What’s Really Facing Today’s Teens – And How to Respond
By Pastor Ellis White
Senior Pastor
This year, my eldest began Middle School. I recall the transition I made at her age from St Peter’s Catholic Primary School with only 200 students to the Royal Grammar School with 10 times as many students. It was overwhelming. But thankfully, I wasn’t also dealing with a daily bombardment of social media, gender, and sexuality questions, and a widespread mental health crisis.
Today’s teens and pre-teens are living in a world vastly different from the one I grew up in. I am just on the edge of being what is called a digital native. I remember in the mid 1990s visiting the Science Museum in London with my father to try out this thing called “the internet.” We looked at web cams of places we had visited in the US during a trip we had recently taken to Colorado, California, and Washington. The internet arrived in our house a few years later, but it wasn’t until I was about to graduate from high school that Facebook became available for non-college students around the world, and I didn’t get my first iPhone until my senior year of college. I cannot imagine the pressures that such things place upon teens and pre-teens today.
The internet isn’t the only thing that makes today’s world vastly different. Gender and sexuality issues were fringe topics during my teen years. No one ever asked me what my gender identity, or my sexual orientation was. I wasn’t asked to declare my pronouns when completing an online form, or logging into a Zoom call. Sure, I had to figure out what it meant when I was attracted to a girl, and how to ask someone out, but I wasn’t also questioning a raft of other things.
On top of all these changes, the number of teenagers struggling with mental health issues, particularly depression and anxiety today is staggering. Perhaps it was all being suppressed in my teenage years, but I don’t recall more than one or two people I knew having mental health issues. Today, the National Alliance on Mental Illness states that one in five teens experience a severe mental health condition at some point during their lives. Given this prevalence, it’s very likely that a teenager today has or will have a close friend dealing with a mental health issue.
So how do we, as parents and grandparents, respond to all this? How do we initiate dialogue with our kids and grandkids on these issues? How do we help them to know what it means to follow Jesus in today’s world?
Those are the questions that are going to be addressed on Sunday, October 6 at 6:30 pm in “It’s Teen Time: A Parenting Workshop.” We have invited David Eaton, the cofounder and CEO of an organization designed to support parents called Axis, and an expert on these topics to come equip parents and grandparents to talk about these topics with their kids. I will be there, and I would encourage every parent or grandparent to join me. Space is limited, so please sign up before it fills up, by registering here.
Tomorrow, we will pick up the story of Saul following his conversion and discover how he immediately put his newfound faith into action, and what that might mean for us.
See you at 9:00 or 10:30 am.
Pastor Ellis