When Kids Hurt

Chap Clark

Description

Chap Clark's groundbreaking Hurt: Inside the World of Today's Teenagers revealed the hard truth about contemporary adolescence: societal changes and systemic abandonment have left teenagers struggling to navigate the ever lengthening and ever more difficult transition to adulthood without caring adults.When Kids Hurt offers these challenging insights to youth workers and parents in a more accessible form, with greater focus on how adults should respond. Practical sidebars and application sections, contributed by other youth experts, provide additional insights into youth culture and how adults can better guide adolescents into adulthood. This book will be an important resource for youth workers, parents, counselors, and others who work with youth.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441204134
• Langue: English

Extrait

when kids hurt
when kids hurt
H ELP FOR A DULTS N AVIGATING THE A DOLESCENT M AZE
C HAP C LARK AND S TEVE R ABEY
2009 by Chap Clark
Published by Baker Books a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakerbooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-for example, electronic, photocopy, recording-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Chap, 1954- When kids hurt : help for adults navigating the adolescent maze / Chap Clark and Steve Rabey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8010-7183-6 (pbk.) 1. Teenagers-United States-Social conditions. 2. Teenagers-United States-Attitudes. 3. Adolescent psychology-United States. I. Rabey, Steve. II. Title. HQ796.C555 2009 305.235 50973-dc22
2009000367
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION . NIV . Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
contents
Introduction: My Excellent Adventure
Part 1 Kids Brave New World
1. The Changing Face of Adolescence
2. Abandoned and All Alone
3. Exploring the World Beneath
Part 2 Inside the Lives of Today s Teens
4. From Cliques to Clusters
5. School Daze
6. Fractured Family Values
7. Good Sports
8. Sexual but Not Satisfied
9. Our Overstressed Adolescents
10. In Search of Ethics and Morality
11. I Party, Therefore I Am
Part 3 Helping Our Kids Cope and Grow
12. How Adults Can Help Our Kids
Conclusion: The Adventure Continues
Acknowledgments
Sources Cited
introduction my excellent adventure
In the 1989 movie Bill Ted s Excellent Adventure , Keanu Reeves plays Ted Logan, a California high school student who cares more about rock music than his American history class, which is the reason he is about to fail the class. If he doesn t shape up, his authoritarian father says he will send Ted to the Alaskan Military Academy.
Thankfully, a guru named Rufus appears from the year 2688. Rufus (played by George Carlin) takes Ted and fellow slacker Bill on a guided tour of the past where the two students meet historical figures whose names they repeatedly mispronounce: Socrates becomes So-Crates, Sigmund Freud is pronounced Frood, while Ludwig van Beethoven becomes Beeth Oven.
Still, when all is said and done, Bill and Ted s oral report gets an A+. An excellent adventure, indeed!
Recently I had an adventure of my own, but mine wasn t a journey into the past.
Into Foreign Territory
Hillary had his Everest, Cousteau his oceans, and Lewis and Clark their journey of exploration. So where did I go?
I spent more than six months working as a substitute teacher at a public high school in north Los Angeles County. I chose Crescenta Valley High School, a nationally recognized Blue Ribbon School for excellence in academic achievement, because of its diverse ethnic student body; its strong programs in sports, music, and drama; and its middle-class socioeconomic status (there s a big disparity in how much students parents earn, but none are filthy rich or desperately poor).
Plus, the school s administration was supportive, so long as I agreed to focus first on my duties as a teacher, not harass kids, and not reveal identifying information about the kids who invited me into their lives. (That s why all the names have been changed, but all quotes come from real students.)
I spend a lot of time in academic circles where scholars debate competing theories of adolescent development, but the goal of my excellent adventure was to move beyond theory to observation, so I could understand more fully what life is like for middle adolescents. In academic terms, I was conducting participant-observation research to create an ethnographic study of a specific population: today s teens.
For more than six months I spent nearly every day with high school students as a participant-observer in their world. I wanted to get close and to listen to them, to develop enough trust for them to let me in to places that few adults are allowed. I wanted to discern their complex, contradictory worldviews and watch how they navigate the multilayered expectations and relationships that control their landscape.
Within a few weeks of my arrival at the school, students warmed up to me so thoroughly they were soon being surprisingly candid with me (and sometimes embarrassingly so) about their lives.
By the time my six months in the school were over, I had received hundreds of notes, songs, poems, and scribbled letters that kids handed to me as I walked the halls or entered a classroom. Most of the time these messages came from students I couldn t quite place and had never interacted with in any deep or significant way.
In my vain and silly moments I told myself that young people naturally trust me more than they do most adults. But in my saner moments I have come to a more sobering realization: my expressions of sincerity and concern-no matter how fleeting or superficial- served to open the door to young people who were desperate to talk to any safe adult about their lives.
I conducted twelve scientifically designed focus groups with carefully selected groups of high school juniors and seniors (ten in the United States and two in Canada). Plus, I surveyed most of the significant literature and research on youth culture and teen development.
I was amazed by what I found. While I can t say that anything surprised me totally, I was repeatedly reminded of how little those of us who raise kids or work with them really know about the inner lives of midadolescents.
After that experience I wrote my 2004 book, Hurt: Inside the World of Today s Teenagers , so adults could learn to become more astute students of the kids we are responsible to nurture.
Mixed Reactions
When I told people about my adventure, both students and adults wondered if I had lost my mind. Why would anyone want to study us? asked Sharon, a seventeen-year-old high school junior. I mean, what s the big deal about kids?
Sharon had been bugging me for some time about my motive for hanging around the school. My explanation that I was taking a sabbatical leave from my teaching job at Fuller Theological Seminary failed to satisfy her, as did my lighthearted quips about liking kids, or my more serious explanation that I believed most adults had little understanding of where adolescents were coming from.
Sharon suspected an ulterior motive and worried that talking to me would be threatening to her friends. Is this going to make you famous? she asked.
I laughed out loud. After writing some books that few actually read, I said, I gave up on fame a long time ago.
Then, why? she said. Why are you doing this? Will it really matter to anyone?
Frankly, I shared her concern, as did Jake, a junior.
Tell them our story, he remarked. Tell them the truth-that nobody cares, that nobody listens, that teachers and coaches and cops and parents don t even know who we are. Tell them that and see if anybody listens. Ha! Not a chance!
As a parent of three kids and as someone who has devoted my entire professional life to youth work, I feared Sharon and Jake were right. I had spent hundreds of hours gathering valuable insights into today s kids. But would anybody care? Would all my work make any difference?
From Hurt to When Kids Hurt
Nearly two hundred thousand books are published in America every year, and fewer than 5 percent of them ever sell five thousand copies. The numbers are even worse for academic books ( Hurt was published by Baker Academic, an imprint of Baker Publishing Group). But Hurt beat the odds , connecting with readers in a powerful way and selling nearly fifty thousand copies, which is an astounding number for a scholarly book about kids.
Over the next few years after writing the book, as I talked to parents, taught students at Fuller Seminary, or spoke to youth workers (one by one or thousands at a time), it seemed that everyone had questions for me about Hurt :
Were those real kids?
Did those kids really say all those things?
And what can we do about the things you told us?
My typical answers were:
Yes.
Yes.
And that s an excellent question!
It s my desire to answer that third question that has led to the new book you now hold in your hands.
In addition to talking with parents, students, and youth workers, I had many long talks with Robert Hosack, my intrepid editor at Baker. Robert is a man who loves books and believes they can impact people s lives. People had been asking Robert about Hurt too, and he convinced me to consider creating a book that was less academic in tone and more practical in its application. The results of that process are found in When Kids Hurt .
Robert and I decided to ask Steve Rabey, a veteran writer who works with me to edit the magazine YouthWorker Journal ( youth worker.com ), to help make the transition from Hurt into When Kids Hurt .
I did not go back to high school for more observation, but Steve and I reviewed and critiqued everything I had written before, changing and updating those things that needed tweaking. (To see if and how I changed my mind about anything, see the conclusion of this book.)
We also added updated info about trends in youth culture, many of these written by Paul Asay, who writes the Youth Culture Update department in YouthWorker Journal .
Finally, I invited dozens of respected peers in academia and youth work to contribute their insights to this project. Nearly forty of them accepted my offer to write their responses and observations. In many cases, these mini-essays help answer some of the so what? questions readers had been asking me over the years abou