I used to teach English to high school juniors at an affluent private school. Early in the year, I would have a conversation with my class that always went something like this:
Me: “Why are you here today?”
Student: “Wha?”
“I said, why are you here today? Why did you come to school?”
“Because my parents made me.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to go to school.”
“Why?”
“So I can get an education.”
“Why?”
“So I can get into a good college.”
“Why?”
“So I can get a good job.”
“Why?”
“So I can have money.”
“Why?”
Dumbfounded stares across the board: “So I can buy stuff!”
There it is, the American Dream as instilled from generation to generation. To condense, “My parents make me go to school so I can buy stuff.” I always hoped that making them lay it out like that would awaken them to the shallow pool of motivation from which they were drawing. No wonder they were uninspired! But the darker realization was that this version of the American Dream had been taught to them, mostly by their parents. And, lacking a better story, most of us in education have gone along with this version.
“Yeah?” you’re probably saying. “What’s wrong with that?”
This part took me longer to figure out. See, adolescents are caught in the middle of a terrifying bridge. The end they just left was childhood, which was playful, simple, and though typically filled with a few small bumps here and there, mostly free of major pain. At the other end is adulthood, with all the worries and responsibilities they see us burdened with every day. So the version of adulthood that they sell to themselves is that adulthood means freedom, and freedom means being able to do whatever they want, whenever they want to do it.
As parents, counselors, teachers, we constantly remind them that this isn’t the real world at all. They have to hold themselves accountable, they have to learn to do the things they don’t want to do in order to be able to do the things they do want to do, they have to be responsible, blah blah blah. But are we ourselves still living from that adolescent version of “freedom?” Do we have any clearer picture of WHY we are doing the things we are doing?
If we want to teach our teens a deeper, more authentic way of life, we have to be clear about the values that serve as the foundation for the decisions and choices that we make. If our teens don’t seem to be buying into those values, are we really living them, or do our teens see a lack of integrity between what we say and what we do?
I urge parents to make a list of three to five values that serve as the core of their worldview — compassion, service to others, honesty, health, safety, security — whatever they may be, and then do a serious, clearheaded assessment of how well they are living from those values. Do what you can to improve areas that are out of integrity, and then use those values as the basis for explaining your decisions to your teens. It doesn’t mean they will like your decisions any better than they have in the past, but they will come to understand those values and hopefully, one day, if we’ve lived them out well, our teens may see the value in them and adopt them as their own.
