lifestyle, and sexual message everywhere.
3. Decision stress.  This generation is bombarded with choices. The vast array of choices moves beyond products and services in malls ans supermarkets. A smorgasbord of philosophies and ideologist compete for their allegiance. Teenagers trying to make their own decisions and choose their own values, religion and lifestyle can feel overwhelmed by all the options available to them.
4. Loss of role models.  Through the proliferation of information media, our youth have grown up distrusting their government, parents, their leaders, their teachers, their heroes, and institutions. Almost every day brings a scandalous revelation about a national figure. Ministers, professors, sports stars, and even presidents have fallen. With the loss of figures to look up to, our teenagers live in a different world indeed. And who can tell the effects of this growth setting on the crucial teenage years?