2. Learning to Listen for Answers
2
Learning to Listen for Answers
BRAD: Is there anything else before I stop recording, about anything that we’ve talked about or something that has come to mind, that you didn’t get a chance to say?
DANIEL: Not really. Just that I am going to miss these talks. I really like doing this one-on-one thing. It’s really cool.
Janelle is a junior in high school. She’s friendly, easy to talk with, and thoughtful. Her brother is one of her closest friends; he makes her feel good about herself. She often hangs out with his friends because they cause “less drama” than the girls she knows at school.
For a period of time when Janelle was younger, her family experienced homelessness, moving from shelter to shelter. After her mom married her stepdad, their housing stabilized. She has lived in the same apartment for a few years now and likes her neighborhood. When asked to share a photo of something that reminds her of belonging, Janelle shared a picture from her phone of her front door—because home is where she feels safe. One of her dreams for the future is not to live in an apartment. Someday she’d like to live in a yellow house, with a yard where kids can play.
Like many teenagers in her generation, Janelle wrestles with anxiety. She remembers several intense experiences with mental health struggles in middle and early high school.
I didn’t know it was anxiety at the time. I was always sick, but I would pretend I was fine, like there was nothing wrong. My therapist now says it was a coping skill. I wouldn’t let myself eat if I was anxious. I would tell my mom that I had already eaten so she wouldn’t be worried. Or I would tell her that I had friends I would hang out with, because I didn’t want her to be worried that I wasn’t making friends. I would hide in the bathroom to cry several times a day, and sometimes have panic attacks.
Eventually, Janelle was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and she found the help she needed.
It’s important to Janelle to talk with other people about mental health. Particularly as an African American, she thinks it’s vital to share her story with other Black students to destigmatize getting help.
Listening for the 3 Big Questions in Janelle’s Story
Like all teenagers, Janelle is working out her identity, belonging, and purpose while navigating the daily ups and downs of adolescence. As we spent more time with her, we were able to understand Janelle’s own unique journey in answering the 3 big questions.
“Compassionate” is the way Janelle describes herself, in part because it’s an important quality she looks for in a friend. She says her own tough experiences have given her more compassion for other people who are struggling.
Her parents see her as confident and smart. She’s self-assured, but others’ opinions also really matter. This year she started serving as a leader in her school’s Black Student Union. But painfully, Janelle is also targeted with the racial stereotype of not being “Black enough” because she gets “really good grades.” Grappling with this discrimination, Janelle asserts that other kids “shouldn’t assume Black people are not smart.”
At the same time, she feels continual pressure—internally and externally—to perform academically. “I feel like I have to do everything so perfect.” Janelle constantly lives in the intersectionality of her identity markers: young, Black, female, smart, confident, anxious.
Belonging: Where Do I Fit?
Janelle thinks that for most people her age, friends are their safe place. But for her, it’s family and church. Her apartment’s living room is where she overall feels safest, with church being a close second. She loves her church and feels a deep sense that she is part of the community. Janelle talked about one leader in particular who has really been there for her: “She’s always checking in on me.”
Janelle thinks about belonging “all the time. I think that’s the big thing for me, but I think that’s a big thing for a lot of people. You want to know if you really fit in there, if they really like you coming along or just invited you because they felt bad.”
Purpose: What Difference Can I Make?
Janelle gains a sense of purpose from serving at church, especially in children’s ministry. Working with kids at her church’s summer camp raised her confidence last year. She shared, “I was asked to do so many things outside my comfort zone, but that was a time when I felt happy. I was doing things for God.”
Thinking ahead to her future, Janelle offered, “I think I want to be a child development clinical psychologist. I want to work with kids.” She went on to share, “I would like to impact people the way my psychologist and therapist impacted me. They made things a lot easier for me.”
The Research behind the Stories
Janelle was part of the interview study we mentioned in chapter 1. Our research team wanted to uncover teenagers’ current answers to their biggest questions. We used an approach called “narrative analysis” to explore the 3 big questions of identity, belonging, and purpose.
Our research team sat down one-on-one with twenty-seven teenagers from a wide variety of backgrounds for three consecutive interviews. Each was nominated by a youth ministry leader as a young person who might be willing to talk about their life and experiences of faith, but some were more involved in church than others. We asked dozens of questions for up to two hours at a time. The ten interviewers roughly represented the cultural and geographic diversity of the sample. (Use appendix A as a quick reference for each participant’s name—we’ve changed them all—and demographics.) See the illustrations on pages 48–49 for a full picture of our interviewee demographics.
Over one hundred hours of interviews were transcribed, and our team pored over the transcripts and reports from each interviewer. We met together periodically and in an all-day gathering to explore themes and share highlights. We also reached out to more teenagers (beyond the interviewees) through twelve focus groups to field our ideas and learn from their helpful correctives.
Alongside interviews, a literature review team explored themes of identity, belonging, purpose, faith formation, Generation Z, and narrative studies. Over one hundred cross-disciplinary academic and popular sources were consulted in this process.
Finally, we compared what we heard in these in-depth interviews with data from 2,092 youth ministry student surveys from our related innovation project that focused on identity, belonging, and purpose.
We did all this listening so you could hear young people in their own words—and hear them better.
Why Listening to Real Young People Matters
The beginning of love for others is learning to listen to them. God’s love for us is shown by the fact that God not only gives God’s Word, but also lends us God’s ear. . . .
Christians who can no longer listen to one another will soon no longer be listening to God either.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
One of the reasons we conducted this research was to help adults like you—and ourselves—move beyond assumptions to truly connect with teenagers.
Assumptions keep us at a distance.
Assumptions lead to judgment. We judge across generations all the time, and this judgment allows us to comfortably dismiss what we experience as different by declaring it wrong.
Young people feel this judgment. Karie, a freshman, can tell when adults are guided by assumptions. She shared the following with Jane Hong-Guzmán de León, her interviewer:
KARIE: So, for example, an adult might say, “Oh yeah, it’s just because you guys have your phones,” and just stupid things like that.
JANE: What are some of the common misconceptions?
KARIE: That we are addicted to social media, or social media is so bad for us. There are certainly cons to it, but there are also pros, and I feel like they do not see that. It’s not right to blame everything on how we use social media.
Karie wasn’t the only one to express this sentiment. Here are a couple of other thoughts from teenagers we asked about adults’ misperceptions:
Teenagers are underestimated a lot. People are uncomfortable talking about conflict or something controversial in front of teenagers, but we aren’t surprised by it. It’s weird when adults act like we’re less, or like we don’t know what we’re talking about. Even small comments. We notice.
Ask teenagers about something you wouldn’t usually ask them, even questions that are uncomfortable. Teenagers have a lot more to offer. We have real opinions. We have beliefs and experiences and thoughts about things going on that adults might not be aware of. Things have changed since you were in high school.
Indeed, things have changed since we were in high school. Whether that was more than twenty-five years ago (like both of us; okay, for Kara, it’s actually more than thirty) or even just a few years ago, things are different for today’s students.
Truly listening to young people pushes us past our tendencies to assume and judge.
Listening brings us closer.
Listening helps us forge a new path across the generational impasse.
But we can’t stop there. Listening opens us up to the next step. It makes empathy possible.
Empathy Changes Everything
In our previous research studying churches that are Growing Young (see fulleryouthinstitute.org/growingyoung for details and resources), we identified empathy as one of six core commitments found in churches that effectively engage young people. Among all the things churches were doing well—developing a culture of “keychain” (shared) leadership, taking Jesus’ message seriously, nurturing warm community, prioritizing young people everywhere, and being the best local and global neighbors—intergenerational empathy played a unique and powerful role by weaving through the other commitments.
We defined empathy in Growing Young as “feeling with young people . . . sitting on the curb of a young person’s life, celebrating their dreams and grieving over their despair.” Since that time, countless adults have asked us for more help with understanding empathy and putting it into practice. So we’ll add to our original description this way: we practice empathy when we notice and care.
Empathy = Notice + Care
Noticing is reading someone else’s emotions. Caring is responding to those emotions with feelings of our own.
Taking another’s perspective increases our ability to understand them and helps us avoid judgment and stereotypes. It humanizes them as we see reality through their eyes—if only for the moment—rather than othering them and holding them at a distance. It steps into their shoes for a few paces on the road. Empathy increases our drive to help others rather than ignore their pain.
Empathy isn’t just for tragedies and bad days. This is a common misconception, one we’ve perpetuated ourselves by the way we couch empathy as a response to pain. It is that, but it’s also so much more. In all days and in the midst of all emotions, empathy pushes past the superficial and creates a safe space for the real story to emerge.
a To explore the use of othering in American literature, see Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
Empathy can be hard because it forces us to break old habits. In our past efforts at FYI to help build empathy for teenagers’ search for identity, belonging, and purpose, we used to ask youth leaders to spend time in the spaces where young people gather, such as sporting events, skate parks, and coffee shops. We speculated that asking leaders to observe at a distance would be less intimidating for adults and less intrusive for young people.
We hoped leaders’ observations would trigger empathy. But that’s not what happened. While it was helpful to see young people beyond the church walls, most adults tended to reinforce stereotypes when they described what they learned:
“They’re always on their phones.”
“They are present but not really there.”
“They spend too much money on silly things.”
“They just seem lonely.”
Hoping to move beyond these shallow assumptions, we next asked leaders to talk with young people instead. We gave them question prompts to use (a lot like the conversations permeating chapters 5, 7, and 9). We reminded them to withhold judgment and ask for clarity, especially with cultural references or teenage slang.
This approach produced remarkably different interpretations. Leaders were struck by how distant they had become from young people’s real lives. Phrases beginning with “I didn’t know . . . ,” “I never realized . . . ,” and “I now see . . .” signaled a shift toward empathy.
You’re likely nodding along. Chances are good that you already know this intuitively. You’re probably naturally empathetic toward teenagers—otherwise, you wouldn’t have picked up this book. Here’s your invitation to go deeper. Take another step closer. Intentionally practice noticing and caring.
NOTICE: Can You See Me? Can You Hear Me?
“Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost the same.” When our friend Mike Park, a church-planting pastor in New York City, shared this quote with a group of leaders at one of our innovation summits, the room fell quiet.
We try a lot of things in our churches to attract or engage young people. Sometimes these efforts are fruitful. But if we aren’t creating environments and relationships in which young people can be heard and seen, we may be wasting our time. We’re missing true conversation and connection.
Many of us can call to mind the people who extended us this gift while we were growing up. I (Brad) remember the two teachers who really saw me. Mrs. Patty Davis was the first grade teacher I needed—the perfect combination of authority and love. She sent me to the principal’s office with a pink slip for talking too much. But she also tended to my social exclusion, my nervous tick, and the fact that I was lagging behind in reading. She knew I was growing up on a farm out in the country and noticed that I found it hard to fit in with town kids who swam at the same club and played in the same neighborhoods with other classmates.
I don’t remember why I had trouble with reading, but I remember the paperback book about a boy and his duck that I wanted to read over and over during quiet time. And I still remember the smell of the old-school photocopy ink on my personal version of that book, which Mrs. Davis took time to create so I could read it at home.
I remember these things because Mrs. Davis saw me.
a This is because stories we tell about ourselves are products of both the speaker and the listener, a process known as “coconstruction.” Engaged listening includes being attentive, supportive, and challenging, and offering interpretation. Laura Ferrer-Wreder and Jane Kroger, “Identity as Life Story: Narrative Understandings of Adolescent Identity Development,” in Identity in Adolescence: The Balance between Self and Other (New York: Routledge, 2020), 112.
b Monisha Pasupathi, “The Social Construction of the Personal Past and Its Implications for Adult Development,” Psychological Bulletin 127, no. 5 (2001): 651–72.
Then in middle school, there was Mrs. Debbie Dwyer. Starting in sixth grade, she saw something in me that others didn’t: the potential to take my over-the-top personality and extra-loud voice and channel both toward public speaking. At her invitation, I joined the speech and drama team and never looked back. (I’m guessing she heard me more than she anticipated!)
While God used that training to prepare me for the speaking, preaching, and teaching I do now, the real power of Mrs. Dwyer’s influence reached far beyond a skill set. In a season when I was experiencing intense social rejection, she never once made me feel left out, weird, or alone.
She didn’t just see something in me—she saw me. That gift profoundly shaped who I am today.
CARE: Putting Empathy into Action
“What am I good at?”
This text from fifteen-year-old Noah caught Damon off guard. Damon, a youth leader at Noah’s church, could think of lots of answers. So he shot back a list: “You’re good at relating with people, an influencer, an artist, a sharp student.”
“I don’t have any real talent, though,” came the reply.
Damon responded with another list of accolades and encouragement. More self-rejection followed from Noah. The cycle continued.
One of Noah’s last statements in the conversation was “I just want to know why I’m not enough right now.” And then Noah stopped texting Damon.
Damon couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong in this conversation. At every turn, he had sought to encourage Noah. He tried reassurances. He tried replacing negative self-talk with truth. What happened?
Damon shared this story with a friend at a training I (Brad) was leading for a group of youth ministry leaders. In the session, we were talking about the power of empathy for young people. A friend at Damon’s table read the text thread and shook his head. Then he said something that floored Damon.
“You never made him feel heard. You just tried to fix it. That’s not what he needed.”
Despite his best intentions to help Noah, Damon missed what Noah may have wanted most in that moment: someone to empathize with what he was actually feeling. Damon reflected, “I seemed more interested in fixing the problem than trying to wrestle with the questions with him. I began hammering away at his feelings, hoping to change his mind rather than hear his heart.”
Maybe you’ve had a similar experience. You’re trying to care, but it backfires. Here are a few tips for next time.
Tell Me More
I don’t know about you, but I often find myself in conversations with young people that bump along awkwardly and end abruptly. As one of the ministry volunteers at my church recently shared, “I am apparently terrible at getting more than one-word answers in conversation with most of the guys.” Can you relate?
Me in the past: “How was your baseball game this weekend?”
Teenager: “Good.”
Me: “Cool.”
That’s usually how it ended.
Until I started using a key phrase FYI teammate Steve Argue has championed for years. In conversations and connections with young people, try using this simple three-word invitation: Tell me more.
Memorize those words right now.
In the baseball conversation above, a “tell me more about that” might still yield a short answer. But sometimes it opens enough of a crack for an adult to peer inside the elusive experience of the reserved teenager. And with older students who may be jaded by how little adults seem to want to know about them, “tell me more” can be a relational game changer.
There are all kinds of variations on this approach. We could ask for more specificity, like “What was good about the game?” or “What made it fun?”
Steve will often say, “The first question isn’t as important as the second or third question.” That’s because the first question we ask comes from our agenda; what follows emerges from the unfolding conversation.
Match Your Words with Your Body Language
We say as much with our expressions, attention, and posture as we do with our words. But I (Brad) confess that I sometimes struggle with empathetic nonverbal communication. It’s not unusual for Kara to say in a meeting, “I can’t tell by your affect how you’re feeling.” When I am processing information and considering what to say, I can forget to tell my face to keep up. The problem is, other people need cues from our expressions. They need to know whether to keep talking or to shut up. They need to know whether they’re being understood or misinterpreted. Our faces help fill in the blanks beyond what we are saying out loud.
a You can explore these questions further in Virginia Ward, Reggie Joiner, and Kristen Ivy, It’s Personal: Five Questions You Should Answer to Give Every Kid Hope (Atlanta: Orange Books, 2019).
The coronavirus pandemic of 2020—and the subsequent shift from in-person to virtual gatherings—gave many of us new opportunities to see what we look like in meetings, ministry gatherings, and one-on-one conversations. While I prefer to hide my own self-view and focus on the other people onscreen, sometimes in these digital encounters I watch my face to see my reactions and learn how others might be experiencing them. Occasionally I even find myself practicing empathetic responses and trying to avoid expressions that could miscommunicate.
Perhaps you’re using videoconferencing enough to try the same exercise for a week. Maybe you can practice empathetic expressions in the mirror every morning while you’re getting ready. Or over the next month, choose one expression you want to offer a young person in your interactions and look for natural opportunities to do so.
Obstacles to Empathy: Two Pairs of Extremes
When it comes to relating to young people like Janelle, whom we met at the start of this chapter, we all fall into common traps that short-circuit our attempts at connection. These traps can be grouped in two sets of extremes.
“When I Was Your Age” versus “You’re So Different from Me”
It can be easy to assume we have too much or too little in common across generations. Let’s start with “When I was your age.” This statement rarely precedes an empathetic response. Think about the tone in your voice when those words slide out: critical, judgmental, pejorative. We would do well to remove the phrase from our vocabulary altogether.
Why? Here’s the truth. We may have been teenagers once, but we’ve never been “their age.”
We can remember what it was like to be a teenager, but we’ve never been teenagers in their world.
On the flipside of “When I was your age” is another fallacy: “You’re so different from me.” We often assume that young people are so different—so other—from us that we couldn’t possibly understand them.
One leader from Tennessee observed:
Honestly, I think empathy may be our biggest challenge. It is super easy for me—a child of the ’80s and ’90s—to judge technology and social media and say they are the biggest hindrance to spiritual formation. But the reality is that I just want something to blame. It helps to have technology as a scapegoat. That’s not just a speed bump to empathy; it’s a roadblock!
Rather than simply critique kids’ tech habits, we can empathize with a need we all share regardless of age: relationships. When you were in high school, you may have spent evenings at home in your bedroom on the family telephone—perhaps with a long curly cord plugged into a wall—talking to your best friend (with whom you had just spent all day at school). Your parents may have even decided to pay extra for call waiting so other calls could get through during your hours-long conversations. Or maybe you came of age in the brief-but-exciting pager phase, when cryptic messages came beeping through your hip-side device to make you feel important and needed. Perhaps you had an early Nokia or Razr cell phone—not yet “smart,” but it definitely helped you stay connected with your friends.
You get the point.
You’ve been there. Relationships matter—to all of us, but especially to adolescents (which is why this book devotes an entire section to the big question of belonging). Tap into your own memories from the past to strengthen your empathy and build deeper connections with the young people in front of you today.
“What You Need to Do” versus “This Is Totally under Your Control”
In this second pair of extremes, we either rescue young people from their problems or abandon them to figure things out on their own.
We frequently feel like we have advice to give teenagers. That’s normal. We have lived longer, experienced more, and gained wisdom from the road. But in the face of a dilemma, if we jump in too quickly with a “what you need to do” suggestion, we risk communicating that a teenager isn’t capable of handling problems on their own. We rob them of the value of sorting things out, making decisions, and learning from failure.
The opposite response can also be crippling. “This is totally under your control” sounds empowering on the surface (and when a young person is ready for it, can actually be empowering). But putting the entire responsibility on a teenager to solve a problem can sound like the young person is to blame. If they had only tried harder or not made a mistake or avoided a situation, they would not have ended up here. And now they—on their own—have to dig their way out.
Continuing Our Own Search for Identity, Belonging, and Purpose
While “when I was your age” may not be very empathetic, it doesn’t mean we should never revisit our experiences. Getting close to teenagers can remind us of our own quest for identity, belonging, and purpose—maybe too much.
It turns out we adults need to do the work too.
Sometimes we struggle to really be there for teenagers because we have unresolved questions and toxic stories we’re telling ourselves. When we try to connect with a teenager, we find ourselves wondering, Will they like me? Will they listen to me? Will I really make a difference?
Perhaps especially for those of us who are parents, our kids’ journeys to discover identity, belonging, and purpose affect our own in surprising ways.
All three of my (Kara’s) kids went to the same school from kindergarten through eighth grade. We had nine great years with more or less the same kids and families through elementary and middle school.
Which made the process of making new friends in ninth grade especially jarring—for me.
Our kids did just fine. I was the one riddled with anxiety and insecurity. Especially with Nathan, our oldest. When I picked him up those first few late August days at his new high school, I was eager to hear who he had lunch with, who he sat next to in class, and who he thought might become a real friend.
Truth be told, I was far too eager. And this is even more embarrassing, but I feel safe enough to admit it: I took comfort that Nathan seemed to be connecting with the “popular” kids.
Two weeks into ninth grade, Nathan and the rest of his class went away on a camping trip. When Nathan returned, he gave me a recap of what had happened. Apparently, both nights he hung out with the more popular kids. But when they started teasing and making fun of other kids, that bothered Nathan. He told me over dinner, “The most popular kids are kinda jerks. I think I’d rather hang out with the kids who are in the ‘next tier.’”
I was proud of my boy for looking past popularity in choosing his buddies. But I wasn’t proud of my own reaction. That night I confessed to my husband, Dave, “I’m glad Nathan’s choosing character first. But I have to admit I wish he was still hanging out with the popular kids.”
Why did I care more about Nathan hanging out with the popular kids than he did? Because as I journeyed alongside Nathan in his search for belonging, my own insecurities about friendship were heightened. Subconsciously, I hoped that if he received a stamp of approval from the right students, that would somehow reverberate three decades into my past and make my teenage self feel more welcomed and valued.
So many of us try to lead or love from a place of deficit. Doing our own work on identity, belonging, and purpose can open us up to empathize with young people on a whole new level.
How do the 3 big questions bubble to the surface for you these days?
What triggers your insecurity?
What does it look like for you to lean into God’s truths about your identity, belonging, and purpose?
While we will invite you to look back at your own story throughout this book, it might be helpful to pause right now and name how you’re answering the questions of identity, belonging, and purpose today. Good self-reflection can help till the soil of empathy for others. We’ve included some questions at the end of this chapter to get you started.
Where We’re Going: Current Answers and Christ-Centered Answers
Janelle’s faith grounds her through the ups and downs of her journey toward identity, belonging, and purpose. One of her go-to Scripture passages is Psalm 139:14. Reflecting on its significance, Janelle shared:
That’s my favorite one. It says I’m “fearfully and wonderfully made.” It’s really important to me. I think, especially when I was going through mental illness, I felt like, why would God make me like this? Or when we were in shelters, or like, all this stuff, why would God do this? But that verse helped me know that he makes things and he thinks they’re good. I think it makes me look at the good and bad things that I see in myself, that they are all there for a reason.
Janelle has several adults in her life who have taken time to listen well and empathize with her quest to answer the 3 big questions in light of her faith. In chapter 3 we turn our attention to the ways she and other teenagers in our interviews talked about faith and how we might help them imagine new ways of answering the big questions.
Chapters 4, 6, and 8 will strengthen our “notice and care” muscles by digging deeply into what we learned in our research about current answers to identity, belonging, and purpose.
Chapters 5, 7, and 9 will explore more life-giving faith-filled answers. We’ll offer all sorts of practical ideas to launch conversations and connections that can move the young people in your life toward Jesus’ better answers.