REACTION TO:
Chap
Clark, Hurt 2.0: Inside the World of
Today’s Teenagers
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011) 264pp.
I
resonated with so much that is in this book—personally and professionally. It
isn’t hard to want to take to heart the challenge to be a youth advocate once
reading Clark’s findings about today’s youth. Adults who want to be effective
in reaching out to this generation need to consider Clark’s presuppositions—today,
not many are “getting it”—not the church, the schools, youth workers or
parents. What IS going on inside the world of today’s teenagers? I am still in
the process of re-wiring my mental thought processes to Clark’s ‘underworld’ schemata
but frankly it is taking a while—he states in his update to his first edition, “It
isn’t getting any better,” and that is the ‘why’ for this second edition.
This is
yet another book which speaks to the elongation of adolescence but doesn’t give
a complete definition (explicitly) of what a healthy ‘normal’ teenager looks
like today. One could glean implicitly from what Clark speaks against and
reports negatively about. Clark seems to report how bad it was for teens before
and that things are so much worse for them today—how things are definitely
different for them since the days we were in High School. At one point I
wondered how he and George Barna who reports in his book, Revolutionary Parenting, how spiritual champions are raised today, would
come together to discuss how healthy kids come to be today. This almost seems
to be an impossible chore to accomplish from Clark’s book. But his book isn’t a
parenting book, it is an exposing book.
In many
ways I see the older generations simply reaping in the next what they
themselves have sown--the entitlement attitude for example. Adults today
believe kids today should respect them first, as if they are entitled to it. This
book gives in detail why this generation should not respect them. Respect and
other virtues won’t be found until all of us see how youth are trying to
survive in the world and culture we have built (dug?) for them. They are simply
reacting to our pushing them to the side or launching them into the proverbial
cultural sea “without a rudder or a compass.” Today’s adolescents have been
abandoned.
What
has happened is that it seems the 60s kids never grew up--they were to progress
from dependence to independence to interdependence but stopped. In their search
for continued survival in a post-World War society, they have abandoned the
next generations to ‘figure it out for yourself’ while they distanced
themselves to live their own lives. But live them for what? It looks like the biblical
book of Judges all over again. But where are the Judges? When is the next Advent?
We need another incarnation. We need to stop leaving our kids “to themselves”
as Solomon says which reaps more of the same consumer culture we find ourselves
in which sees both us and them as things to cash in on and leave emotionally
bankrupt. This creates a make-believe world where teens today walk as avatars
to merely been seen but not ever heard—the real teen is sublevel living his or
her life seemingly protected but lonely. Our culture neglects them so they act
as if they don’t need adults—not the kind at least that further abandons them.
They want safety. Isn’t that the kind of world we all seek to create at some
level and in our way?
Is it
any wonder then that in a pursuit to cash in on what is available that today’s
psychological world is taken the time to update their research on adolescence? This
is another form of abandonment Clark states. Professor seekers want the degree and
the money without the work of getting their hands dirty with the actual
teenagers—let’s just build on another’s work. Today’s teens are different so it
does make sense that many studies would be irrelevant and outdated.
Satan’s
plan was unmasked in many findings reported in this book. Satan lies to
soon-to-be-parents that life is found in stuff, not people. The deceived parents
have kids born into the family and an environment built around this belief.
They raise their kids but soon Satan turns the lie back on the parents by
telling the kids, “Your parents don’t really care about you. They only care
about what advances their lives.” The kids run away from Satan and his lies to
those whom they believe and trust to give them the truth and who will protect
them—the parents. But the deceptive trap is sprung and as it closes the teens
find that over and over again when they approach their parents cannot be found
and so believe the lie they were told. When the parents finally snap out of
their deception and try to gain their children’s trust they have layers and
layers of abandonment memories to try and work through. Most parents give up.
Some keep it up for years with no success—the kids have been too scarred, too
trapped. But then there are some who continue to believe the lie can be broken
and that the children are worth what it takes to break it. And the kids hope
that one day mom and dad will come through those doors and try just one more
time. “Will they come?” is the question this book ends with.