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.