The Seven Cries of Today's Teens: Hearing Their Hearts; Making the Connection

If I were asked to make a list of the top 1 percent of family experts who know the hearts of teens and can express those needs to their parents, Tim Smith heads my list. If you want to stay close and connected to your busy, emotional, wonderful, challenging teen, Tim’s grace-laced, trustbuilding parenting truths will help you, just like they’ve helped Cindy and me with our teenagers. In case you haven’t heard, your teen is crying for you to get this book!

John Trent, Ph.D.

Author of The Light of Home and President of StrongFamilies.com

The Seven Cries of Today’s Teens alerts parents and youth workers to the reality that teenagers live in a culture that doesn’t protect them, that hurries them into adulthood and adult-sized problems without preparing them to handle them. I appreciated the hopeful language that parents can respond to the cries by valuing their teenagers enough not to leave them alone.

Doug Fields

Youth Pastor, Saddleback Community Church (Lake Forest, CA)

and Author of Purpose-Driven Youth Ministry

This analysis of today’s teens is based not only on the latest research available, but on the careful observation and hands-on experience of one of America’s top youth ministry professionals. Tim Smith has spent many years listening to the desperate cries of young people who just want to be heard. In this book you will hear their voices, their message to us all.

Wayne Rice

Director of Understanding Your Teenager

Not only is this book solid and essential, it is a practical guide to getting inside the private life of the American teenager. Many books on teen culture are difficult to read. Tim Smith has created a compelling page-turner. I kept waiting to see what was coming next.

Jim Burns

President of Youthbuilders

It’s hard to hear the deep cry of our teenagers’ hearts over the background din of their culture. Tim Smith has turned up the volume on those cries loud enough for parents to detect them. For those parents willing to listen, and listen closely, Smith has made it possible for a connection at the heart that every teen longs for with their parents.

Tim Kimmel

Author of Little House on the Freeway

I’ve been listening to the cries of today’s youth culture for over two decades. No doubt, they’re getting louder. Tim Smith has helped me and a generation of parents to hear, recognize, and most importantly, respond in a way that will begin to answer and quiet these cries. The Seven Cries of Today’s Teens isn’t just a one-time read. It’s a helpful tool you’ll come back to again and again.

Walt Mueller

President of The Center for Parent/Youth Understanding

As a youth pastor, I am looking for ways to help parents and youthworkers develop the skills of loving, communicating to, and discipling teenagers. The Seven Cries of Today’s Teens is a combination of in the trenches experience and excellent research that compels anyone who reads it to reshape their thinking about teenagers. This book is an excellent resource with practical application that is invaluable for any parent, teacher, or youthworker.

Michael Katzenberger

Student Ministries Pastor, Calvary Community Church

(Westlake Village, CA)

The Seven Cries of

Today’s Teens

Hear Their Hearts,

Make the Connection

BY TIM SMITH

The Seven Cries of Today’s Teens

Copyright © 2003 by Tim Smith

Published by Integrity Publishers, a division of Integrity Media, Inc., 5250 Virginia Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027.

HELPING PEOPLE WORLDWIDE EXPERIENCE the MANIFEST PRESENCE of GOD.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in association with The Envoy Group, Colorado Springs, Colorado

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations in this volume are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV). Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. Other Scripture quotations are from the following sources:

Holy Bible New Living Translation (NLT), © 1996 by Tyndale Charitable Trust. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers.

Integrity Publishers and the author do not assume any risk or liability for the activity ideas expressed in the book. Careful research needs to precede any of these endeavors, as some do involve levels of risk.

Stories of the author’s children are used by permission.

Names of some individuals in the illustrations have been changed to protect privacy. Scenarios may be a combination of individual stories to protect confidentiality.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Tim, 1954-

The seven cries of today’s teens : hearing their hearts, making the connection / by Timothy Smith.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-59145-050-0

1. Teenagers—Life skills guides. 2. Teenagers—Conduct of life. 3. Parent and teenager. I. Title: Seven cries of teens. II. Title.

HQ796 .S5538 2002

305.235—dc21

2002038831

Printed in the United States of America

03 04 05 06 07 08 LBM 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Brooke

May you always be a refreshing source

of life and laughter.

Love, Dad

But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him

if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul.

DEUTERONOMY 4:29 NIV

Contents

Foreword: Hope and Help for the Future George Gallup Jr.

Introduction: What’s a Millennial?

Chapter 1: A Cry for Trust

Chapter 2: A Cry for Love

Chapter 3: A Cry for Security

Chapter 4: A Cry for Purpose

Chapter 5: A Cry to Be Heard

Chapter 6: A Cry to Be Valued

Chapter 7: A Cry for Support

Conclusion: Responding to Teen Cries

Appendix A: Conflict Pie

Notes

Recommended Resources

FOREWORD

Hope and Help

for the Future

GEORGE GALLUP JR.

Tomorrow’s world will be greatly affected by how we deal with youth today. Many trends give us real cause for pause. Young people are asking questions, and they’re not getting answers.

Tim Smith’s book, The Seven Cries of Today’s Teens, is making a timely appearance. Tim is well equipped to write this book. In determining the Seven Cries, he has painstakingly examined the available research on the topic, both from experts and teens themselves. And he roots this information in his own direct, hands-on experience with families, which spans a quarter century.

It has been my pleasure to work with Tim on this project and as a Fellow with The George H. Gallup International Institute. We enjoy a long shared history of commitment to young people. The Gallup Youth Survey was founded twenty-five years ago to help society meet its responsibility to youth, by providing an ongoing reality check of what is on the hearts and minds of teens. During this period more than twelve hundred weekly reports on youth have been released through the Associated Press. As a contribution to this book, the Gallup Youth Survey explored the vital needs of teens today in a customized, exclusive poll: the Gallup Cries of Teens Survey.

Tim Smith’s goal in writing this book is to provide hope and practical help for parents and others who care about teenagers. His hope and prayer for the book is that it will be a tool to enhance the health of our adolescents—spiritual, emotional, and physical.

The word cries is the appropriate one to describe the voice of youth today: an utterance—even a primal yell—of an emotion such as fear or anger; an urgent entreaty or appeal; and, to some extent, a rallying call to fellow teenagers. The Seven Cries that Tim describes arise from anger, fear, anguish, confusion, and from deep needs.

Today’s teenagers—the millennials—will be the leaders and shapers of the twenty-first century. Yet how much do we as a society know about this vital segment of the U.S. populace, which has the potential to lift our nation to new levels of achievement and social health? The image of teens in America today, surveys have revealed, is a negative one. Teens are frequently maligned, misunderstood, or simply ignored by their elders. Adjectives such as immoral, reckless, and untrustworthy are used to describe today’s teenage population. Sadly, teens are aware adults view them in a negative light.

Yet a quarter century of the Gallup Youth Survey has provided ample evidence of the special qualities of the nation’s youngsters. In fact, if our society is less racist, less sexist, less polluted, and more peace loving, we can, in considerable measure, thank our young people, who have been on the leading edge of these trends. And this is not a generation geared toward greed: Survey after survey has shown that teens have a keen interest in helping people less fortunate than themselves, especially in their own community.

Yet, despite the major impact teens are having on society—economically, socially, and in other ways—the sad truth is that America is not meeting the needs of its children. Children worry about their physical well-being. They are apprehensive about their future. Foremost among their concerns are AIDS, dangerous drugs, and random death and violence.

Six years of Gallup youth surveys identify ten recurring needs. These ten needs were put to a fresh sample of teens, to measure the relative strength of these needs in the minds of survey respondents. Large majorities cited each of the ten needs—that is, they chose category five (very strong need) on a five-point scale.

That these cries are basic and fundamental human needs is evident in the fact that respondents choosing very strong need differ little in terms of characteristics such as age, sex, geographic region, level of income, and academic status.

We call the top seven needs The Seven Cries of Today’s Teens. In order of frequency of mention, they are

a The need to be trusted. Teens believe that their elders distrust them and regard them as irresponsible and unpredictable. Teens want to be taken seriously.

a The need to be understood and loved. Teens tend to believe that their elders do not understand them. They crave to be listened to and loved by their parents or guardians.

a The need to feel safe and secure where they live and go to school. Sadly, this is not always the case.

a The need to believe life is meaningful and has a purpose. Surveys show that this is a growing need in the populace as a whole.

a The need to be listened to—to be heard. Teens have much to say, but are we listening?

a The need to be appreciated and valued. Roughly one-third of teens are found to have low self-esteem, which is, of course, a key factor in antisocial behavior.

a The need to be supported in their efforts. Teens want more help from their parents on homework and more discussion on a wide range of topics.

Gallup Youth Surveys underscore the compelling qualities of youth—their idealism, optimism, spontaneity, and exuberance. Young people tell us they are enthusiastic about helping others, willing to work for world peace and a healthy world, and feel positive about their schools and even more positive about their teachers.

Teens want clear rules to live by; they want clarity. They favor teaching values in schools, which half of the schools do now. In the area of sex education, teens overwhelmingly would like to have abstinence taught. Young women would like more help in knowing how to say no. Millennials would like to see divorce harder to get. They’d like to see more premarriage counseling. They overwhelmingly want to reduce the level of violence on television.

Nearly half of all our youth today volunteer. Half of all schools have a volunteer program. A majority of young people would like to see such programs made mandatory. (If a child is involved in volunteerism before age eleven, volunteering becomes a lifetime habit.) Youth seem to know what is best for themselves and for the nation. Then why aren’t we listening to them?

Teens remain eternally optimistic, particularly about their personal futures. Yet they are apprehensive about the future of society and a host of problems that were not on the scene just a few decades ago.

In reality, teens today face a rough future—a future in which at least half of all marriages will break up, in which alcohol abuse and alcoholism will continue to ravage society, in which crime will remain at high levels. Unfortunately, this list of negative trends can be greatly extended.

American teens, therefore, need to be called upon, not simply to live up to social norms—to fit in—but to be the helpers and healers that will begin to turn our society around. We need to look to teens to transcend culture, not simply to adapt to it.

How do we prepare our youth to take on this role? How do we redeem the promise of our children? Indeed, is there a more important or pressing topic? Can anyone deny that our children need a greater share of our time, energy, and resources?

There is much to be done. A recent report from the Lutheran Brotherhood and Search Institute, based on a 2000 Gallup survey, notes: We live in a society [where], despite widespread concerns about children and teenagers, the vast majority of adults are not actively involved in the lives of young people outside of their own families. This reality has a profound impact on community life and on young people’s development. Without the attentions of many adults in all parts of their lives and community, young people are deprived of important sources of guidance, nurture, care, and socialization.

Yet there are in place wonderful success stories of programs that are working to keep youth from risks, mindful that teens should be regarded not as pathologies waiting to happen, but sparks of joy to be developed and nurtured. When people care about children enough to invest in their lives, something magical happens. We are seeing a trend toward hands-on, face-to-face kinds of volunteerism, including mentoring, direct contact between the privileged and the underprivileged, and broken-down walls of indifference. Nothing short of this will alleviate the social ills that affect our society. Nothing less is worthy of our children.

Inner-city youngsters, especially, live in an atmosphere that says, You can’t make it. They’re surrounded by people who haven’t made it. The messages they receive are relentlessly negative. These youth have a particular need for mature adults who can take them aside, give them a hug, and tell them, quietly and convincingly, an entirely different story.

Tim Smith’s book calls for adults to listen anew to the cries of today’s teens and to do so with a sense of urgency, for, as one social observer has noted, teens make up one-fifth of the population but one hundred percent of the future.

George Gallup Jr.

Princeton, New Jersey

INTRODUCTION

What’s a Millennial ?

Today’s teens have been called the millennial generation—the generation emerging at the end of one millennium and the beginning of another, a generation of extremes.

Extreme sports are in. The X Games were made for the Extreme Generation: extreme in-line skating and vert ramp biking, extreme skateboarding and wakeboarding, extreme rock climbing and sky surfing. Perhaps the strongest image reflecting millennials is snowboarding. This extreme sport was born when they were. The fashion, the equipment, the language, the culture, the death-defying flips and in-your-face attitude capture the essence of millennials—at least one end of the millennial continuum.

At the other extreme we have teens who are committed to starting prayer groups on their campuses, who spend their Saturdays working in soup kitchens and their vacations teaching children in the inner cities or in foreign countries. And to make the whole topic more complex, some of these kids snowboard!

Millennials do not fit the traditional stereotypes we have for teenagers. They tend to be outside the teenager box, which is why they are often referred to as extreme. To some, they appear to be a paradox, talking about extreme sports one minute and serving Christ in some remote region the next.

Teen violence and angst have pierced our nation’s soul. North American teens have captured our attention. Grief and haunting images arise at the mere mention of Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah, Kentucky; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Springfield, Oregon. Tragically, the list goes on. While this may be the most violent generation of teens, it may also be the most spiritual. It is, after all, a generation of extremes. Because of this spiritual group, some refer to them as the revival generation.

What makes the difference between millennials who shoot up their schools and millennials who stand in circles of prayer at their schools? What can we do as parents, youth workers, and mentors to understand and positively impact the millennial generation?

The purpose of this book is to address these questions. I want to help you understand today’s emerging youth culture and discover how to effectively relate to millennials.

A millennial is generally defined as a young person who was born during 1982 or after. The first millennials graduated in the high school class of 2000.

To get a grasp on the characteristics of this generation, I evaluated the last six years of research completed by The George H. Gallup International Institute gathered through the Gallup Youth Survey. The George H. Gallup International Institute, a nonprofit organization, was founded in 1988 in memory of a man who sought to develop opinion research as a tool for building an enlightened society. Its mission is to discover, test, and encourage application of new approaches to social problems in education, environment, health, religion, and human values. I’m honored to be a Gallup Institute Fellow, a diverse group of men and women who seek to be agents of positive change in America. In addition to allowing me to review existing data, George Gallup Jr. graciously assisted me in designing and implementing a youth survey specifically for this book. Because of his support and generosity, I am able to write with confidence about the millennial generation. For more information, check out The Gallup Organization at www.gallup.com.

I have aimed to produce a book based on solid findings, not simply anecdotes and opinions. The scientific standards for and methodologies of research have been followed—the same standards and methodologies used in surveys for CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, and other media providers that partner with Gallup.

A Summary of the Research

Teenagers have captured our attention. Some adults report that teens are worse than ever, while others are more upbeat and positive, calling today’s teens sincere, conservative, and spiritual. Since The Gallup Organization gave me exclusive access to its research, I discovered recurring issues, easily identifiable as important themes because of their status in the rankings and the frequency in which teenagers cited them. Additional exclusive research conducted for this book by Gallup undergirds the Seven Cries.

Out of these top issues, seven stood out dramatically from the rest. We call these The Seven Cries of Today’s Teens. I define cry as a signal, a call for help or a demand for attention. It does not necessarily have to be a cry of sorrow or pain—but it will become that if no one responds. I’m using cry as a wake-up call. We need to pull ourselves away from distractions and hear the cries of the millennial generation.

What Are They Crying For?

What do teens want? I have two at home, and I can’t figure them out.

Todd was my host for a national morning drive-time radio talk show, and I