Stand up for Youth:
A Special Report

Teens Need Plenty of Guides
on Path Through Adolescence

by Sharon Sheridan
"I've heard people that are really surprised about what happened at Columbine [High School]," says college sophomore Arianna Williams of Goehner, Neb. "I'm not surprised at all. ... There are kids at my [high] school that I could see doing that if they had the opportunity and if they had a way to get a gun.

"You can only pick on a kid so much, and they're going to get to a point where they can't handle it anymore, especially if they don't have a good home environment."

Adolescence is a time of rebellion and exploration, when peer groups become increasingly important as teens seek to discover who they are and where they fit in.

But mixing those normal struggles with a breakdown of conventional values and a culture of violence creates a recipe for incidents such as the school shootings outside Littleton, Colo., said the Rev. Jon Magnuson, a therapist and the Lutheran campus pastor at Northern Michigan University.

"Developmentally with young people, the passage into emotional and spiritual maturity is and should be a rocky one," said Magnuson, who founded the Cedar Tree Institute in Marquette. "If it's not, those challenges and those issues are going to emerge later in adult life. And, specifically, those issues have to do with establishing an identity over and against your family of origin. Now, that necessitates rebellion."

In searching for their identity, adolescents struggle between separating themselves from their parents -- and church -- while still needing both as a "safe harbor," said Robin Turner, a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in the St. Louis area and a lifelong Episcopalian. "We know that this process is necessary for the development of healthy adults. Leaving the family, the adolescents seek what they think is another safe harbor. Frequently, their choice is a mirror of themselves. ... It is natural for all adolescents to seek group identity because they are not yet strong enough to trust completely their individual identity."

Youngsters from dysfunctional families tend to group with others with similar backgrounds, noted the Rev. Ora Calhoun, executive director of the St. Francis Academy at Atchison, Kan., a program for chronic runaways. "After a lot of experimenting, we tend to end up with people like ourselves."

Peer groups become very important around ages 10 to 13, Magnuson said. "That's why at that age it's so important to be aware of your kids' friends. And I've seen people do tremendous things with kids by changing their friends. If they're in a mean-spirited crowd, they can't resist."

A healthy peer group, he said, is one where members can join and leave without harassment, where individuals are respected and where diversity of opinion is tolerated and celebrated.

"There are certainly cliques," said college freshman Kate Kelly of Newport, R.I. "The stereotypical high school scene really does happen. There really are the jocks who make fun of the nerds."

"I think teasing is hurtful no matter who it's coming from and no matter who you are," she said. While people in her high school looked down on others who weren't part of a particular crowd, she added, she didn't see "a lot of personal attacks."

Bullying, common among youth, isn't just a problem in the nation's high schools.

"You have to be careful not to stereotype that this is a youth problem," Magnuson said. "There's a lot of bullying that goes on in the Episcopal Church and other organized forms of religion by bishops and by priests and by vestry members. But it doesn't excuse it."

On the Sunday after the Colorado killings, Calhoun, an Episcopal priest, preached that "There's a correlation between Columbine and Kosovo."

"We have lost valuing each other," he said. "One of the things that we try to teach the kids here is, How do you value other people and how does that happen?"

Called Successful Teen Experience and Personal Satisfaction (STEPS), the climbing-ropes-style St. Francis program teaches skills such as anger management, leadership and teamwork. St. Francis has provided training to incorporate the program into Kansas public-school classrooms and is doing the same in Mississippi. Calhoun said he believes this sort of program belongs "in every school in the country."

Helping youngsters -- and adults -- claim their identity as children of God can help them develop respect for themselves and others, said Ellen T. Charry, associate professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. An Episcopalian, she previously worked with adolescents as a psychiatric social worker.

"Youngsters have teased each other forever," she said. "What we haven't learned is how to help children control their nastiness toward one another. And we've not taught them how to deal with unpleasant emotions. Instead, youngsters are exposed to so much violence and easy means of perpetrating violence, that that to them is the means of first resort. ... Proper Christian formation could help us deal with our emotions that are so dangerous and help us control them."

Charry recently lectured on "Baptism and Columbine: Responding to the Youth Crisis" at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.

"I want to help the church make a distinction between secular psychology and the calling of a Christian and what it means to be a human person from a Christian theological foundation," she said. "From a Christian point of view, we don't construct an identity and make up an identity that we like for ourselves. We have our identity given to us by God. ... The work of the church is to help us come more fully to understand and live into that identity that's given to us by God in our baptism."

"The church's responsibility to children is to rear and nurture them into the full stature of Christ," she said. This includes helping them discover their gifts and teaching them to use them to build up the body of Christ and for the well-being of others.

"The adults need to recognize that the children need them very much and that we need to invite especially men in the congregation to be more involved with the youngsters," she said. "I think that we have to realize in this nation -- and this is not just for the church -- that every interaction that we have with children is part of that child's formation. They are learning what it means to be an adult. They're learning what it means to be a human being by the way we treat them and the way we interact with them."

Michigan's Magnuson likes to tell adolescents that life will be both much harder and much better than they ever imagined. "And the church is around to help you understand the mystery of that promise."

Also in this series:

• Youth in perspective
• The struggle to guide youth
• Churches can make a difference