Chapter 3
3
THE MYTH OF ADOLESCENCE
Exposing the low expectations that are robbing our generation
Do you know anyone who owns an elephant? Neither do we. We grew up with all the usual pets. Some unusual ones too—rats, snakes, wild ducklings, turtles, salamanders, a great horned owl, even a baby white-tailed deer.
But we never had an elephant.
That didn’t stop us from dreaming. We could just picture it: Some kid would brag, “Hey, our family just got a dog! A purebred schnauzerdoodle-something! He fetches and sits and everything!”
“That’s great,” we’d reply. “Our family just got an elephant.”
From that moment on, we’d be twin rulers of the playground. “Hey, bring your purebred schnauzerdoodle over sometime. Bet our pet can sit on your pet.”
Or something like that.
When we got older, we learned a bit more about elephants. For example, in certain parts of Asia, farmers still use elephants to do much of their heavy labor. Elephants pull stumps and trees out of the ground, haul logs, and carry heavy loads. They’re good at it too, because not only are they enormous, they’re also incredibly strong.
Some countries hold “elephant festivals” to celebrate the strength, agility, and intelligence of these mighty animals. Handlers enter the elephants in games of basketball and soccer—with giant balls. Elephants perform choreographed dances to music. But the main event is a game of tug of war between an elephant and one hundred grown men.
Let’s think about this for a moment. We’re half-Japanese, so let’s say the average Asian man in this tug-of-war competition is our size—about 135 pounds. Not too impressive (we’re working on that). Still, when you multiply that by one hundred, that’s six whole tons. Plus, the men aren’t just standing around. They’re digging in their heels and pulling.
But the elephant still wins—every time.
That information made us question our childhood dream of owning an elephant. For example, what would we do if our elephant woke up in the middle of the night and decided it wanted to visit Aunt Bertha and Uncle Dumbo?
Later we learned that elephant owners in Asia don’t have this problem. To keep their elephants from wandering off, they have a surprisingly simple solution. The owner takes a small rope, ties it to a wooden post in the ground, and attaches it to the elephant’s right hind leg. That’s it.
Of course, to the elephant the rope is nothing more than string. One jerk and the rope would snap. One kick and the post would go flying. Yet with nothing but the small rope holding it back, the elephant stays put. It won’t move from the spot.
How is that possible? The answer is that it has little to do with the piece of rope around the elephant’s ankle and everything to do with the invisible shackles around the elephant’s mind.
Over the past few years, instead of wishing to own an elephant, we began to suspect that we might be elephants.
Could it be that we and most young people we know are like that elephant—strong, smart, holding incredible potential, but somehow held back by nothing more than a piece of twine? Left almost powerless by a lie?
We think so. And we’ve come to believe that a big part of what holds us back as a generation is a harmless-sounding but very powerful idea we call the Myth of Adolescence.
BEFORE THERE WAS MYSPACE
The word teenager is so common today that most people don’t even think about it—and if they do, it’s usually not positive. According to the dictionary, a teenager is a person between the ages of thirteen and nineteen years old. There’s a good chance you fall in that category. Like most teens, you attend school, have a MySpace or Facebook profile, and are more likely to take a photo with your phone than with a camera.
But would it surprise you to find out that at one time teenagers didn’t even exist? Don’t believe us? How about a pop quiz?
The first documented use of the word teenager was:
(a) Tyndale’s first edition English New Testament in 1526.
(b) Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in 1623.
(c) Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1739.
(d) Theodore Roosevelt’s Strenuous Life speech in 1899.
(e) A Reader’s Digest issue in 1941.
(f) Alex and Brett made it up for this book.
The answer is (e). That’s right, the word teenager has been around for less than seventy years.
Prior to the early twentieth century and, really, throughout history, people were either children or adults. Family and work were the primary occupations of the group we now call teenagers. In fact, in 1900 only one out of ten American young people between fourteen and seventeen years old attended high school. One historian, Friedrich Heer, writes about that era, focusing on Europe:
Around 1800 young people of both sexes could reckon on being considered adults as soon as the outward signs of puberty made their appearance. Girls attained marriageable age at fifteen…. Boys could join the Prussian army as officer cadets at the age of fifteen. Among the upper classes entry to university or to a profession was possible at the age of fifteen or sixteen. The school leaving age, and consequently the end of childhood, was raised during the nineteenth century to fourteen.
So what was it like to be a teen back then, before the idea of teens even existed? Good question. To answer it, we’d like to introduce you to three young people from different times in America’s past. Their names are George, David, and Clara.
GEORGE, DAVID, AND CLARA
George was born in northern Virginia in 1732 to a middle-class family. When he was eleven years old, he lost his father. Even though his peers never considered him very bright, he applied himself to his studies and mastered geometry, trigonometry, and surveying (think algebra and calculus) by the time he was sixteen.
At seventeen years old, George had the chance to put his studies to use at his first job. Talk about a job! Official surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia. This wasn’t a boy’s job, and it certainly wasn’t office work. For the next three years George endured the hardships of frontier life as he measured and recorded previously unmapped territories. His measuring tools were heavy logs and chains. George was a man at seventeen.
David was born in 1801 near the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father was serving in the state militia. At ten years old, David began a career at sea, serving as a naval cadet on the warship Essex. At eleven he saw his first battle.
At age twelve, David was given command of a ship that had been captured in battle and was dispatched with a crew to take the vessel and its men back to the United States. On the journey home, the captured British captain took issue at being ordered around by a twelve-year-old and announced that he was going below to get his pistols (out of respect for his position, he had been allowed to keep them). David promptly sent him word that if he stepped foot on deck with his pistols, he would be shot and thrown overboard. The captain decided to stay below.
Clara was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, on Christmas Day, 1821. She was the baby of the family, with ten years separating her and the next youngest. She was a timid child, so terrified of strangers that she was hardly able to speak. Then something happened that would change her life forever. When she was eleven years old, her older brother David fell from the roof of a barn and was seriously injured. Young Clara was frantic and begged to help care for him.
Once in the sickroom, Clara surprised everyone by demonstrating all the qualities of an experienced nurse. She learned better than anyone how to make her brother comfortable. Little by little, the doctor allowed her to take over all of his care, with his complete recovery lasting two years.
A year later, at the age of fourteen, Clara became the nurse for her father’s hired man, who had come down with smallpox, and then to more patients as the epidemic spread through the Massachusetts village where she lived. Still shy and timid, her desire to serve others drove her to overcome her fears. By age seventeen she was a successful schoolteacher with over forty students—some nearly as old as she.
All three of these young people were given increasing levels of responsibility at early ages, and they not only survived, they rose to the occasion. Even more important, as the quote we shared from Professor Heer shows, at the time in which they lived, young men and women like them were not all that unusual.
The question is: what changed? Why is it that young men and women of the past were able to do things (and do them well) at fifteen or sixteen that many of today’s twenty-five to thirty-year-olds can’t do?
Is it because young people are now called “teenagers”? Not exactly.
The answer is that people today view the teen years through the modern lens of adolescence—a social category of age and behavior that would have been completely foreign to men and women not too long ago.
The term adolescence literally means “to grow up.” This is true in a biological sense as well as in other aspects of maturity. We have no problem with that, or even with the word itself—you’ll notice that we still use the word teenager a lot. The problem we have is with the modern understanding of adolescence that allows, encourages, and even trains young people to remain childish for much longer than necessary. It holds us back from what we could do, from what God made us to do, and even from what we would want to do if we got out from under society’s low expectations.
For the powerful elephant, a shackle looks like a piece of twine. For young people today—a powerful, educated, and unusually blessed generation—our shackles hide in simple, deadly ideas like “adolescence” and “teenager.”
Are you ready to set yourself free by changing how you think?
THE HISTORY OF YOU (STARTING ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO)
In order to understand the modern “teenager” concept, we have to go back in time only a hundred years. At that time, right around the year 1900, a cascade of labor-and school-reform laws were passed in an attempt to protect kids from the harsh conditions in factories. These laws were good because conditions had been brutal, and children’s health and education suffered. Unfortunately, the laws had some unintended and far-reaching consequences. By completely removing children from the workplace and mandating school attendance through high school, teens’ once-established role as key producers and contributors came to an end. Suddenly their role was almost exclusively that of consumers.
Young people were suddenly stuck in a poorly defined category between childhood and adulthood. Young men and women like George, David, and Clara were discouraged. Instead, the “teenager” was invented—a young person with most of the desires and abilities of an adult but few of the expectations or responsibilities.
When we were researching this subject, we happened across a word origins book called America in So Many Words. Read what it says about the word teenager.
In the first part of the twentieth century, we made a startling discovery. There were teenagers among us! Until then, we had thought of people in just two stages: children and adults. And while childhood might have its tender moments, the goal of the child was to grow up as promptly as possible in order to enjoy the opportunities and shoulder the responsibilities of an adult. The girl became the woman, the boy became the man. It was as simple and significant as that….
[But] [t]he reforms of the early twentieth century, preventing child labor and mandating education through high school, lengthened the pre-adult years. In earlier times, a person reaching adult size at age thirteen or fourteen was ready to do adult work. Now adult size was achieved as soon as ever, but preparation for adult responsibilities lasted until age eighteen or later.
Thus the years ending in -teen became something new and distinctive…. The teenager remade our world. The concept is…subversive: why should any teenager enjoying freedom submit to the authority of adults? With the discovery of this new age, ours has been the century of the teenager ever since.
Think about that last line: “Ours has been the century of the teenager ever since.” Isn’t that exactly what has happened? Entire industries—movie, music, fashion, fast food—and countless online services revolve around the consumer habits of, you guessed it, teens.
With all this money and attention focused on teens, the teen years are viewed as some sort of vacation. Society doesn’t expect much of anything from young people during their teen years—except trouble. And it certainly doesn’t expect competence, maturity, or productivity. The saddest part is that, as the culture around them has come to expect less and less, young people have dropped to meet those lower expectations. Since most of us have grown up surrounded by these low expectations, meeting them is like breathing to us—we never give it a thought. And we never realize what we’ve lost.
As one education expert put it, “Our current ceiling for students is really much closer to where the floor ought to be.” Think about that. The most our society expects from teens is really much closer to the least we should expect. Does that strike you as extreme? To us it seems extremely true. And not just in school but in every area of our lives.
So just how far have the expectations fallen?
MAKING OUR BEDS (AND OTHER FEATS OF VALOR)
Recently, we decided to Google the words teens and expectations to see what came up. The results were far more entertaining than we would have imagined.
Most web browsers have a built-in Google search box, and as you type in your search terms, it gives you suggested searches based on terms that are used most often. Here are some of the suggestions it gave us as we tried to Google teens and expectations:
• teens and drugs
• teens and alcohol
• teens and smoking
• teens and drinking
• teens and marijuana
• teens and cell phones
Even Google has low expectations for teens! Anyway, we did our search.
The top result was about teens, drugs, and alcohol abuse. Another was for an article called “A Parent’s Guide to Surviving the Teen Years.” But the one that really jumped out at us was an article about teaching teens responsibility by setting expectations.
The article seemed promising, so we clicked the link: “When you formally develop a set of expectations for your teen, you begin to set your teen up for succeeding in meeting those expectations.” And so we’re thinking, This is great!
But maybe not.
The author proceeded to list suggested expectations for teens, divided up by age group. First, preteens and younger teens, ages ten to fourteen. You are expected to…
• make your bed every day
• be able to take a message on the phone
• clean your room every week (with help from Mom and Dad)
Then comes older teens, fifteen and up. Besides everything on the younger teens’ list, you are expected to…
• do a daily chore [just one], like taking out the trash
• make sure the gas gauge stays above a quarter of a tank
• clean your room every week (with no help from Mom and Dad)
The article also includes an encouragement to parents about the list: “Please do not feel that your teenager should be doing all of them.” Phew. We were getting worried there!
The author means well. And actually for some teens, meeting those low expectations might require a great deal of effort. But consider for a minute how far the expectations have fallen. Seventeen-year-old George was expected to endure the hardships of frontier life as a surveyor. And we’re expected to endure the hardships of doing the dinner dishes?
Twelve-year-old David was expected to successfully return a ship, its captain, and its crew to the United States. We are expected to return our pillows, sheets, and blankets to their proper place on the bed. David succeeded. Did you this morning?
It’s almost gotten to the point that people expect less of teenagers than they do of toddlers. Think about it. Why do babies, with inferior motor skills, reasoning ability, and physical strength, experience nearly 100 percent success in overcoming difficult challenges, while teens often falter? Well, one is expected, and the other is not.
Why does every healthy baby learn to walk while very few teenagers have learned to dance? One is expected, and the other is not.
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.
The truth is that all of us are susceptible to low expectations. Once we have satisfied the minimum requirements, we tend to stop pushing ourselves.
THE SURPRISING POWER OF EXPECTATIONS
You’re probably familiar with the saying “Ideas have consequences.” But did you know that expectations have consequences? It’s true. The power of expectations has been documented in study after study over the last few decades. We’re familiar with two of them—one occurring in a public middle school in San Francisco, the other at a Bible college in our hometown of Portland, Oregon.
Both studies were set up the same way. Teachers were given two classes of randomly divided students. However, the teachers were told that one class was made up of the best and brightest students at the school and that the other class was made up of the slower to average students. With that, the teachers began to teach. And guess what happened?
All of the teachers’ interactions with the students were tainted by their expectations. When the teachers worked with a student in the “bright” class, they persisted with the student until he or she found the answer. But when a student in the “slow” class didn’t find the answer right away, the teachers moved on to another student. When a student in the bright class struggled, the teachers brushed it off, saying that the student was just having an “off day.” But when the students in the slow class struggled, it was just because they were slow.
Don’t miss this: statistically the classes were exactly the same. The only difference was in what their teachers expected of them. Soon, the students began to meet those expectations. The “best and brightest” class began to excel, and the “slower to average” class began to lag behind.
As teens, we’re no different from the middle school and college students in those studies. For all of us, expectations are a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the words of Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, “Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.”
The self-fulfilling power of expectations impacts teens in almost every area—often maddeningly so. Take, for example, tech savvy and sexual activity. These are two areas where teens are expected to have high interest and high performance. Just as you’d predict, the levels of activity, consumption, and even obsession in these areas are unprecedented. We are meeting the expectations set before us.
Isn’t it ironic that many teenagers, though fluent in multiple computer languages (we’re considered trendsetters and early adopters), are not expected to understand or care about things like personal finances, politics, or our faith? We’re not even expected to be capable of carrying on an intelligent conversation with an adult.
Isn’t something wrong when girls are constantly judged on their physical appearance and pressed to become more and more sexually provocative, yet are so rarely expected to develop qualities of character and intellect beneath the surface?
When we understand the power of expectations, we begin to understand why things have changed so dramatically and why our culture has bought into the Myth of Adolescence—without even realizing that it doesn’t have to be true.
WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT TEENS
You might wonder what the Bible has to say about adolescence. The answer is simple.
Nothing.
You won’t find the words teenager or adolescence anywhere in Scripture. And you won’t find any reference to a period of time between childhood and adulthood either. Instead you’ll find the apostle Paul writing in 1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”
Notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t say, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But then I became a teenager and I looked like an adult, I sounded like an adult, but I still acted like a child.” No! He said, “I became a man, and I gave up childish ways.”
In another letter, Paul wrote to a young pastor in training: “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” (1 Timothy 4:12, NIV).
What we find here is clear evidence that God does not hold two standards: one for young adults and one for adults. He has high expectations for both. Where some might look down on or excuse young adults, God calls us to be examples. Where our culture might expect little, God expects great things.
So whose expectations are we living by? The Bible says, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world” (Romans 12:2, NIV). When we let cultural expectations become our standard, we allow ourselves to be squeezed into a mold, with little room for Christlike character or competence.
As we have seen in this chapter—and as you no doubt know from personal experience—we live in a culture that wants to tell us how to act, how to think, how to look, and how to talk. It tells us what to wear, what to buy, and where to buy it. It tells us what to dream, what to value, what to live for—and it’s not Christ. To quote an old Pepsi ad from the nineties, “Be young. Have fun. Drink Pepsi.” Nike tells us, “Just do it.” Sprite tells us, “Obey your thirst.” And who hasn’t heard the joke that 92 percent of teens would be dead if trendsetting Hollister decided breathing was uncool?
Where expectations are high, we tend to rise to meet them. Where expectations are low, we tend to drop to meet them. And yet this is the exact opposite of what we’re told to do in 1 Corinthians 14:20: “Brothers, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults” (NIV). Our culture says, “Be mature in evil, but in your thinking and behavior be childish.”
Of course, sometimes we like being able to do things we know we shouldn’t do—or getting away with less than our best. We excuse our choices because that’s what teens are supposed to do or by thinking, Well, I’m not as bad as some people I know. We go with the crowd. We do what comes easily: we certainly don’t do hard things.
The consequence? We waste some of the best years of our lives and never reach our full God-given potential. We never attempt things that would stretch, grow, and strengthen us. We end up weak and unprepared for the amazing future that could have been. We like the freedom low expectations give us, but we’re really being robbed.
As the stories in this book will show you, wasting our teen years is not what most of us really want. And it’s not what God wants for us either.
BREAKING THE TWINE
Remember our elephant in India, shackled by nothing but a piece of twine and a wooden post in the ground? What’s going on there? Why doesn’t he just break free? The strength is there. Why doesn’t he use it?
Here’s how it works. When the elephant is still young, his owner takes him from his mother and shackles him to a large tree—with a heavy chain around his right hind leg. For days and weeks, the young elephant will strain and pull, trying to break free, but all he succeeds in doing is causing the shackle to cut deep into his leg. Eventually he gives up and accepts the idea that he can’t go anywhere when there is something around his right hind leg.
Soon the owner can replace the tree with a post and the chain with a piece of twine. Once the elephant feels resistance, he stops. There’s nothing but a piece of twine around his ankle, but there are heavy shackles around his mind.
In this book we hope to demonstrate that we—Alex and Brett, you, teenagers everywhere—are like that elephant. We have proven strength and God-given potential—the potential to do hard, important things—but we are held captive by a lie. We have been conditioned to believe what is false, to stop when things feel hard, and to miss out on God’s incredible purpose for our teen years.
In the chapters that follow, we want to show you that deep down you want to do hard things, that you were created to do hard things, and what’s more, you can do hard things. What you’ll discover is a whole new way of living your teen years and of living the rest of your life. God’s Word and all of history demonstrate that we are far more capable than we think. This world is trying to trap you by tying its pathetic piece of twine around your ankle. We want to help you break the twine.
This is what we call the Rebelution: throwing off the shackles of lies and low expectations and returning our generation to a true and very exciting understanding of the teen years—not as a vacation from responsibility but as a launching pad for the rest of our lives.
What does that look like? We’ll find out in chapter 4.