Adolescence is an Internship

I may have mentioned it a few times in other posts, but I want to write a bit about what is becoming my dominant metaphor when I think about the life stage of the people I work with the most: adolescents.

What adolescence is can me a tricky thing to talk about. It’s that developmental liminal space in between childhood and adulthood. It is where humans have started to work out who they are, but haven’t finished that work. The already-but-not-yet of human identity. It is when humans develop their identity; understanding who they are and who they are becoming. It is a crucial stage in life where you are growing and learning at an incredible rate. Sometimes people treat it like a terrible hormonal nightmare (expressed well in my favorite quote from Shakespeare: “I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting…” ¹ ]). Some think it is a cultural creation and should be ignored altogether (just treat them like adults and they’ll behave like adults!).

Cowering in fear or downplaying adolescence would both miss the incredible opportunity that this life stage offers. It is a chance for humans to discover themselves, to discover their gifts, and to figure out how they want to live their lives as adults. To test out and experiment with what they want to be in the real world. Which is why I think the best illustration for adolescence is that of an internship.

Untested skills

When interns show up on their first day at their new job, in clothes from their newly purchased “work” wardrobe and their can-do attitude, they may have a basic idea of what they are going to be doing, but it would be crazy to expect them to be as valuable to a company as a full fledged employee. Because they don’t have the practical experience in actually doing their job. The purpose of the internship is to give interns the opportunity to learn how to put what they know, or think they know, into practice.

Adolescence is remarkably similar. Only a few years before, teenagers had little or no ability to think abstractly. Now their brains are both adding rapidly new neural connections and rapidly winnowing out unused ones – changing at a remarkable rate. Teenagers have a this brand new skillset of emotional depth, ideas, cognitive abilities; skills that they have no idea how to use or put into practice. How could they? They are recent developments. And not only are they recent, they develop slowly and over time, so it is a skillset in progress.

And so, adolescence is that necessary time in which they get to see how to critically engage the world around them, or feel proper empathy for another individual. It isn’t that children don’t do these things, they can’t. So when adolescents are doing these things (practicing true empathy, thinking abstractly), they are just trying these thing out for the first time. Like an intern at his first day in the real world of work.

Space to fail

It is why both interns and adolescents fail. They have no experience in success yet. In fact, they have no experience either way. So they need to be able to fail in away that doesn’t destroy companies or lives. For an internship to be successful, the not-yet employee has to be able to have real responsibility that actually makes a difference – and yet not be given so much responsibility that their mistakes can significantly hurt them or others around them. I have only had one intern in my life, and I was less than successful at giving him good tasks that would help him develop skills. They were always either too simple, or I would throw him in the deep end and tell him to swim his way out. I don’t know how he looks back on the internship, but I look back on it as lots of missed opportunities to give him space to both fail and succeed.

Adolescents, similarly, need hands on experiences. It’s why we don’t hand them driver’s licenses until they get practice in the car. Behind the actual wheel, but with an adult next to them to coach them. That is how we ought to be approaching all aspects of adolescent life: giving them the wheel, but sitting with them in that terrifying passenger’s seat to encourage and instruct.

Obviously there are two extremes here, and I think (depending on your own disposition) you are likely to treat the adolescents around you as completely unable to accomplish anything on their own, or chastise them for not behaving like full adults. The problem is that we regularly treat them as either just children or fully adults, rather than the in-between thing that they are. And just like interns, if they aren’t given the space to fail gracefully, they will never have the chance to really develop their skills and identity.

Still figuring it out

Interns need to be able to not have everything figured out. They have to be able to still be interns, and not employees. Sometimes you’ll have an intern that seems to step up and fully perform the responsibilities and tasks asked of them as if they were fully trained staff. That is great, but other interns are not at fault because they haven’t figured everything out yet. The expectation of an internship is that it is a growing process, not an extended job interview.

When we expect adolescents to arrive quickly at adulthood, or when we only praise adolescents who seem to have figured themselves out earliest, we are shooting the whole process in the foot. Rather than embracing the individuation process as a good thing, we treat it like it is a bad thing that has to be overcome as soon as possible. But rushing teenagers into adulthood before thy are ready will probably just be behaviour modification: encouraging them to act like they are adults before they really are, and then forcing them to completely internalize and suppress the really important developmental work of testing out who they are and what they want to be.

Faith development

I spent two summers as an intern in a church as a children’s and youth pastor. It was hard, and a lot of time I really wondered if I wanted to actually follow through and work in a church. In the end, those summers were a crucial picture of the life of parish ministry, and they gave me the incredibly useful experience and perspective on how to work with real people in a real church. I think my internship cemented in me the desire to work as a youth pastor at a local church.

So what does this mean for me as a youth pastor helping adolescents grow into their identities and (hopefully) form those identities as followers of Jesus? Well, it means that while I respect the people who are calling for greater and more rigorous theological education for adolescents, I think they are missing the point. The point of adolescence isn’t to make sure they learn as many things about God as they can. Adolescence is about forming an identity, not just learning about an identity that we hope they embrace. And the only way to learn about living as a disciple of Jesus is to give them a chance to test, and fail, at doing it. It means focusing my time with them on engaging and living out a life of faith, instead of just telling them about it. It means telling them to read the Bible on their own and wrestle with what it means, tricky passages and all.

And that is the scary part. Allowing your teenagers to really try out faith – to come up with conclusions that we don’t like and do some things that we don’t agree with – means leaving the control of their faith formation into someone else’s hands: theirs. But if I want them to learn about what it means to follow Jesus – in life and in faith and in practice – I have to give them opportunities to try it out for themselves, not just tell them all about what it is like. I have to be willing to give them opportunities and then step back – trusting that they are going to learn the habits and practices of faith by doing, rather than just by listening. I will certainly be there to instruct as I am able and give insight as I can (after all, they are interns, not employees). but I have to always pull back into that tension of letting them try out things for themselves. Otherwise I’m not taking advantage of the opportunities that the liminal space of adolescence offers.