A Guide to Creating Teen-Adult Conversations in Your Community

Introduction

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ADULTS AND ADOLESCENTS ARE ALWAYS POWERFUL. Precisely for that reason, they can either erode teenagers’ development into strong and confident people or create small and large occasions for growth and connection. Miscommunication and silence can tilt the balance of these relationships. Parents and other adults longing to connect with a teenager often find themselves groping in the dark. Most adolescents don’t talk much to adults, even when they think about them a lot.

So what’s on their minds when teens shrug off parents’ questions with one-word responses? To what adults do they think they matter, and why? Who matters to them? What in their relationships with adults encourages them to thrive and strive—to embrace learning, take positive risks, work hard, and put their skepticism, idealism, and curiosity to good use? What shuts them down? How, then, can adults best reach out to kids, understand them, and offer the help they need?

In 2005, What Kids Can Do—a national nonprofit organization bringing youth voices and insight to bear on problems facing schools, communities, and families—set out to answer these and other questions about teenagers’ relationships with close-in adults. With support from MetLife Foundation, we turned for advice to teenagers themselves.

Over a period of six months, WKCD writer Kathleen Cushman met with sixty teenagers nationwide, gathering their views, experiences, stories, and tips. From these intensive discussions and interviews came a book, What We Can’t Tell You: Teenagers Talk to the Adults in Their Lives (Next Generation Press, 2005).

Since the book’s publication, WKCD has traveled the country, co-hosting with local organizations public forums that promote honest conversations between teenagers and adults. Along the way, we have been struck by the absence of public occasions where adults and young people can find common ground across the divide that separates them. We have noticed the extent to which adult concerns for teenagers focus on keeping them from negative behaviors, rather than supporting them as positive
contributors to their families, schools, and communities. We have heard teens say, again and again, how they wished they had more caring adults they could turn to for support and inspiration. We have concluded that we owe our teenagers more.

The power of public dialogue

“We will never understand each other without talking, we’re not mind readers,” one teen said of his relationships with adults. “And it may sound strange, but sometimes the best way to get the conversation going is sideways. Not in your own living room with your own parents, but in a public space with adults who aren’t your parents, and vice versa. It relieves the tension.” This has been our experience, too. Dialogue, we know, helps promote change. When individuals share their opinions and have their opinions tested by others, long-held assumptions can lose some of their force. Small insights can shift old attitudes and behaviors. Between groups that view each other with suspicion, or for whom talk is often difficult, open dialogue can help forge common ground.

And when the conversation is public, when it brings together a diverse group, participants can gain perspective from learning about experiences different than their own, as well as draw comfort from those facing similar struggles. “Hearing what other teenagers have to say helps me understand my own teen,” one parent wrote at the end of a teen-adult forum WKCD co-hosted in Houston, Texas. “I see better how things she does that seem disrespectful, to me, are about self-expression, to her. It takes the edge off my feelings.” Providing a setting where teens and parents can talk without having to address each other directly can also be freeing and, in the case of teens, validating. At the end of the Houston forum, one of the teenage panelists told the audience, “I can’t tell you how much it means to us when adults we don’t know take our voices seriously, when we are treated with respect and not condescension. “

Adult or teenager, we owe each other the same thing: to share what is hard for us, to listen carefully to what we hear, and to put ourselves in the other’s shoes.

To keep reading, follow link below:

http://www.whatkidscando.org/publications/pdfs/Teen-AdultForumGuide.pdf