Three Important Questions to Ask Your Teenager

This week’s article summary is The Three Most Important Questions You Can Ask Your Teenager

A lot of adults today don't help focus and direct kids to what’s truly important in life, i.e., according to the article, “good health, solid values, meaningful work, positive relationships, and selfless service”.

Rather adults reinforce more superficial and even selfish goals and outcomes.

For many kids today school and outside activities are a list of "To Do" items to check off in the competition to build a resume and  to be accepted to a prestigious school. How will this activity make me more marketable in college admission? 

And many of us—as the adult in our kids’ lives—support this mindset rather than helping kids, as a voice of reason and experience, to see the bigger picture of learning and life.

The sad result as the article attests is too man kids today are sad, disillusioned, depressed.

While this article focuses on teens, our elementary school students are not immune to this pressure of superficial achievement, and it is our responsibility to help them see the deeper meaning in their actions and relationships--especially as we begin a new year.

Joe

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There is a paradox about millennials: On the one hand, they tend to be confident, technologically connected, environmentally aware, committed to helping the disadvantaged, and open to diversity and change. 

On the other hand, many millennials are beset with insecurity, anxiety, unhappiness, aimlessness, and despair. 

One theory from the book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life says that too many young people have been conditioned to think that the reason for getting good grades is to impress admissions officers and employers, the purpose of community service is to fill out one’s resume, playing sports is to get recruited for a college team, and studying art and music is to look smart and well-rounded. 

The result is that too many students fall apart in college because they cannot conceive of the fact that hard work and learning are positive outcomes in and of themselves. They have no sense of who they are or what is important in their lives. In our efforts to push our kids ahead, we have forgotten to ask why pushing ahead is important in the first place.

What is to be done? We know that lasting happiness springs from good health, solid values, meaningful work, multiple positive relationships, and selfless service. We need to get young people to focus on three questions:

Who tells us who we are? Not the Internet, TV, movies, social media, and advertising, which judge us on what we wear, what we buy, how thin or buff we are, and our number of Facebook “likes.” It’s about how hard we work, how curious we are, and how much we are willing to make a positive difference to others and to our world in distress. Our children need to learn that they are important not for reasons of appearance but for reasons of substance.

Where do we want to go with our lives? Focusing only on getting into a good college and landing a high-status job will lead to frustration, anger, and loneliness. What young people need is to find their passion and get into a career that pays them for doing what they love. We all know we are in the right jobs when how long we work at something is driven by interest and not only about earning a paycheck. 

How do we want to get there? Having a worthwhile end in sight will greatly influence the means for getting there. Kids cheat in school because they think grades are more important than what they learn. They take short-cuts because they believe the longer, harder path has no value or because they are afraid of stumbling or of being seen as someone who stumbles. They are mean or cruel or uncaring often because they do not like themselves. Real success comes when you can look at your life and say, ‘I have done my best to make a positive difference in the lives of others and the world we live in.’