You want great things for your kids. You even have every reason to believe they’re capable of it. Watching them grow up over the years showed you time and time again just how brilliant, clever, and determined they can be. But then you started to look around. You saw how awful a whole lot of other kids are turning out these days. Fear crept in and soon dreams of little Johnny being sworn into the oval office were replaced by the simple hope not to see him in jail or strung out on drugs. Culture and media reinforced your fears, telling countless horror stories of how irresponsible teenagers are, and you believed them. Unfortunately, though, so did your kid.
The embarrassingly low expectations we have for the rising generation are ruining their most influential years. Culture teaches them how to escape hardship, avoid pain, and dodge duty. This is not just wasting teenage years, but ruining them for adulthood. We dub this the “myth of adolescence”—the idea that teen years are a last-chance party before having to become an adult.
Time Magazine recently performed a study into the emerging result of this myth of adolescence and found “kidults.” The scary truth was that many teens delaying their growth into maturity never actually made it. Grown men and women in their late 20’s and early 30’s very commonly live with their parents, work only part-time or none at all, and behave just like they did in their teen years. This might be scary for you as a parent, but for teens, it can be infuriating. For Alex and Brett Harris, it was cause for a revolution.
Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations by the Harris brothers addresses the issue better than the typical how-to book. Through a multitude of stories they show teens that not only believe their teen years could have deeper meaning, but should. And these aren’t just the overachieving, type A students. These are shy, nervous kids who had high expectations placed on their shoulders, and consistently rose to the occasion.
The lesson we see in action: expectations produce success. Consider the question they ask, “Why does every healthy baby overcome communication barriers by learning to talk while very few teenagers overcome barriers between themselves and their parents by learning to communicate? One is expected, and the other is not.” This reality proves itself also in the expectations we do have for teens. The bar is set high for teens on being tech-savvy and sexually active, and the forecast become self-fulfilling.
A crazy thing to consider is that “Teenager” isn’t some God-ordained stage of life that has always existed. In fact, the word teenager appeared for the very first time in 1941 in a Reader’s Digest!
It was only about a hundred years ago that labor laws forced children to stay in school and pulled them from harsh factories. The laws were good in the sense they protected children from the abusive work environment and gave them greater freedom in their future career, but it also turned teens from key producers of society to mere consumers. Thus, our youth exist in an awkward limbo we excuse as being a teenager—“A young person with most of the desires and abilities of an adult but few of the expectations or responsibilities.”
An important consideration as you begin to examine if your expectations for your children are healthy is to remember that the Bible says nothing about “teens” and doesn’t hold some second-rate standard. 1 Tim 4:12—“Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.” God expects great things even when we don’t.
For part 2 of Do Hard Things, we’ll look into some specific “hard things” your teen might be up against, how it holds them back, and how you can encourage them to overcome it.
