“The young of today will rule tomorrow.”
When our time has come and gone our children will be called upon to take over from us. With this in mind the rituals surrounding the development of children into adults when they come of age ought to be the most important that we get involved in. But increasingly in the modern world these rites are losing their impact in the lives of our children, and the future looks bleak as the indifference that we are already used to looks set to rise.
As a youth worker, I have a very important and often undervalued role in the lives of adolescents (young people). Adolescence is a stage of life where most people experience great changes, physically, socially and mentally and it is perhaps the most transitory part of life that anyone will experience. It is the transition of children into adults, and part of my job is to facilitate that change.
What I actually do is to help young people identify needs in their communities and enable them to take on the personal responsibility of doing something about it. One part of this is to go into schools to facilitate discussion among the students around the kind of community they want to live in, the changes that are necessary to turn their visions into reality, and what they can do as individuals to help make these changes come about. This (in theory) leads nicely onto the role that I can play in that process.
Unfortunately, in practice, the concept of personal responsibility as a means to affect change in society is an alien one to a great many young people that I talk to in schools. The opinion that it's someone else's job to make the changes that need to happen is a common one, as is general malevolence towards any kind of authoritative body. "There's nothing I can do" and "It's not my problem" are phrases that I hear often. And we're not talking about solving the rail crisis or bringing an end to world poverty here. Even such mundane things as ensuring vulnerable people in the community receive the care they need and doing something about crime in the community are met with general apathy.
What is the reason for this indifference? Why are many young people growing up without an understanding of their own responsibility in the world? Why do so many adults allow this to happen to a generation that will one day rule the planet? These are questions that I am going to explore and hopefully find some answers to.
Let's start by exploring what happens during this transition that all young people go through. It starts from the age of about ten onwards, and is called puberty. Puberty is the natural change that turns children into adults. Apart from the physical changes that children go through from this age, there are mental changes too. This is the stage of life at which children start to develop sexual identity and independence from their parents, which can often cause great friction in families when personalities clash. The young person's strive for greater freedom from their families may be suppressed and quite sensibly too as we as fully functioning adults do not want our children to make certain mistakes.
Young people also find that society begins to treat them differently at this time of life, because of their development as sexual adults. A colleague recently related the story of her husband and daughter, both of whom used to be very affectionate towards each other, as is perfectly normal in father/daughter family relationships. One day while out shopping with his daughter (when she was 14), the father felt suddenly uncomfortable walking along the street arm in arm with his daughter and pulled away from her, causing her to feel fatherly rejection for the first time in her life. In this family, as in many others, they found it very difficult to talk to each other about how they felt. Thus the daughter had no explanation for why she was rejected, leading to confusion and a feeling of separateness from her father.
This experience is unfortunately very common. There are no ready answers around for young people as to why they feel the way they do, and why they are treated differently from before. However society's rejection of teenagers does not end there. Over the last eighty years, the media has developed a harshly detrimental image of the adolescent. The media shows us that adolescence is about rebellion, crime, drugs, anarchy and violence. Adolescents hang out on street corners, smoke, drink, steal cars and abuse the elderly. Unfortunately this view is very widespread in our community, perpetuated by the tabloids that sensationalise and have a habit of blowing things out of all proportion. This makes my work very difficult, particularly when trying to convince community partners that what I can offer can make a difference.
So how does it all go wrong? A proportion of young people do get involved in drugs culture and crime. Why do they feel the need to escape? What are they running away from? Who are they fighting against? Turning to crime, to drugs, to prostitution, is not what being an adolescent is all about; it is adolescence gone wrong. Adolescence is about developing independence from our parents, learning from our experience of making mistakes and going through phases in order to develop our own choices over where we go in life. That's youth worker speak: a rare view in this day and age.
It's interesting to note the correlation between the development of adolescence as a detrimental phase and the process that societal religion has gone through over the last fifty years. By societal religion, I mean the generally accepted religion of Anglo Saxon society, the religion that has performed ritual tasks for the general populace at the various stages of their lives. As the view that adolescents are violent, rebellious 'yobs' has risen, so the 'irreligion' of general society has also developed. Far less people are going to church, or getting involved in religion at all, and ritual is having a far lesser effect on people's lives. I believe (as I'm sure do many church ministers) that the two go hand in hand.
Because there are fewer people in society that are taking part in ritual, it is having a far less impact in our lives. Therefore young people in particular, an anthropological group who have less power in society than their elders, are left stranded in the expansive sea of life. Perhaps this helps to explain the rise in young people interested in paganism, an easily accessible religion, in recent years. It certainly explains the rise of youth crime.
Rites of passage have various purposes. They teach, they guide, they celebrate and they mark the passing of one stage in life to another: the changing of the seasons of life, if you will. So what are the rites of passage that are important in young people's lives? They stem from the mundane, for example a first job or a first girlfriend or boyfriend, to the major events in our lives such as puberty and leaving home. Even becoming old enough to smoke or join the army is an event worth passing, because the more support we give our young people - the more rites of passage we get involved in with them - the more they will come to accept their place in society, and accept their position of responsibility as adults rather than stumbling around as grown ups lacking guidance.
Rites of passage for young people also have another very important purpose: they are a marking point for parents that their children are becoming adults. They are the perfect opportunity to pass on much needed advice for children to carry on with them into adulthood, and to explain why they will be feeling different, and why they may be treated differently. They are a point at which parents can begin to let go, from being wholly responsible for their children, to allowing them to break the reigns a bit and learn about the world for themselves.
Coming of age is obviously a very important ritual that is worth spending time over but there's no need to go overboard on the semantics. A simple ritual, an explanation of the responsibilities of adulthood, perhaps a challenge to build character if you feel so inclined are all that are required, plus a good celebration to inject some fun into the passing. On the island of St Kilda off the Scottish coast young men used to have to climb the cliffs without aid before being allowed to get married. This is perhaps taking it a little far but provides a good example of a coming of age rite with not a robe or pentagram in sight.
Other adolescent rites of passage shouldn't be great-convoluted rituals but are still important. The entire family need not be invited along to Avebury of a Sunday afternoon to meet young Sam's first girlfriend or to watch Kelly get drunk for the first time. These things still need recognising, as they are important stepping-stones on the road to full adulthood yet there's no need to drag out the experience with full magic circles, robes and pointy sticks at midnight. A simple chat about responsibility and maturity and whatnot, a free hand to let the young people have the experience for themselves and make the mistakes and you're on the way. I have found professionally that rather than banning alcohol on trips out and summer camps, for example, providing the young people with a role model of knowing your limit and sticking to it works a lot better.
As an adolescent I missed out on most rites of passage. My parents didn't believe they had time for religion, Sunday being a day of rest, and like most children I learned what I did about puberty from the playground. I never learned from my parents things like sex and relationships (they divorced when I was a teenager) and my situation was made particularly vulnerable as I grew up a young gay man without a good role model. I stumbled around, making one mistake after another, and took a lot longer to develop into a self-respecting adult. If my parents had provided me with a decent understanding listening ear, and the lessons that rites of passage could bring it would not have taken until I was 24 to start to really feel like an adult.
We've explored what happens to adolescents who lack the direction that ritual can bring and what can happen when these young people grow up. Without guidance young people cannot become adults: it's a transition that does not happen easily. They grow up obviously, but they are grown ups that don't know how to be adults. The apathy of our modern era that is instilled in the young of today could have been avoided, but without the importance of adolescent rites of passage being fully appreciated by the wider society this is only going to get worse.
As I mentioned before, when we are old (and I'm sure I'll be the old bloke sat on the end of the bar complaining at everything in general) the young people of today will be ruling the world. As their adolescence is the transitory phase through which they become adults, why do we as a society spend more time complaining about them and less time teaching them about their personal responsibility?
Do not be surprised at the time that society calls on its children to rule the world if they turn round and ask, "how?" It is simply not preparing them to take this step.