1. The Big Questions Every Teenager Is Asking
1
The Big Questions Every Teenager Is Asking
I’ve been slowly reflecting more on what it means to be a Christian, and I feel like I still don’t know where exactly I fit into everything.
In middle school, I used to see everything as right and wrong because I was just learning the foundations. But as I eventually moved to high school and started learning critical thinking and that kind of thing, I’ve been slowly exploring the in-between areas. So I feel like I’m still trying to figure out my faith.
Lilly
As a twelfth grader, one student took a big risk and faced some big questions.
In ninth grade, she had been driven by one singular question: How can I successfully navigate my new twenty-five-hundred-student high school? Other than a few junior varsity swim meets when her fairly desperate coach dubbed her temporary (and last-minute) cocaptain, leadership wasn’t in the picture. Surviving her growing homework load and shifting friendships were accomplishments enough.
As a tenth grader, with a year of classes and friendship under her belt, she started wondering, How can I be a leader on campus without risking an election loss? She found failure (public or not) unnerving. Gratefully, that question was answered when she applied for and was selected by teachers to serve as class secretary.
The next year she interviewed and was chosen by the student senate to be secretary of the school’s student body. Then her English teacher asked her to be coeditor of the school paper. Between the newspaper and student government, she viewed herself—and was known to others—as a visible and active leader on campus.
Few eleventh graders had climbed so high up the school’s student leadership ladder without winning a single election.
That streak ended senior year when she decided to run—in an election—for student body president. She and her campaign team gave away handfuls of candy, all plastered with creative slogans. While she still feared the humiliation of an election loss, underclassmen’s widespread promises to vote for her made her optimistic she would triumph.
That hope disintegrated as soon as results were posted. Not only did she not win—she came in third. Out of three candidates.
This was no flubbed interview behind closed doors. This felt like public shaming. As adrenaline rushed through her body and she felt her face growing warm, one question flooded her mind: Where can I hide?
She drove home, ran upstairs to her bedroom, slammed the door, and curled under the covers. She had never tried this hard and failed this big. Half a dozen friends reached out to console her, but she was too embarrassed to talk.
Her bedspread was no shield against the core questions about herself, her relationships, and her future racing through her mind.
Who was she if she wasn’t a student leader?
How could she face her friends, let alone the entire school?
And after this disgrace, could she ever lead anything again?
Every Teenager Is a Walking Bundle of Questions
Every teenager is a walking bundle of questions. For this student huddled in her bed, the questions were largely about leadership and risk. For students you know, the questions in their driver’s seat may be about friends, race, money, grades, abuse, justice, sports, future, family, social media, or mental health.
Sometimes kids’ questions leak out and are muttered aloud. More commonly, they remain bottled inside a teenager’s curious mind and conflicted soul. Either way, we’ll never activate this generation if we don’t understand their most pressing questions.
You’re likely reading this book because you want to understand teenagers and have better connections and conversations with them. You are a mentor, teacher, youth worker, small group leader, parent, stepparent, grandparent, pastor, church member, neighbor, aunt, or boss who wants to help address the questions of young people in general—and likely a few young people specifically.
At the Fuller Youth Institute, we love listening to teenagers’ tough questions, as well as the (equally tough) questions about teenagers asked by churches, ministries, and families. Over the last couple of years, we’ve conducted surveys and focus groups with over twenty-two hundred teenagers, as well as in-depth multi-session interviews with twenty-seven youth group high school students nationwide (whom we will describe further in chapter 2). Among the questions tumbling through any teenager’s mind at any time, the following questions often float to the top.
How Do I Manage Anxiety and Stress Better?
The two of us rarely go a day without a leader or parent asking us about young people’s stress, anxiety, and depression.
That prevalence makes sense given that anxiety is the most common psychological disorder in the US, affecting nearly one-third of adolescents and adults in their lifetime. So if you are a leader of twenty students, somewhere in the neighborhood of seven of them may suffer from a diagnosable anxiety disorder.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health challenges skyrocketed in the US. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, anxiety tripled (from 8.1 percent to 25.5 percent) and depression almost quadrupled (from 6.5 percent to 24.3 percent). Approximately half of young adults ages eighteen to twenty-four during the pandemic were wrestling with anxiety or depression.
Suicide is currently the second leading cause of death for US young people ages ten to twenty-four. What’s more, approximately two out of every three young people who have suicidal thoughts never get help.
I try not to think about it, but my life is very stressful. I changed schools to be in a better music program. Fear of not doing well in my new school is making me stressed out. It’s also making my parents stressed out, and everybody who’s rooting for me is stressed out. So that’s a lot of pressure on me, because I have to do well to stay in this program. And it’s just a lot. —Simone
A few of the twenty-seven students we interviewed had contemplated or even taken specific steps toward killing themselves. One eleventh grader who’s active in his church remembered feeling emotionally swallowed up by academic and social pressures: “On school days, I couldn’t even make it until 10 or 11 a.m. My anxiety was crazy. It got to the point that I wanted to kill myself. I called a suicide hotline and was put in a hospital with security guards around my bed to make sure I wasn’t going to harm myself. That was my lowest point.”
Poignantly, the help he received during that hospitalization helped him peer behind the curtain of his emotions and discover what he ultimately longed for: “I finally realized in that hospital bed that I really didn’t want to hurt myself. I just needed someone to be there for me.”
Technology? We Don’t Have Many Questions. We Kinda Get It.
If you’re like us, whenever you have tech problems, you hand your device to the young person nearest you (resisting the impulse to throw it out the window instead). Today’s teenagers have mastered—and are now pioneering—new paths forward in technology.
According to the latest research, nearly all (95 percent) of US teens have access to a smartphone, and about half say they are “almost constantly” on the internet.
Almost three-fourths report often or sometimes checking for messages or notifications as soon as they wake up, and approximately four out of ten feel anxious when they do not have their cell phone with them.
Roughly half of thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds are worried they spend too much time on their smartphones.
Sixty-eight percent of young people who are active on social media have received support in tough times through those channels.
With ubiquitous technology comes new temptations and conflict. In one survey of teenagers, 32 percent admitted to intentionally accessing online pornography; of these, 43 percent did so on a weekly basis. During the course of our interviews, an upperclassman revealed his struggle with online pornography from sixth to ninth grade: “I was inundated with social media and introduced to all sorts of heinous stuff, you know, like porn. There was a whole bunch of mess that I got sucked into. No one knew what I was doing. I just deleted my online history. I was watching things I shouldn’t have been watching. It was horrible for me.”
Turning to another downside of technology, a junior we interviewed was one of the 15 percent of US high school students victimized by electronic bullying. She was an African American minority at her school, and other students used her race as a weapon against her. No fists were thrown, but because she was different, insults were tossed her way both at school and in the digital world.
While this eleventh grader shared in specific detail about other aspects of her life, she didn’t seem to want to give many details about this painful part of her history. I (Kara) asked her to tell me more about the bullying she had experienced. She paused and then gave a vague answer, “You know, name-calling. And people not wanting to be with me.” She lowered her gaze, stared at the coffeehouse table in between us, sighed, and added one final, softly spoken, “Yeah . . .”
Our Generation Is Diverse, but How Do We Navigate All the Racial Pain in Our Country?
US Census statistics help us understand why this generation is so aware of ethnic and cultural diversity and why many are actively seeking racial justice and reconciliation. Today in the US, approximately half of those under eighteen are White and half are people of color; one-fourth of that same age group are first- or second-generation immigrants.
We might conclude from this data that if you’re a leader, teacher, or mentor, about 50 percent of the children and teenagers you love and serve are likely to be White and 50 percent are likely to be from another ethnicity or two (or sometimes three or more). And if you’re a parent, about half of your teenager’s friends are White and half are likely young people of color.
a Juan Martinez and Mark Lau Branson. Churches, Cultures, and Leadership (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011), 19.
However, America’s racial reality is that our neighborhoods, schools, and churches remain relatively segregated. In some cases, students experience diverse classmates but go home to monocultural neighborhoods. For other teenagers, church is the most segregated environment of their week. And for still others, most every context in their lives is populated with people who look like them and share similar backgrounds. Often with fresh eyes, teenagers see the racial segregation and injustice surrounding them and are eager to work toward unity and healing.
In the midst of young people’s varied ethnic and racial experiences, many have the opportunities to cross boundaries and build cultural bridges. Claudia is a seventeen-year-old Latina who loves traditional Mexican dishes but also enjoys Korean drinks and treats. She intentionally introduces her Latino friends to Korean cuisine and invites her Korean friends to enjoy Mexican food in her home and neighborhood. While this cultural exchange can at times create tension for Claudia and many students we interviewed, Claudia also enjoys watching both sets of friends try new foods. Claudia summarized: “Although I got some of their culture, I also got to share some of mine, and they actually love it. It’s so fun.”
a Fifty-two percent of young people ages ten to nineteen: 16 percent below the poverty level and 36 percent in low-income households. United States Census Bureau, “Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement,” 2018, http://www.census.gov/cps/data/cpstablecreator.html.
How Do I Best Handle Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation?
In 2016, about ten million people, or 4.1 percent of the US adult population, identified as LGBTQ, which is a modest, but noteworthy, increase from the 8.3 million (or 3.5 percent of adults) who said they were LGBTQ in 2012. In one national study across generations, the youngest cohort surveyed (young adults ages eighteen to thirty-six) was by far the most likely to identify as LGBTQ (7.3 percent). In addition, it’s estimated that somewhere between 0.7 percent and 1.8 percent of US high school students identify as transgender.
Gabriel is a recent graduate who describes himself as pansexual because “I will date someone for who they are.” Taylor is a high school junior who prefers the pronoun they. Taylor describes themselves as “nonbinary, Christian, vegan, loving and empathetic, really gay, and quiet.” When Taylor came out in middle school, many of Taylor’s friends and family grew distant and seemed afraid of them. “My brother and I did not talk for like six months because he did not accept me. And that was really hard. But now he accepts me and stuff like that. I hear from other friends that he corrects people when they call me his sister because he knows how I feel about gender identity.”
Today’s young people who identify as straight and nontransgender are also navigating new questions with their gay, transgender, and nonbinary peers—including which terms to use and what they mean. As Steve, a high school senior from North Carolina, noted about one of his closer friends, “His girlfriend identifies as male, so he is pansexual. I respect what they both believe so I use the pronouns they want me to. I am not going to judge him, I’m not going to put him down. I am going to realize that his situation is different and respect that.”
When It Comes to Sex, How Do I Figure Out What’s Best for Me?
The percentage of teenagers who report “ever having sex” has steadily dropped over the last decade—from 48 to 40—as has the percentage of those who are currently sexually active (from 35 to 29 percent).
While these trends are promising, sexual temptations, hazards, and missteps remain part of young people’s journeys. For today’s tech-savvy students, sharing nude digital photos and videos is often an expected part of high school relationships.
During our interviews, one of our team members asked a sixteen-year-old who had dated one serious boyfriend in high school, “What is something you have learned about yourself because of that dating relationship?”
She responded, “I learned I have to be more self-confident.”
The interviewer followed up, “How did that come up in your dating relationship?”
“Well, a lot of times, if you say no to something, the person you’re dating kind of makes you feel bad about it. So you do it anyway. I wish I had been more confident so I could have stuck with my no instead of giving in.”
How Can I Stay Safe at School? And Why Isn’t More Being Done by Adults to Change Things?
Remember crouching under your school desk in elementary or high school during your annual earthquake or tornado drill (depending on which part of the country you grew up in)? Today’s teenagers still do this drill, but campuses nationwide have added a second drill to their safety protocol.
Active-shooter drills.
The Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting was in 2012. The Parkland, Florida, shooting was in 2018. No wonder only 59 percent of fifth through twelfth graders report feeling safe at school. A similar proportion (57 percent) of teenagers are worried about the possibility of a shooting happening at their school, with one out of four saying they are “very worried.” This fear is higher among students of color.
Teenagers’ underlying concern isn’t just about school being dangerous but also that adults can’t—or won’t—protect them from violence. No longer waiting for adults, young people have been on the forefront of recent movements for legislative change addressing gun regulation across the country.
When It Comes to Drugs, Alcohol, and Vaping, What’s Okay for Me to Try?
Experimentation is a hallmark of adolescence, and it’s no surprise that drugs and alcohol are often in the mix among high schoolers. But the trends in this area are shifting. Overall, substance abuse is (wonderfully) declining among teenagers. The percentage of young people who report using illegal drugs has fallen (from 23 percent in 2007 to 14 percent in 2017), as has the percentage of those who have injected illegal drugs (from 2 to 1.5 percent over that same decade).
The percentage of tenth and twelfth graders who have consumed alcohol in the past year has seen a significant five-year drop—down to 38 percent and 52 percent, respectively.
The glaring and alarming exception to these encouraging downturns is vaping, or the use of electronic cigarettes. Over one-third (35 percent) of twelfth graders have vaped nicotine in the last year, along with a distressing 17 percent of eighth graders. Around 20 percent of tenth and twelfth graders have vaped marijuana in the past twelve months, which is more than double two years ago.
In our interviews, we didn’t ask directly about drugs, alcohol, or vaping, and few students voluntarily disclosed their own encounters. We were buoyed up when one senior who leads his school’s Christian club noted that “a lot of students openly mock me for my faith in classes or refer to me as ‘a dumb priest with his dumb Jesus.’ I know these students are actively cutting and depressed. They are addicted to vaping. When they are in their most broken-down moments, at least three of them have come to me and asked, ‘What makes you so happy?’ That alone is like, wow.”
How Is God Relevant to Me?
While the senior who leads his school’s Christian club is known for his faith on campus, many churched young people, when asked how God is relevant to them, answer “not much at all.”
For over fifteen years, we have been trying to answer questions about young people’s faith through our research at the Fuller Youth Institute. Many of those questions come from leaders, parents, and mentors—people like you—who worry about the young people around them. Multiple studies indicate that 40 to 50 percent of young people—including those you know—who have been involved in a church or youth ministry will drift from God and the church after they graduate from high school. So visualize the children and teenagers you care about most, and then imagine half of them leaving their faith behind in adulthood.
It’s not just teenagers and young adults who are experiencing a spiritual decline. The proportion of US adults who describe themselves as Christians has dropped 12 percent in the past decade—down to 65 percent.
While that’s disheartening, the data about young people is even more revealing. In those same surveys, only 49 percent of millennials, the youngest age group polled, described themselves as Christians, making them the least likely generation to do so.
In a similar vein, the religious “Nones,” or those who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, now stand at 26 percent, up from 17 percent in 2009.
These statistics are daunting, but we wanted to hear more from young people themselves. Though the twenty-seven high school students we interviewed for this study were all involved in church youth groups, the centrality of their faith was certainly up for question. Some were exploring faith in creative and thoughtful ways, while others seemed to keep God compartmentalized.
In one of these interviews, our team member Tyler Greenway asked a midwestern high schooler, “How would you say your faith has shaped your sense of identity?”
There was a long pause before the student answered, “Not like a huge amount, but my faith like shapes part of who I am, I guess.”
Tyler nudged him to offer specifics. “In what ways do you think it has shaped you?”
“Maybe it has made me more respectful.”
Pressing in further, Tyler asked, “So how important would you say your faith is to you?”
“I would say it’s pretty important.”
Finally, Tyler offered, “So on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being not at all important and 5 being extremely important, how would you describe your faith?”
“Maybe like a 3. It’s a big part of my life, but it’s not my whole life, I guess.”
Will Adults Please Stop Giving Me Answers to Questions I’m Not Asking?
Today’s teenagers can access almost any information. They can instantaneously receive scores of possible answers to just about any question—plus a list of new ones. But they’re also growing up in families and churches that shy away from some of their deepest questions about faith and meaning.
One of the reasons young people are drifting from faith is that churches aren’t focused on the questions they care about most. Instead, we’re pitching answers to questions that aren’t anywhere near their strike zone.
We’re too often stuck in questions that reflect what happened in the past.
Or we are missing what’s unfolding in the present.
And we are afraid of what’s to come in the future.
During a recent Fuller Youth Institute summit, the executive director from a national training organization shared about one high school student who yearned, “I wish the church would stop giving me answers to questions I’m not asking.”
The specific questions that he and other teenagers most value might be unique to our time, but questions aren’t new to God. By one count of the four Gospels, Jesus was asked 183 questions.
That’s remarkable, but what’s even more remarkable is that Jesus himself asked 307 questions.
The question isn’t whether faith is big enough to hold young people’s questions. We know it is. The question is whether we will take the time to hear and honor them.
What’s More Toxic Than Tough Questions?
One of our most counterintuitive findings over the years has been the role of doubt in teenagers’ spiritual formation. In our research for Sticky Faith, 70 percent of former youth group students admitted to having significant questions about faith in high school.
Any temptation to panic can be calmed by this interesting research twist: those teenagers with doubts who felt the freedom and had the opportunity to express their questions actually showed greater faith maturity.
Put more simply, it’s not doubt that is toxic to faith—it’s silence. Tough questions are most likely to sabotage faith when adults stifle them.
The 3 Big Questions Driving the Rest
While many questions are on the minds of today’s teenagers, we’ve unearthed the three primary questions we believe undergird all the rest. These queries may not live right on the surface, but when we dig deep enough, we can trace their longings at the roots.
Almost every question young people are asking ultimately finds its genesis in these 3 big questions:
Who am I?
Where do I fit?
What difference can I make?
We’ve created shorthand phrasing to think about and explore these questions:
First, identity, which means our view of ourselves.
Then belonging, defined as our connection with others.
Finally, purpose, or our contribution to the world.
If it helps to see these organized in a table, the example below offers a start. We will continue to build on this table throughout the book.
Big Question
Focus
Description
Who am I?
Identity
Our view of ourselves
Where do I fit?
Belonging
Our connection with others
What difference can I make?
Purpose
Our contribution to the world
Throughout this book, you’ll find images of three interlocking circles representing identity, belonging, and purpose. When we’re focused on one of the three, that circle will be darker in the illustration. This is not only to orient you to where you are in the book but also to indicate that at any given time, one or another of the 3 big questions may take the lead in a young person’s quest for answers. We’ve made the three circles overlapping because research with young people (others and our own) highlights that the three are interrelated and are best understood together.
For much of the rest of this book, we’ll be wrestling with these big questions, pinning down teenagers’ current answers as well as better Christ-centered responses. For now, we want to warn you that while our research focused on young people, these questions cut across all generations.
They aren’t just young people questions; they are people questions. They aren’t relevant only to adolescents; they are relevant to the two of us. They are to you too. But for young people, the 3 big questions of identity, belonging, and purpose are at a constant, rolling boil.
Young People Need Adults Like You to Journey with Them in Their Big Questions
That high school senior huddled under her covers whose story started this chapter was certainly wrestling with these three questions.
Who am I if I’m not in student government? That’s a question of identity.
How can I face my friends when I’m so humiliated? Sounds a lot like belonging.
What can I do to still have a meaningful senior year? You guessed it—purpose.
Eventually, she left the safety of her bed and went downstairs to hugs from her mom, stepdad, and younger brother.
That helped. But she still felt discontented and disoriented.
Until Mike and Kristi, her youth pastor and small group leader, came by to talk.
They listened to her identity, belonging, and purpose questions and suggested answers bigger than anything she could see. She was especially surprised when Mike predicted, “Someday you’re going to catch a vision for youth ministry. And then watch out.”
As he had anticipated, she started hanging around the church more, and even joined the student leadership team. (To her relief, no election was required.)
By the end of her senior year, she was running that team.
During her college summers, she served in the youth ministry as a volunteer and then as a paid intern.
Her youth pastor was right. God gave her a vision for young people. And thirty years later, she’s still in youth ministry.
You’ve perhaps figured out that I (Kara) was that defeated and disgraced high school senior. Mike was my youth pastor, and Kristi was my small group leader. They walked beside me in high school and beyond as I stumbled and crawled toward God’s better answers for my identity, belonging, and purpose. (And yes, I’m tearing up as I type this.)
I wouldn’t be doing what I do, or writing this book, if they hadn’t patiently and prayerfully journeyed beside me. (Now the tears are streaming down my cheeks. Good thing I’m writing at home and my teenagers are out.)
You can be a Mike or a Kristi.
You can be that adult who sees God’s potential for a young person’s identity, belonging, and purpose when all they see is defeat and dead ends.
Whether you’re married or single, paid or volunteer, church or parachurch, a parent, stepparent, foster parent, or grandparent, an empty nester or nonparent, you can have better connections and conversations with teenagers as they trailblaze toward God’s best answers.
We know you can do it.
We’re cheering for you.
And for young people.
REFLECT and APPLY