When attempting to construct a program for the young adolescent, one realizes the wide disparity between the data we have on youth that age. The programmatic responses we have devised here are some of the aspects of the young adolescent we know through developmental research and the common response of most schools.
Fact: Young adolescents vary enormously (as much as five years) in physical, mental and emotional maturity and capability.
Response: In schools, chronological age is still the overwhelming method used in grouping students.
Fact: Young adolescents need to try on a wide variety of roles.
Response: We classify them in a few general roles to make them more manageable.
Fact: During young adolescence, the development of control over one's own life through conscious decision-making is crucial.
Response: Adults make all meaningful decisions for almost all young adolescents almost all the time, giving the young people the "freedom" to make only safe (read meaningless) decisions.
Fact: In young adolescence, all-natural forces (muscular, intellectual, glandular, etc.) are causing precipitous peaks and troughs.
Response: We demand behavioral consistency enforced through punishment.
Fact: Young adolescents are preoccupied with physical concerns.
Response: We operate with them each day as though this was not even a minor matter in their lives, but as though such concerns did not exist.
Fact: Young adolescents need a distinct feeling of present importance, a relevancy in their lives.
Response: We place them in "junior" high schools, whose very name implies a subordinate status, and then feed them a diet of watered down "real stuff."
Fact: Young adolescents, up to the age of 15, continue to show wide variance in skill and conceptual areas, strictly due to developmental variances.
Response: We have used our counseling apparatus to lock children before age 15 into four-year programs that will dictate in large part the child's future occupational horizons.
Curiously, it appears that in the face of what we know about young adolescents, we act quite oppositely to that knowledge in most schools. The following recommendations do not demand new, massive, expensive programs to make them work. They are conclusions born of a life time of work with adolescents that anyone can put to work tomorrow in their dealings with young people of this age group.
Conclusion: Since young adolescents don't fit into neat classifications, don't classify them. At all. Ever. For there is no need to and there is harm in trying.
Conclusion: Since we don't know how best to place young adolescents in groups, let them place themselves in groups. Since we do know that peer friendship is of prime importance, that at least can be maximized.
Conclusion: Since we know so little about young adolescents, we must ask them questions, listen and formulate programs from that dialogue.
Conclusion: Since young adolescents need wide intellectual, affective, emotional and role experience, we must provide an environment that allows them these experiences.
Conclusion: Since young adolescents are newly aware of the intensity of life, we must live openly with them. It keeps alive the trust that they can weather their turbulent times, for they recognize and trust the fact that we did.
Conclusion: Be wary of locking young adolescents into roles that you, not they, are comfortable with. They need to experience a wide variety of roles, acceptable and not acceptable, before they can wisely decide in which direction they wish to venture forth.
Conclusion: Take them seriously, but keep yourself balance. If an young adolescent hurts you, it is a childhood nettle, not an adult thorn.
Conclusion: Some young adolescents are verbal and articulate; most are not. Provide varied opportunities for expression and study the results. These acts of expression do speak louder than words.
Conclusion: For young people newly perceiving a world filled with terror, while at an age of special vulnerability, an emoting of loving adults makes that world bearable and teaches the efficacy of love.
Conclusion: Openness to the freshness and challenge of youth adolescence thwarts adult tendencies towards ossification. It also legitimizes the thrill of growth when such growth is shared by an adult and a youth.
Adapted from: Don Wells, A Treatise: Educational Plight of the Early Adolescent. Carolina Friends School, Durham.
© 1996 The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society PECUSA
This article is from Handbook for Ministries with Young Adolescents, a publication of the Ministries with Young People Cluster of the Episcopal Church Center, New York, NY. Permission is granted for congregational use and use by diocesan youth coordinators. You may order this resource from Episcopal Parish Services.
