Adolescence & Reality
“Hey, why don’t you just grow up!?”
“Well, ok...but how?”
In our last article, we saw that adolescence is a time of great uncertainty, and that this uncertainty left unsolved or wrongly solved leads to all of the pejorative characteristics which we link to teenagers. To guide safely their children into full-fledged adulthood, then, parents must provide two things: conviction by way of an all-encompassing answer to the problem of life and courage in the strength to live that answer. This article will give some principles for parents to help give their teens that all-encompassing answer to supply the certainty they need to face life.
Boys vs. Girls
But first, an aside. There is a profound crisis of manhood today,1 and this crisis extends to the traditionalist camp. Traditional Catholic boys seem to have more problems “finding themselves” than the girls. The reason, as far as I can see, is this: girls are made for the home; that is their natural setting and where they are to mature and gain the strength to leave that home one day and in turn establish their own family circle. Men sanctify themselves primarily through their work, and their primary setting is outside the home. Thus, boys must find themselves in the world, achieving independence outside the home. (This is why homeschooling for boys is often a disaster: upon leaving home, they are either bound to be wild because their manhood has been crippled in the home environment, or they are dishrag-like and under-achieving because they have never faced the challenges that “make a man out of you.”)
The home is small and local; we have more control over it. If a girl is happy at home, then she has no problem. Traditional Catholic families can do what they want in their homes; no matter how wretched the world is, they can make their homes godly places and, for girls, that is usually sufficient. A girl can safely go from the happy home of her parents to her happy home with a well-chosen husband–from home to home, not from home to world as boys must.
Boys must leave the home to find their fulfillment in a world gone mad. Their coming of age, making the necessary steps toward manhood, naturally entails greater demands, since traditional Catholic boys have to get along and stand firm in a world that is savagely inimical to what they have received at home.
Let’s Get Real
It is absolutely indispensable for teenagers to get in touch with reality if they are to find any certainty in this life. The salvation of our soul is intimately tied up with our relation with reality. First we must recognize it, second we must accept it, and third we must live according to it. I would claim that one who does all three to the best of his ability is a saint.
He who falls short of any of these three separates himself from God, since everything that is real proceeds from God. Everything that exists must come from Him alone as the owner of existence. This includes not only existing beings, but also the unchangeable laws of the universe, or what some might call the “facts of life.” We can only acknowledge and please God by acknowledging and conforming to His reality, which is the only reality.
The problem we find with reality is that, after the introduction of sin and the turning of God’s creation against His own order, it is often hard to face. Life is a valley of tears, and the post-sin road to fulfillment and true success is that of the cross alone. “Nothing succeeds like Christian failure,” says one author.2 There is no escaping difficulty and suffering in this life, and the only thing that makes it fruitful is its acceptance through an understanding of its role in our personal and spiritual development.
With the array of faculties given to the human soul–intellect, will, memory, imagination, passions–man has the power to create, believe in, live in (dare I say, stew in?) his own reality. The most obvious example of this is the insane, who consider themselves to be someone else and act accordingly–for example, Teddy in Arsenic and Old Lace. However, I would claim that we all live in our own world to a greater or lesser degree; we do not see things exactly as they are because we clutch our own false notions and imaginings which warp actual reality.
A sin is an offense against the law of God. Man is so constructed by the Lord God that he can only choose what he considers to be good. When man chooses evil, that choice is not directed toward the evil, but toward the good that coexists with every evil. Thus, in every sin there is an intellectual fault, a trick bought into wherein an evil is considered good, where reality is not seen or is pushed aside in favor of a lie, an unreality. Satan is happy to have us avoid reality, because then we destroy ourselves in our false world. Both Satan and man’s fallen nature are ever creative in pushing man toward the construction of a personal and hence false reality.
Teenage Escape
There is perhaps no time when a man is more drawn to create and live in his own virtual reality than the teenage years. For the first time, the teenager is facing the full scale of the problem that life presents. It is looming large and the temptation is to retreat within himself or re-write the script in an attempt to construct the facts of life on his own terms. Rudolf Allers remarks on teenage introversion:
The appearance of phases of introversion is very often the first intimation to the older people of the changes going on in the child. The withdrawal from reality, manifesting itself as introversion, is something they were not accustomed to observe in the child. It is necessary to grasp the full meaning of and the reasons for this withdrawal. A retreat from reality is caused very often either because the individual feels scared by reality or because he has suffered defeat. Man withdraws generally from dangers or from obstacles he cannot overcome.3
But if a teenager does not learn life’s lessons in those years, chances are he will never learn them, or only learn them through the most terrible trials, as King Lear did. “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” A teenager who has been avoiding life’s difficulties will hardly be able to face them as a man. “Getting real” is an indispensable condition to becoming an adult.
Teenage introversion in turn leads to daydreaming–if you are not interacting with the outside world, you are interacting with an inside world of your own creation:
One way of escape is open to everyone who, bewildered by this “great and terrible world,” looks out for some refuge wherein to dwell securely. This is the flight into imaginations or into the realm of dreams. One who is dissatisfied with reality will imagine another world more pleasant, more like what he desires, more able to give what reality withholds….The dreamer is indeed omnipotent in a world of unreality.…The more he is lost in dreams, the less he understands reality.4
These daydreams can be useful, but more commonly are quite harmful in being completely illusory:
Daydreams are part of adolescent growth, and yet they can be very dangerous. If daydreams are an approach to real plans for the future, they are a part of the healthy romanticism of youth, and hence are good. A boy who dreams of the day when he will be a priest, a lawyer, a builder, the father of a family–a boy who makes resolutions and plans and tries to put them into practice–is using his dreams profitably, though he will hardly reach the heights of success of which he dreams.…If, however, the daydreams are wild and built of stuff far too thin for reality, they are a real peril. The dream which puts the dreamer on a pedestal with all the world in adulation at his feet, is unhealthy. It is merely a refuge from the reality which the adolescent has failed to meet. Here is the norm: If a dream has a connection with a reasonable possibility, it is good; it if is outside the realm of possibility, it is dangerous.5
Teenage brooding and moodiness, if not checked or redirected, will easily lead to the more damaging escapes from reality that are so chillingly accessible today: impurity, television and movies, video games, Internet drivel, rock/rap/death metal music, and, the ultimate flight, suicide itself.6 There is much that could be said about teenagers crawling into these refuges, but such a discussion is beyond the scope of this article. The bottom line is that teenagers are strongly tempted to look for a way out of the difficulties facing them instead of looking them in the face. All such flights cannot fail to have short and long term side effects: their inability to cope with life grows in direct proportion to their time spent wrapped in the unreal.7
Parental Strategies
We turn again to Rudolf Allers for some general strategies for making teens more comfortable with life and the problems it poses them.
The first thing to do, as it seems, is to break down the habit of excessive subjectivism. The world of dreams is a merely subjective one, different from and antagonistic to reality. The more a person lives in touch with reality, and the more at home he is there, the less will he be tempted to withdraw into the dream-world. The idea of reality must be taken in its fullest sense, including not only tangible things and society and work and economics, but the world of truths and of values too. We ought to train our children in such a way that they shall become conscious of the fact that truth and value are realities or sides of reality.8
The training for reality and for the acceptance of all its laws–comprising, as has been said, those of morals too–ought to be started long before the beginning of adolescence.
The adolescent is simply not at home in reality. To make him feel so, one has to make reality homelike to him. We must try to divest reality of the note of being uncanny and dangerous. Or we must, which is perhaps more true, teach the adolescent how to face a world which, up to a certain degree, will never lose all of its threatening, uncanny, dangerous aspects.
Specifically for parents, this means that they must, over the long term, teach reality and live it. There is no “reality injection” out there to be administered or “healthy dose of reality” to be drunk. Children must be reinforced in the idea that there is an immutable set of laws, outside of and independent of them, by which the universe runs. You break the laws, you suffer the consequences; you follow the laws, you reap the benefits. If you do X, Y happens. This is true for every aspect of life and applies even to such details as table manners, chores, and grooming. “If you eat with your mouth open, Johnny, everyone will think that you are rude. It is a sign of disrespect to others at the table and bad-breeding. It takes self-discipline and courtesy to keep your mouth closed; barnyard animals do not have such control.” Though such moral pressure is often insufficient to convince Johnny fully, giving the principle behind the command is giving it flesh and life, tying it to the real world that Johnny will one day have to face.
The intellectual knowledge of the facts of life, however, will mean nothing to the child unless he sees them lived at home. It is enormously confusing for a child to have parents of the “do as I say, not as I do” mold. Talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words. The ultimate strategy to help children become good and stable adults is for the parents to lead a good and stable life. American Catholics especially have been afflicted in the past century with a serious disconnect between what they believe of the Faith and practice on Sundays, and how they live for the rest of the week.
Let us take the typical nominally traditional Catholic family. When everyone goes to church, they are dolled up and modest, they listen carefully to what the priest says, and they fold their hands ever so beautifully. Back home, mom dons the pants and sleeveless shirts, while dad turns on the games that he watches for hours every Sunday. They are lucky to pray the Rosary together and rarely go to a daily Mass. They take steam baths in the spirit of the world on a regular basis. True, Father preaches against their lifestyle, but the parents have long had a habit of criticizing Father vehemently on those points and praising him to the skies on others. In point of fact, dad and mom don’t respect authority. They argue with each other and criticize religious, teachers, and employers. They don’t understand why their children are so disrespectful and disobedient, but the children have only learned the lesson taught: obeying and respecting authority is optional, depending on when they please you, and that applies just as much to dad and mom as anyone else.
If parents expect children to believe and live the realities that God and religion are most important, that the world is empty and shallow, that the way to a happy life is through self-sacrifice and right living, then they must say these things, yes, but much more importantly, they must live them.
The practical ways to bring reality home to children are innumerable.9 Much ink could be spilled specifically on eliminating technology and substituting it with substantive natural and especially intellectual culture. The aim of this article, however, is limited to this: to awaken parents to a most primal principle in the rearing of their children: objective reality understood, assimilated, and lived is the indispensable staple for their children to attain stable adulthood. This realization in the minds of parents is already a big step towards its accomplishment.
Conclusion
God is real; in fact, He is the only reality. To possess that reality for all eternity, we must face and live up to His reality here below. But that reality is the very challenge of our existence, and as with anyone facing a daunting test, teenagers are severely tempted to retreat into a world of their own making when the full challenge of life poses itself. If they retreat into a dark shell, they alienate themselves from God, parents, and life fulfillment. Braving the reality outside the shell, they toughen and render themselves ready for all the curve balls of adulthood. Parents wanting to help their adolescents in this difficult time must plan ahead and above all live in their own lives the reality they wish to pass on to their children.
Have your children live in contact with reality.…Prefer simple leisure to virtual leisure, the reading of stories, which take place in a normal universe, simple games to artificial games. Reality also means the realization that nothing is obtained without effort, difficulties to overcome, without energy and sometimes with a certain lack of material comfort.10
1 The underachievement of today’s boys in relation to girls is pointed out in the April, 2001 Angelus article “Book Review: War Against Boys”:
2 Dom Hubert van Zeller, O.S.B., in his excellent meditation on the Stations, Approach to the Crucified.
3 Rudolf Allers, Forming Character in Adolescents (Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, 1940), pp.28-29.
4 Ibid., pp.120, 122.
5 Henry V. Sattler, Parents, Children, and the Facts of Life (New York: Image Books, 1956), pp.150. This book has recently been republished by TAN Books & Publishers (Rockford, Illinois).
6 There is a greater prevalence of suicide among teens than any other age group. According to Meg Meeker, author of Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters (p.21), 11.5% of high school girls attempted suicide in 2005.
7 “When School Works,” USA Today, September 5, 2007. Is this useful?
8 All three quotations are from Forming Character in Adolescents, pp.128-129.
9 As the lives of modern man are entwined ever more tightly by the toils of technological tyranny, it seems that Traditional Catholics are becoming more outspoken and proactive in their effort to get real. I mention as examples the “Sursum Corda” Crusade of St. Mary’s, the April 2008 St. Dominic School newsletter, the May 2006 Angelus among other issues, and Christendom No. 8 (a must read). [It is on line at www.dici.org. A revised version of this article was published in the Feb. 2007 Angelus under the title “Open Letter to Parents of Post-modern Children.”] All of these provide good practical applications of the principle that this article attempts to set forth.
10 “Modern World, Modern Teenagers,” Christendom, No. 8. Examples: arts, crafts, puppetry, pets, sports, music, folk dancing, nature studies, gardening, cooking.
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