01/05/98

Teens Need More Adult Guidance

Many of you express concern and bafflement about our disenchanted youth. Many teens are angry, unmotivated, irresponsible, and disrespectful. It's refreshing to meet young people who exude enthusiasm about their worlds and those who openly share their thoughts and feelings with their parents or their parents' friends. When you were a child, did the whole community seem to know you and delight in your accomplishments? That sense of neighborhood seems so rare now!

Our children know more than we did at their age. But they still need just as much adult guidance as ever, perhaps even more as their world becomes increasingly complex and fragmented. Families move more frequently; often both parents work long hours; fewer marriages survive; and children are exposed to mountains of verbal and visual information at an astounding rate. Yet, emotionally, a child is still a child is still a child. We are not bad parents; we just get overwhelmed by life's demands in these hectic times. We need ways of reducing our isolation and talking with each other about effective parenting.

Reduced parental or adult supervision is creating dangerous situations for our young. High school and college student parties are awash in alcohol while we look the other way. We not only need to wake up; we also need to toughen up. Our children may act like they love their freedom, but they're unprepared for it, finding themselves fundamentally resentful and afraid to be so unprotected without defined and enforced limits from parents and other responsible adults. The young people who are prepared for freedom rather than thrown into it are proud, yes, proud, to say, "No!"

My son told me about a college in New England where members of the hockey team were severely penalized for getting new recruits (mostly 18-year-old freshmen) drunk to the point of hospitalization during a celebration of their acceptance on the varsity team. Students at every college in the area, it seems, were abuzz about this administrative action, because they were so surprised by it. They were also impressed and thankful that college officials had taken a stand against such dangerous consumption, even though it meant that their hockey team might win fewer games that season because of the suspensions imposed.

As a parent, I, too, was relieved that college officials, knowing full well that they had been 'looking the other way' for years, were willing to enforce statewide laws about liquor consumption by minors. Discuss this issue with your sons and daughters. What do they have to say about drinking and drug use among their peers? Do they think more intensive parental supervision and law enforcement would help?

It really doesn't matter, after all, how long it takes to look in society's mirror and recognize our reflections there. What matters is the decision each of us makes, when the reflection needs polish, to start rubbing!

Please send questions or comments to bbruno@snet.net.