By Pastor Tee, Pastor of Outreach

As Philly struggles with rising crime among our youth, I have been thinking a lot lately about the confusion and alienation American youth often experience during the transition from childhood to adulthood. Thirty years ago, social scientists said adolescence was between the ages of 13-18. Ten years ago while studying adolescence in graduate school, they said the age expanded from 13-25.

I would suggest today that adolescence is creeping up to the age of 30.

As adolescence has extended, the difficulties of transitioning to adulthood have magnified. This only shows itself in western countries that.

Why?

I would suggest that prolonged adolescence has become a long experiment for young people in practicing freedom, conformity, responsibility and identity. If you go back to Jesus’ day, a person became an adult at the age of 13. This means your family was responsible for teaching you a skill. As soon as you could sit up, you were in the presence of your parents as they worked and gathered food. That is why Jesus at the Temple at 12 years old in Luke 2 is so significant. This passage is reminding us that who Jesus was as a child would be part of who he is as an adult.

Have you noticed that when you go back 2,000 years or more, you rarely see any biographies that include childhood? That is because childhood was shorter and viewed as not important. In Jesus’ day, people usually did not live past the age of 50 depending on their profession since most jobs were physically demanding.

But since there has been technological innovations in food production, education, employment, health and labor laws, leisure time has grown exponentially. In the early 20th century is when you see the advent of film, the telephone, TV, etc.
Today, youth have been the beneficiaries of these innovations and continue to be. But with so much polarization and political conflict today, youth have also inherited much of society’s confusion. So, they retreat to entertainment and technology culture and it is here that they are exposed to mostly self centered values about love, identity, family, politics, etc. I experienced this growing up but it is worse today.

In this prolonged adolescence, youth also have more time to explore creativity and take risks which contributes to new trends and fads in a growing global youth culture. But that culture is also quietly anchored by large multinational companies and Big Tech who don’t really care about them.

As long as youth are encouraged to live ‘an adult life without adult consequences’ which is what this prolonged adolescence is turning into for many of them, They will struggle to understand what it means to be an adult that has to pay attention to boring things like paying bills, raising a family, buying a house, etc..