Today, April first at 8:30PM 2007… my blog was… the blog of the minute. beat that suckaz!

I have been thinking through our culture’s ideologies of parenting and comparing them to the issues this generation of young people faces. Now, before I go on, it is important that I state, I am not a parent or parenting expert. I am an outside observer who is idealistic at best. Maybe my theory has support, but maybe it doesn’t. But I believe that there is somthing essential that is missing in our society.

I have started reading a book that I recommended to the parents of the young people of Vertical Ministries entitles, hurt: inside the world of todays teenagers.  Within the first chapter I have been challenged, shocked, and filled with compasion for a generation that is experiencing more rejection and abandonement from the systems and structures our society has created for the express purpose of nurturing young people.

My first observation came as the author systematically walked through the progression ofthe American family unit, personal identity, and the individuals relationship to others. He describes that between the 1960’s and 1970’s two powerful shifts have occured that have redifined the roles of men and women in familial relationsips, thus leaving the child/ adolescent to fend for themselves (and again furthering their sense of isolation and abandonment.) And two, the redefining of family. Where once family was defined as “two or more person related by birth, marriage, or adoption who reside in the same houshold,”  to current definition of a freeflowing, oganic “commitment” to people who love eachother.

He goes on to say, ” We moved from a culture with a divorce rate that affected 2 percent of the married population in 1940 to a society in which 43 percent of first time marriages end with divorce or separation within fifteen years of marriage, as of 2002. I observed this new ratio first hand while attending a dance competition in Orlando with my daughter. Of the thirteen girls on the team, all from the high school where this study took place, more than half came from divorced families. Of the parents who attended, one forty-six year old mother brought her sixty seven year old live in boyfriend, and a fifty six year old father was accompanied by his thirty one year old girlfriend, while his ex-wife brought her live-in boyfriend. It is indeed a new day when it comes to what the word family means.For the adolescent who is trying to hold on to somthing, at times anything, that is stable and safe, societal choices concerning divorce, adult sexuality, and the experimentation of living together even while children are in the home have had a strong effect. In the course of my study I have found that this effect has been powerfully destructive.“

At one point he goes on to say, and I paraphrase, “that adolescents are desperate to have an adult show that they genuinely care about them.”

Our world has changed. Families, that were once sources for stability and personal identity have crumbled. As parents who have barley managed to define who they are struggle to fend for their own survival, young people are left to absorb identity, affirmation and  their understand of where they fit in todays “social landscape,” from whatever is stable at that moment.

The author also notes that todays institutions that have been established for the purpose of nurturing todays young people have strayed from their mission, essentially abandoning them in a world that is marked by social chaos, and a lack of relational stability.

This is a generation that is isolated. That is lost. That is struggling to make sense of who they are, where they fit, and why they matter.

“Behold in that day I will send you the prophet Elijah, and he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to the fathers.”

Malachi 4:6

I propose it is our responsibility, not soley as Christians, but as parents, to re-establish the creative order. Teenagers are clueless because the generation before them was clueless.  Teenagers today are rebellious because they struggle to connect to a world that lacks stability. Their deepest desires are for community, identity, and purpose.

It is our responsibility to recognize the need of the young people of our day, and find a way to bridge the gap. The second part of Malachi 4: 6 goes on to day that unless fathers and son, mothers and daughters, are not turned toward eachother, that God would strike the land with a curse. I believe we are living in that curse. Not in the sense of a hyper spiritualized cosmic consequence. But what we experience in the sense of isolation that both parents and young people alike are sensing.

It’s important to recognize what the passage says to turn. Our hearts.