I cannot remember feeling more sad or heartsick than when I heard each of the following news stories for the first time. Perhaps they hit you the same way:
•In the quiet town of West Paducah, Kentucky, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal opens fire on a group of teenagers circled in prayer, leaving three of them dead.
•In Pearl, Mississippi, sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham shoots his mother to death then goes to his high school and starts firing, killing three and wounding seven.
•Mitchell Johnson, thirteen, and Andrew Golden, eleven, trip a fire alarm in their Jonesboro, Arkansas, junior high school. Once their classmates are outside, the boys start shooting at them, killing four students and a teacher.
•Gunpowder, crude bombs, and computer disks with bomb-making information are found in the homes of three fourteen-year-old Wimberly, Texas, boys accused of plotting an assault at their junior high school.
•After murdering his parents at home, fifteen-year-old Springfield, Oregon, student Kip Kinkel sprays his school cafeteria with gunfire. Twenty-four students are hit; two die.
•Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, go on a killing rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. When twelve students and a teacher are dead and twenty-three students are wounded, the boys conclude the terror with their own suicides.
Since writing these chilling lines, I suspect that even more communities like West Paducah, Springfield, and Littleton have experienced similar carnage and tragedy. Youth rage and murder are escalating at a shocking rate, leading to more shootings, bombings, and killings by young people in school hallways and on quiet suburban streets.
Alarming surveys among teenagers show:
•80 percent of students at a Midwestern middle school had bullied their peers to some degree in the past thirty days.
•19 percent of students say they have been hit, slapped, or kicked while at school.
•25 percent of students indicate they are afraid another student will harm them.1
•More than half of American teens believe a murderous rampage could erupt at their schools.2
Romans 3:16–17 aptly describes these news stories and statistics: “Destruction and misery are in their paths, and the path of peace have they not known” (NASB). It is only natural to ask why. What causes our teenagers to lash out at their parents, teachers, and peers with lethal violence? What has happened in our culture to allow mere children to become so callous and violent? An even more alarming question is, Will our own young people get caught up in this juvenile mayhem?
On the surface, the proliferation of violence in the media—particularly interactive media in the form of killing-based video games—appears to contribute to the violent acting out of some of our youth.
When the U.S. military realized that fewer than 20 percent of American soldiers fired their weapons during World War II, they concluded that soldiers needed to increase their firing rate to enhance the killing rate. The U.S. Army learned, according to Lt. Col. David Grossman, author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, that shooting at mere bull’s-eyes in practice did not result in the soldiers’ firing weapons in battle. But directing the soldiers’ firing practice at man-shaped outlines numbed their consciences and made killing a reflex reaction.
According to Grossman, a psychologist who formerly taught the psychology of war at West Point, today’s modern video games are even more effective in causing a person to overcome the aversion to shooting. He states:
The more realistic touches in video games help blur the boundary between fantasy and reality—i.e., guns carefully molded after real ones, accurate-looking wounds, screams, and other sound effects, even the recoil of a heavy rifle.3
Grossman goes on to contend that the traits of killing games are evident in some of the recent shootings:
Michael Carneal, the schoolboy shooter in Paducah, Ky., showed the effects of video-game lessons in killing. Carneal coolly shot nine times, hitting eight people, five of them in the head or neck. Head shots pay a bonus in many video games. . . .We have to start worrying about what we are putting into the minds of our young. Pilots train on flight simulators, drivers on driving simulators, and now we have our children on murder simulators.4
But there is something more behind youth rage, murder, and mayhem than bloody video games and movies. I posed questions about our violent youth culture back in 1994 in my book Right from Wrong.5 A response from journalist Rowland Nethaway bears repeating:
Adults have always complained about their youth, but this is different. There have always been wild and rebellious kids who would go off the track and do something wrong. Many of today’s youth don’t seem to know right from wrong. Children are robbing, maiming and killing on whims, and with no pity and no remorse.6
I agree with Nethaway. A significant part of the problem is the disappearance of moral absolutes from our culture. Youth violence thrives in a moral vacuum. When kids don’t have a personal value system that distinguishes between right and wrong, there is nothing to prevent them from venting their anger and frustration through violence and cold disregard for human life. Restoring moral absolutes to the fabric of our families and society is key to curbing the destructive trends among our youth.
To that end, I have taken the Right from Wrong campaign across our country for the past several years. I accepted the challenge to equip churches and families to resist the erosion of biblical values and help our children determine right from wrong. My team and I have traveled to four continents and more than 160 cities, resulting in an estimated sixty thousand churches embracing the message of moral absolutes. We have developed thirty-two different resources and taught hundreds of thousands of parents and youth a biblical, practical blueprint for understanding and implementing moral absolutes in their lives and relationships.
If I felt the need, I would do it all over again. But as important as it is to instill in our young people a personal right-from-wrong values system, moral values are only one key dimension of the answer to today’s youth crisis. Teaching our young people right from wrong is vital to the solution, but it is not the entire solution. We must also take steps to protect them from becoming immersed in a culture that glorifies violence and illicit sex. We must allow them to experience the love and nurture of a caring family. Our kids must learn what it means to honor and respect people and property.
Yet I believe there is a deeper crying need among our youth that must be addressed as we restore moral absolutes and stand against a sin-filled world. If I were asked to identify the core reason that our young people are succumbing to the lure of a godless culture and lashing out with rage, I would say it is that they feel alone, disconnected, and unsure of who they really are. Many young people, even those from good Christian homes, feel disconnected and alienated from their parents, from adults in general, and from society as a whole. Recent scientific studies, my personal research, and my interaction with thousands of young people confirm that our kids today are disconnected from most adults and lack a sense of personal identity and purpose. This alienation from adults and fuzzy sense of identity cause them to feel adrift in a hostile world. That’s why I call them the disconnected generation.
The relational disconnection that young people feel today is both frightening and emotionally painful to them, and much of the antisocial behaviors they exhibit—including extremes like West Paducah, Jonesboro, and Columbine—are the result. In order to reach the disconnected generation, we must first understand their makeup and why they feel so painfully disconnected and alone.
On-Line but Disconnected
The disconnected generation is in a population group some have referred to as the “echo boomers,” born between 1977 and 1994. Some call them the “millennials.” Those born after 1983 are sometimes called the “mosaics.” Today’s adolescents are primarily the offspring of baby boomers. The teenage population is more than twenty-two million strong. They are perhaps the richest, most populous, best educated, and most physically fit generation in history.7 Our young people are growing up in a prosperous society with unprecedented career opportunities and access to a virtually limitless amount of information. More than one-third of today’s teenagers are connected to the Internet, and it is projected that 70 percent will be cruising along the information superhighway by 2003.8
Today’s youth are logging on to the Internet for more than just information and entertainment. Increasing numbers of young people are using e-mail and chat rooms in an attempt to connect socially with others. Yet people who are seeking emotional and relational connections on-line are finding electronic relationships unfulfilling, a cheap substitute for in-person friendships and interaction. A study out of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reveals that the more hours a person spends on the Internet, the more depressed, stressed, and lonely he or she feels.9 Hill Walker, codirector of the Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior, calls the results of the new communication technologies “almost a virtual reality without adults.”10
The high-tech devices that allow our kids to connect electronically with people around the world may also be encouraging them to disconnect relationally with people at home. In a rapidly increasing number of homes, students have their own computers, modems, and phone lines. And since many homes are also equipped with PCs for Mom and Dad, kids and their parents spend more time staring at their monitors than they do interacting with one another. As wonderful as computers may be for many tasks, they can be insidious contributors to the disconnected generation. As kids spend hours surfing the Internet, chatting with people on-line, and playing computer games, they have less time to interact with others, specifically their parents and other significant adults. Adults who are similarly preoccupied with the Internet, careers, social activities, or church commitments are equally at risk of disconnecting from their kids.
Every major sociological study during the last fifteen years that cross-tabulates human relationships—or the lack of them—with human behavior reveals that the more disconnected a person is relationally, the more prone he or she is to engage in antisocial behavior. Two major studies I commissioned of churched youth, the first in 1987 and the second in 1994, reveal that the closer youth are to their parents relationally, the less at risk they are for unacceptable behavior. And yet the sobering statistics underscore the mounting disconnection and loneliness in this generation:
•Almost half of today’s young people have lived through their parents’ divorce.
•63 percent of youth live in households in which both parents work outside the home.
•Only 25 percent of teenagers say their mothers are always home when they return from school.
•98 percent of teenagers spend eleven hours per week watching TV.
•Teenagers spend an average of three and one-half hours alone every day.11
We should not be surprised that the generation which suffers through parental divorce, comes home to an empty house, spends an inordinate amount of time alone, and sits for hours in front of a TV or computer monitor is also the generation that feels disconnected from adults and exhibits at-risk behavior. When young people’s painful sense of aloneness is not adequately dealt with, their anger and fear may escalate into violence and tragedy.
I receive thousands of cards and letters from young people every year. My eyes light up when I read one like this, which I received recently from a high-school girl. Here’s an excerpt:
Dear Josh,
My parents are both Christians and have been for many years. I have been raised in church all my life. My parents have been together for twenty years this July. They are the most loving, understanding people God could have given me as parents. I don’t know what I would do without my wonderful parents. They are the greatest!
But for every encouraging letter like this, I must get a dozen or more heartbreaking letters from young men and women who feel disconnected from one or both of their parents. Here are some of the sad words kids have written to me:
I am so lonely I can hardly stand it. I want to be special to someone, but there’s no one who cares about me. I can’t remember anyone touching me, smiling at me, or wanting to be with me. I feel so empty inside.
It’s like I have a heavy heart and this burden upon my back, but I don’t know what it is. There is something in me that makes me want to cry, and I don’t even know what it is.
In my life, I haven’t gone through much, but I have always had a strong feeling of loneliness. In fact, yesterday I saw a guy my age by the lake with his head in his hands. I went over to him, and we talked awhile. I found out that we both have been filled with loneliness and confusion over the years.
I’m going to be sixteen on July 1. I was eleven years old when my real dad molested me. Because of that I have tried to kill myself three times. I closed up. I hated people. I’m saved now, but I need to learn to love again. I’m tired of being alone, but I’m so afraid to love.
Your students may not be on the verge of violence, but you may be shocked to learn how disconnected they possibly feel.
The Old Generation Gap
The infamous generation gap, the social and emotional distance separating adults from their children, has always existed to some degree. It is natural for each new generation to want to establish a unique identity apart from their parents. But when massive societal changes occur within a short period of time, the generation gap widens. And perhaps no generation in history has witnessed as rapid and expansive changes in such a short period of time as that of today’s adolescents.
Think about this: The younger generation has all been born since Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. Most of them probably never bought a new vinyl record or watched a drive-in movie. Many can’t remember a world without AIDS. Most are too young to remember the fall of communism. They can’t imagine a world without computers, video games, or the Internet. The world has changed rapidly in their short lifetimes, and today’s adolescents reflect those changes.
Consider for a moment the contrast between the baby boomers and today’s youth:
Ethnically, this new generation is more diverse than the baby boomers. They are the first generation to claim computer technology as a birthright. For the most part, they have not actually rebelled against their parents; they simply feel distant from them.
A New Cultural Language Gap
A cultural language gap also distances adults from youth, and many adults are simply unaware of it. In fact, most young people speak a totally different language from that of their parents and other adults. I’m not talking about some homes in which the parents speak Spanish or Russian or Chinese while their children speak English. I’m not even talking about the slang terms kids use today that many adults don’t understand. I’m talking about adults and youth using a common vocabulary with different definitions, completely unaware that such differences exist. As the distance between adults and youth widens, our young people are forming a tight-knit community of their own with a language all their own. Can you see why adults and young people with a different language might not connect with one another?
For example, sixteen-year-old Jason has locked horns with his father over his “need” for a part-time job. Listen to Jason and his dad to see if you can discern the origin of the cultural language gap, something his father doesn’t even realize exists.
Jason’s view:
It’s not that I hate my parents or anything. I just wish they could understand me. I mean, there’s this issue of having a job. Dad is always on my case about studying hard and getting good grades. He thinks having a car and a good sound system and the right clothes are not important. He’s always putting me down for wanting to make money and have nice things. Well, that’s who I am, and Dad just can’t handle it. And Mom is always saying I’m too eager to “store up treasures on earth,” whatever that means. She says it’s better to be rich spiritually instead of materially. That may work for Mom and Dad, but my friends and I believe you can have both. My parents just don’t get it. They are so judgmental. They don’t give me any credit for being who I am. It’s like they’re rejecting their own son. I have no freedom. They just keep saying, “You can make decisions like an adult when you start acting like an adult.” Well, if acting like an adult means being like them, I don’t think I want to be one.
Dad’s view:
Jason is a good kid. I know he’s a little hardheaded at times, but he’ll pull out of it eventually. He really needs to get off this kick of getting a job so he can buy all the CDs he wants. He needs to seek God’s kingdom first. I am trying to teach biblical values to him, but he thinks his mother and I are pretty tough on him at times. I’m sure he will eventually realize that what we’re doing is best for him. He needs constructive criticism and healthy correction just like I did growing up. Sure, he’s a little distant now, but he’ll come around. I know I did with my folks.
Can you see why Jason and his parents are not connecting? Dad and Mom consider their son to be “a little distant,” but Jason’s response is much more serious. His parents are attempting to correct their son’s behavior in hopes of equipping him for a better life. But in Jason’s mind, they are rejecting him as a person by disapproving of his behavior. In his parents’ view, they are doing the loving thing for their son. In Jason’s view, they are disconnecting from him relationally.
Why does Jason perceive things so differently from his parents? Because most of the input he receives from public education, advertising, movies, TV, secular music, and his peers is colored by the modern cultural doctrine of postmodernism. Postmodernism is a worldview characterized by the belief that truth is created rather than discovered. Jason’s values are being subtly shaped by postmodernism, but his parents’ values reflect those of their own generation. In Jason’s world, the words moral judgment have been redefined. The terminology is often the same, but the definitions of those terms are very different between the generations.
For example, postmodernism asserts that an individual’s identity is inseparable from what he or she does, thinks, and believes. Thus today’s kids are influenced to believe that who they are is essentially equal to what they believe and do. So if your opinions, instructions, or methods of discipline somehow clash with what your young people think or do, they may tend to think you are disparaging them. And if you suggest that their behavior is wrong, they may feel, as Jason does, that you are judging them. If you criticize their friends or fashions, they are likely to take the criticism personally. The word acceptance has been redefined to this generation.
The word tolerance also means something different to this generation than it does to you. The postmodern culture is subtly teaching students that people who do not wholeheartedly accept the beliefs or lifestyles of others are intolerant, judgmental bigots—and no one wants a relationship with a bigot! But what does a young person like Jason do when the “intolerant, judgmental bigots” happen to be his disapproving parents? Since most kids are still largely dependent on their parents, Jason will probably not “divorce” his parents and run away. But he will likely distance himself from them relationally because he senses that they are rejecting him.
Consider another word that is being subtly redefined by the postmodern culture: truth. As a Bible-believing adult, you undoubtedly accept some things to be absolutely and universally true; that is, true for all people, in all places, and at all times. You also accept that these absolutes are determined by God and communicated to us through His Word. It is this view of truth and morality that formed the basis for much of western civilization up through the modern age. You and your contemporaries were raised on this value.
However, the present generation, the first to grow up in a postmodern age, does not universally accept the existence of objective truth. Since truth to a postmodern world is created rather than discovered, each culture determines its own truth that is true only in and for that culture. Postmodernists contend that anyone who claims to hold an objective truth that unfavorably judges the values, beliefs, or lifestyle of another person is intolerant and bigoted. This is why Jason is unwilling to accept his parents’ values. He is being conditioned to create his own truth, a lifestyle that works for him even though it may clash with the values of his parents.
Since today’s youth have grown up under this influence to some degree, they may discuss key issues using the same terms you use—but with different definitions. These differences and misunderstandings may encourage a relational disconnection between you and your youth. Consider how the terms in the following chart are defined differently from generation to generation:
How Disconnection Turns to IsolationIt is true that the generation gap accounts for a measure of the relational disconnection young people feel today. And the influences of the postmodern culture on this generation make connecting with kids incredibly challenging and difficult. But even with these forces at work, the distance and loneliness our youth feel would not be permanently destructive if parents, youth workers, pastors, and Christian educators would prayerfully counter the culture and build lasting relational connections with their kids. The aloofness and distance that some adults might pass off as a youthful phase or temporary adolescent identity crisis are fast becoming a cultural condition. When our youth’s sense of alienation and aloneness is not immediately and adequately addressed, and when they are left to themselves to find themselves, the distance they feel from adults becomes a relational isolation gap.
Many members of this generation are isolated emotionally as well as relationally. They feel lost, not knowing who they really are. A bright Christian student named Danny said something to me some time ago that represents far too many of our youth: “Sometimes I feel so alone, like no one cares. My folks live in their own world, and I live in mine. It didn’t always seem to be this way. I know it sounds crazy, but I want them to leave me alone, and yet I want to be a part of their lives. Most of the time they do leave me alone, and it gets pretty lonely.” When you hear the desperation of kids like Danny, you can better understand why young people reach out so much for each other. You can see why gangs are attractive—they help close the isolation gap that exists between kids and the adult world.
Traveling tens of thousands of miles across the country and around the world each year, I hear countless hundreds of young people share a sense of isolation with me. Our kids need strong relational connections today to find their way in the world and to escape the riptide of loneliness pulling them toward self-destruction.
Sadly, however, hundreds of parents and youth leaders have told me that they struggle to know their kids and often fail to connect with them at a deep, personal level. I hear caring yet frightened adults say, “Josh, I’m afraid the culture is going to capture my kids.” These are good parents and youth workers who love their kids and desperately want to enter their world, to connect with them, and to let them know they are loved for who they are. They just struggle in doing so.
Obviously, we want to protect our kids from the negative influences and consequences of a godless culture. The postmodern culture threatens to undermine our students’ faith and moral character. Yet we are misguided if we focus our energies solely on changing our kids’ behavior or militantly resisting the godless culture. It is important to understand the damaging influences of our age, and it is vital that young people make right choices in life. But the real battlefields are the very hearts of today’s youth.
Yes, you want your kids to live well and to behave well. But they will continue to struggle with loneliness and emptiness until you convince them that they are loved for the unique people they are. This may be an old cliché, but it’s true: Your kids won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Parents, I know you love your children. Youth workers, I know you care about the kids in your youth group. Pastors and Sunday-school teachers, I know you are concerned about the disconnected generation, and your hearts ache with mine over the senseless savagery that has erupted in places like Pearl, Mississippi; Springfield, Oregon; and Littleton, Colorado. If you did not care, you would not be doing what you are doing to find some answers, including reading this book.
The real challenge before us is learning how to enter our students’ sometimes complex and confusing world and make relational connections at a deep, emotional level that no cultural influence will be able to destroy. That’s what I want for my own four kids and for the tens of thousands of kids around the world I minister to each year. I’m sure that’s what you want too. And that’s what this book is all about.
The first step in this process is learning to understand and to identify with the struggles our kids face in the preteen and teen world. The closing paragraphs in this chapter will launch us in that direction.
Allow me to present what I believe is a representative voice of the millennial generation. These words, spoken on behalf of the disconnected generation, reveal what today’s youth inwardly long for, even though they may not know how to describe it. As you read these words, I encourage you to listen for the heart cry of a young person you know—your son, your daughter, a young person in your youth group, Sunday-school class, or classroom. In reality, the young person closest to you probably shares the deep inner longing to be more closely connected to you.
Worlds Apart: A Millennial’s ViewWe’re different from you. We live in a different world and represent a different generation. We both live busy lives. And even though we don’t spend a lot of time relating to each other, we do spend enough time together for us to learn what you’re really afraid of. You’re afraid we won’t get good enough grades in school. You’re definitely afraid that we’re having sex or that we soon will be or that peer pressure will lead us into drugs, alcohol, or a gang. And we sort of understand your fears. Your urgent message is pretty clear to us: “Stay out of trouble and get good grades.”
But do you know what? All that stuff doesn’t really scare us much. In fact, we would like you to think that we already know a lot of things and are confident about who we are and what we want to become. We want you to be proud of us, but at the same time we want to be our own people, different but really important to you.
I know it may sound a little weird, but our world is full of weird people going through weird stages. We are experiencing a confusing time that you may call a phase, but we’re afraid it may never end. Really, we’re kind of afraid that you’re even afraid of us. Like you’re afraid because you don’t think you know us anymore and maybe you can’t trust us, or you’re afraid we no longer want to be a part of you.
But deep inside, we long for you to break through our masks and know the real us—to value and trust us. We do want to feel connected to you, like we really belong. I know at times it doesn’t seem like that’s what we’re saying, with the strange things we do and say. But we’re really saying that we feel disconnected, like we don’t know who we are, and we’re frightened that we’ll never find out.
You know what’s weird? We may not be so different after all, because I think you want that connection too. I think both of us want to need each other. Deep down, we really do want you to enter our world and help us figure out who we are. That’s what we’re saying, only maybe we’re saying it in a strange way. That’s because we’re confused and struggling.
It seems like we are being measured all the time in terms of numbers and scores and performances that always seem just out of our reach. Each morning when the alarm goes off, our masks go on. We put on our clothes and jewelry and those attitudes of ours to hide our fears. A lot of times we get into sports or clubs or studies or boyfriends or girlfriends or something else just so we can be ourselves or find ourselves or maybe even lose ourselves.
But do you know what? Most of us aren’t finding ourselves. That’s frustrating, and it hurts. Many of us have become angry inside. Most of us don’t even know why we’re angry. For that matter, most of us don’t even realize that we have no sense of identity. But underneath it all, we feel the pain of being disconnected and alone in our own world, and just below the surface there’s this seething anger.
You may not relate to our anger, but perhaps you can understand what we’re feeling. Because you probably know what it’s like to want to be loved for just being yourself without any strings attached. We think you can identify with that inner ache that longs for someone just to cry with you when you’ve been hurt or to hang in there with you when you’ve blown it. Wouldn’t it be great to hear the words, “I’m so proud of you for just being you”? And wouldn’t it be something to know that people think you are okay even when your actions aren’t always perfect?
Here’s something else that would be great: We would love for you to look past our clothes and our music, to peer behind our masks and see the real us—and then to love what you see. That’s what we’re really looking for, but we’re just not sure how to find it.
