Mentorship: I Just Don't Understand Kids Today!

You have probably heard someone announce that this whole generation is headed down the tube. Older folks say it about today's kids all the time. So what exactly happened to our youth? The complaints keep piling up: teenagers have no respect, they don't want anything out of life, they drift. Fair enough. But what are any of us actually doing about it? And do you even know why more teenagers are getting into trouble now than in years past? I ask myself whether the next generation is turning into a generation of degenerates. I also try to act instead of just worrying. So let me be blunt and stop softening the truth. We need to speak plainly about at-risk kids from low income homes.

Ivy League researchers and licensed professionals keep pointing to the gap between minorities and non-minorities in education, life expectancy, and plain old success. That gap is real. Their explanation usually stops at environment and socio-economic status. Those things account for part of the difference, sure. What I want to talk about is juvenile delinquency.

This is not some brand new problem. Flip through the social history of the United States and you will find it running through the decades. Back in the 1940s and 50s, a kid might get shipped off to juvenile detention for talking back to a parent. The heaviest crime around might have been swiping a pack of cigarettes from the corner store. Teenagers then simply did not carry the kind of life experiences kids carry now.

Maybe part of what we are seeing is depression. It can hit anyone, and it does not always arrive wearing the obvious face of anger, anxiety, or steady sadness. Young people carry it differently than grown-ups do. Adults tend to show it quietly, almost passively. Teens do not. Their brains are still mid-construction. A teenager is figuring out who they are, wrestling with new emotions, pushing through puberty all at once. Those feelings often come out sideways: fist fights, thoughts of suicide, a painful self-consciousness that swallows everything.

People love to say that a child from a low income home, or a single parent home, or a rough neighborhood is bound to end up a delinquent. There is a grain of something in that. But then explain the kids who grow up on the exact same block, in the exact same conditions, and turn into steady, productive adults. The environment is not the whole story.

So here is where I come down on helping these kids right now.

First, be a mentor. Mentoring gets praised as one of the best ways to steer a young life, yet plenty of people have no idea what makes a mentor actually work. I spent more than a year inside the juvenile support system, and the organization kept rolling out mentorship programs that kept falling flat. The reason was simple. The people building the programs could not relate to the kids in them. How is somebody raised in comfortable suburban America supposed to understand a sixteen-year-old who has been shoved into the role of breadwinner for the whole family? You cannot reach a child from a hard place unless you carry some of that survivalist instinct yourself.

Second, do not be a selfish mentor. If you want to work with at-risk youth, drop the standard script. You know the script: quiz the kid about grades and mental health, then lecture them that they had better do well or college is off the table. They have heard it a hundred times. They already know the lines, and they can tell in about two seconds that you do not really care. To matter to them, you have to meet them where they stand. Ask why. There is always a story underneath the behavior, and once you find the real reason, you can finally start working on strategies that change things.

Third, build trust. Growing up in a harsh world teaches these kids not to trust, because the people around them keep hurting them and walking away. You have to earn your way in before any strategy will take hold. Go slow. Take baby steps. And accept that you cannot rescue every single one. If you reach even one child, you have done what you set out to do.

- Heather Browning, MBA, BA