Does your child have a "second family"?

"There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience" - Anatole Broyard

"...many teenagers are... angry, lonely, depressed, and anxious, caught in addictive and self destructive cycles, and finding little or no grounding for a stable, healthy sense of self. Most significantly, he says, young people today have walled themselves into their own worlds, furnished by peer and pop culture, with little opportunity for honest relationships with adults who like and respect them.

This isn't because our teenagers are particularly bad. It's because they're like the rest of us. youth culture simply mirrors the wider culture in which we all live, taken a giant step forward with emblematic teenage flair. Adults are obsessed with image and possessions, and so are teenagers. Adults spend more time away from home, and so do teenagers. Adults have become egocentric, and so have teenagers. Adults relax by drinking or using drugs, obsess about their bodies, and live in a highly sexualized world, and so do teenagers. In their most shocking and often frightening behaivior... teenagers are telling us everything we need to know, not just about them, but about ourselves.

At the heart of the problem, is the vast distance that has grown between teenagers and adults, particularly parents. Stay at home parents are rare in today's world. Family routines and rituals gradually slip away. Even when parents are present, they are not fully present. Almost every child... interviewed said something like "We don't spend time together as a family." They meant "undivided attention" time not the kind of time when Mom is cooking, Dad is checking e-mail, and the kids are playing computer games and watching videos in their bedrooms.

Feeling less connected with parents and siblings, and heavily shaped by the pop culture they imbibe from early childhood, kids begin to move away from their own families, often before they're out of elementary school. They surround themselves instead with friends, forming a second, separate but equally important, family system. As kids become more and more attached to their friends and to the common interests that they share, by early adolescence, it is a natural easy step to divorce themselves not only from their first families but, often, from other significant adults as well. Parents know little or nothing about the daily texture of their kids lives, partly because they bury their heads in the sand, but also because of the unwritten code of silence that prevents teens from letting adults know what they and their friends are up to. The generations do not converse about anything that really matters.

Thus, the "second family" becomes the entire social nexus in which many teenagers live. the culture of the second family, shaped by pop culture icons and values, approves many behaviors that parents know to be unwholesome and self-destructive. But it also meets many legitimate needs. If gives them a group of friends, a sense of security and support and belonging, shared interests and a shared language, a sense that someone understands them and accepts them for who they really are.

What teenagers seek most in a second family, is comfort. Virtually everything kids do is motivated by the pursuit of comfort. The second family gives teens a safe, warm, easy, comfortable place to be, among friends who don't, "criticize or correct but merely accept them for who they are." As one teenage boy put it, "I don't have to do anything. I don't have to be good at anything. There's no pressure." In other words, he can simply be himself.

[as a result] they feel "tired" or "exhausted." they're "busy all the time" or "falling behind" They have headaches and leg injuries. They are bounced between angry parents. They are caught in difficult relationships. [to sum it all up] kids use the word "pressured" in describing how they feel, in the arena of sports or drama or relationships or academics or home life. One says "There are so many pressures everywhere you turn. Every single person in my life seems to want something different, including my parents."

As I listen, I notice a melancholy tone in their voice... a note of sadness is unmistakable. I wonder whether teens are perhaps a culture in mourning. The media barrage, social pressures, adult expectations, parental absence and family instability, personal trauma, and their own precocious awareness conspire to shove them rudely out from under the canopy of childhood before they are prepared to handle the requirements of adulthood. Innocence, safety, dependency have been torn violently from them. Their losses are profound. As with all humans, their losses engender shock and confusion, anger and sadness, and often enough, self destructive or bizarre behavior. Why are we surprised?

-Mark Yaconelli: Growing Souls, Experiments in Contemplative Youth Ministry p-136-138