Saving Our Adolescents
a higher death rate from suicide and accidents. Adolescents need adults to help them build their resilience and competence at a time when they’re pulling away from their primary guiding source: their parents. A major contributor to the worsening mental health of Zeds (Generation Zed encompasses young people aged 17 and under) is less support from families, with fewer functioning adults around and a lessened sense of community. Professor Ian Hickie, Executive Director, Brain and Mind Institute, University of Sydney.
This is not just within communities, it is also within families and schools—the two other main support structures for adolescents. Today’s world functions at an unhealthy speed using technology that reduces human interaction. The vital window of adolescence is where the evolving child adapts to become more mature and adult-like. But, it seems the adult world has stepped back and left our adolescents without the guidance and support they need to grow into healthy citizens. You cannot learn about managing human relationships or develop life skills by watching Home and Away—or using Google™ to search for answers! Never have so many people lived so far from extended family, or outside traditional communities where adults served as collective parents for all a neighbourhood’s young people. These developments have reduced our social capital; the relationships that bind people together and create a sense of community. We must find ways to deal with our profound loss of social connectedness. Father Chris Riley, Youth off the Streets.
Father Chris Riley works daily with adolescents and young adults who are lost. They are not bad, damaged or useless—they are lost. Their bumpy ride to adulthood was a journey without enough loving support and they have been scarred by their choices. Father Riley was asked, ‘How can you help these nohopers?’ He replied, ‘It’s quite easy to help these young people. They all improve with compassion, kindness, food and a safe place to live.’ This is exactly what kinship communities offered when adolescents stepped away from their parents in their effort to claim independence and autonomy. There were other adults to keep an eye out, guide and support them. These other supports can be extended family, it can also be people who care enough to be there. I call them ‘lighthouses’. A lighthouse represents something that is strong, reliable and immovable, and shines a light showing safe passage. It does not tell you to do something, it simply shows you a safer way to go. A lighthouse says, if you want to do something really risky and smash on the rocks below where I stand, then be my guest, but 16