c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Dale Hanson Bourke is the publisher of RNS and mother of two sons.)
UNDATED _ My teen-age son doesn’t tell me everything.
He tells me quite a bit compared to his peers, but I know that he doesn’t always want to talk to me.
There are days when I come to pick him up at school and he shuffles toward the car. When I ask him if everything is okay, he mumbles a response that is meant to be polite but unresponsive. Sometimes over dinner he’ll offer another clue, but often it takes days to find out exactly what is bothering him. And even then, he may not want to talk to me about it.
This might concern me except for the fact that there are some other great adults in my son’s life.”Why don’t you have breakfast with Dave?”I’ll sometimes suggest, and his eyes will light up.
Dave is one of his church youth group leaders, a guy young enough to be cool and old enough to be wise. I trust Dave and so does my son. Sending him to Dave for advice is easy for me.
At school he has Mr. Brown, his counselor and English teacher who has known him for several years. I know that Mr. Brown notices when he’s down and sees him often enough to offer a chance to talk.
And there’s Mr. Barry, his history teacher and track coach who often runs beside him on his daily workouts and encourages him in a way that only runners understand.
There are other teachers, too, who know Chase and often tell me things about him that I hadn’t seen during my time with him. To them and the others, I am grateful.
Because despite the fact that I drive my children to school and pick them up every day, that we have dinner together each night and spend time together on weekends, my kids don’t always want to talk to their parents. That’s a natural part of growing up.
So as we as a nation focus on the need to pay more attention to our teen-agers, I’d like to pay tribute to the many people who are involved with my son and other teens. Youth leaders and coaches and teachers who take the time to know my child; people who care and listen despite the fact that they are not ultimately responsible for him.
Teen-agers are not the easiest group to love. To work with a bunch of them day in and day out takes commitment and enormous flexibility.
As a society we rarely reward those who work with our teens. Youth ministers in churches are on the low end of the pay scale. Teachers in our high schools often carry second jobs to make ends meet.
It seems to me that the way we value such people also says something about the way we care for our teens.
I was speaking to a youth leader recently who began to list the realities of dealing with adolescents in today’s society. He mentioned that few kids have respect for authority; he has to earn respect with each group entering his program.
He talked about parents who drop off kids and never show up to pick them up, of kids he has taken home to empty houses.
He talked about the kids he has helped and the ones that seem to be sliding further into trouble without the recognition of their parents.
This man works in a wealthy suburban area, not the inner city. Yet even he said the problems facing middle-class kids are not very different from the ones we once associate with the city.
When I asked him why he did it he smiled and said,”I guess I just love these kids.”His response was telling in its simplicity. Despite all the challenges, he loves the kids and they sense it.
While parents often see the teen-age years as something to survive, the other adults in our teens’ lives have chosen to be there, right in the middle of all the hormonal madness.
As parents, we clearly have some work to do. But as we focus on all the negative influences in our culture, let’s also remember the teachers and coaches and youth workers who have been there when we haven’t, the ones who love our kids even when they are at their most unlovable.
As individuals and as a society, we need to value the amazing contribution they make every day in the lives of those complicated, contradictory, confounding people we call teen-agers.
DEA END BOURKE
