To Understand, Interact

This will be my last entry this week. Thursday I am winging my way to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Friday I’ll be presenting Youth Development: A Winning Hand to Haven House Services ( http://www.havenhousenc.org ). I’ll be back with a new entry on Monday, July 2nd.

Driving into work today I was listening to a talk show while thinking about the upcoming presentation in Raleigh. I realized that what I teach -- working with young people -- is really somewhat of a rare occurrence. The talk show was focused on some new survey about America’s youth (I didn’t catch the actually survey -- it’s only a 10 minute drive to work), and the adults were lamenting how little they understand about young people and the choices and decisions they make. At one point, one of the adults made the statement: “I don’t really have any opportunity to interact with young people”.

I found this to be a very insightful statement, and probably one of the main reasons for whatever problems exist between young people and adults. We don’t interact. Much of the adult population has little or no real contact with young people. Those that do are generally in a role of authority; teachers, parents, counselors, case workers. Rarely do you see situations where young people and adults are colleagues, equals, peers. It’s no wonder we can relate -- there’s no basis for us to try.

Of course, I still find it strange that adults have difficulty understanding young people -- we all used to be one. Somehow we forget what being young was like when we age, which is a real shame. I might also point out that our lack of interaction is under adult control -- we could be creating opportunities for ourselves to interact with young people, we just don’t seem to do so very often. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t so often lament the fact that we just don’t understand young people today …