One day, I decided to start analyzing people’s reactions when I tell them I work as an educator with teenagers. Honestly, I’ve come across many different reactions, but most fall in line with comments like “Wow, what a tough age, it must be hard to work with them, right?”, “I wouldn’t be able to do it, you must have a lot of patience with them!” “Do you think working with them does any good?”, “Young people today are a lost cause,” etc.
Hearing this kind of comment saddens me and makes me think that, as we get further from this stage of our lives, we forget what it means to be a teenager, as if we forgot we ever lived it.
First of all, it’s a stage where we stop being children but aren’t adults yet either. It’s a limbo, a transition phase between these two stages. Therefore, it’s a phase of changes (starting with the hormonal ones, which would need another article on their own) that help us begin building our own identity.
That’s why, on many occasions, we see “drastic” changes in them: for example, one day a teenager expresses that they’re only attracted to people of a different sex, and the next day expresses that they’re attracted to both people of a different sex and the same sex. Or one day they say what interests them most is history, and the next day they say their passion is dance.
Seeing these constant changes in them often makes us think they’re lost, that they don’t know what they want. And indeed they don’t, because they’re at a stage where they’re just beginning to figure out what they want. And to do that, they have to investigate, explore different paths, get to know the different possibilities they might encounter on their journey. These changes aren’t negative, they’re part of the process.
And it’s precisely in this part of adolescence that my job makes sense. I love accompanying young people through this process and putting in their hands all the tools I know so they can develop self-knowledge: discovering what motivates them, what skills they have, what aspects they can improve as people, which values they identify with most… In short, discovering themselves as people.
And I like it even more to make them participants in their own environment, helping them develop projects born from their own needs and interests. We’ve grown accustomed to teenagers receiving things without teaching them where they come from, without even offering them the opportunity to do it themselves. It’s been shown (at any developmental stage) that anything made by us always gives us a bonus of satisfaction just from the fact of having created it ourselves. The feeling of being capable of accomplishing something, however small, produces wellbeing. So, why not give them the opportunity to develop projects that arise from their own interests and needs? A dance-class project during breaks, sports tournaments, end-of-year trips… Projects that show them they’re not just recipients of things, but also have the capacity to give and offer their skills and knowledge to others.
I love seeing how teenagers respond to the educational proposals I work on with them: THEY’RE GRATEFUL. They’re very grateful to see that trust is placed in them; that they’re not blamed for making a mistake, but helped to learn from it; that their emotions are taken into account and they’re helped to identify them; that they’re given the chance to be and discover themselves without judgment.
For all this, every time someone makes one of those comments I mentioned at the beginning, I wish that person had the chance to look again with the eyes of their own adolescence, but being who they are now. And then, have that same conversation again to see if their opinion would change.
And I believe (or I want to believe) that it would.
Elena
Educator in freedom