Teen Stress and Our Response

Today the American Psychological Association published their annual "Stress in America" survey. 

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2013/stress-report.pdf.

This year's edition notes that teens now experience stress at levels that often exceed those levels reported by adults.  Both teens and adults report these levels as being higher than they believe to be healthy.

"For teens, the most commonly reported sources of stress are school (83 percent), getting into a good college or deciding what to do after high school (69 percent), and financial concerns for their family (65 percent)...The most commonly reported stress management techniques among teens are listening to music (67 percent), playing video games (46 percent), going online (43 percent), spending time with family or friends (43 percent), and exercising or walking (37 percent)...Many teens report lying awake at night (35 percent), overeating or eating unhealthy foods (26 percent), and skipping meals (23 percent) due to stress in the past month."

Teen also report higher levels of anxiety and anger, fatigue and fear.  And teens--like their adult models--tend to skip the things that would most readily alleviate stress: rest, exercise, and relationships.

It is clear that this information offers some insight into rising levels of teenage despair, violence and suicide.  I believe that "Generation Stress" is paying the full price for the disconnect between our culture's perfectionist aspirations and the realities of imperfect and frail human existence.  No matter how hard they work, how much they study, how beautiful they are and how much they own, our young people fear that they will fail to be perfect in the end.

Of course, they are correct.

Our culture of official optimism is killing our young people.  What they need is authentic hope.  Jurgen Moltmann wrote about the theology of hope following the German defeat in World War II.  Moltmann quickly had to write an additional book because even in postwar Germany, official optimism quickly displaced realistic hope.  In his book Bound and Free, Douglas John Hall gives this description.

"What he had to do now, Moltmann said, was to demonstrate, for those who had ears to hear, that the only way Christians can dare to speak about hope is by standing not on bridges over the autobahn, but beneath the cross, waiting in the darkness of Golgotha for the light that shines in the darkness.  Otherwise, the gospel becomes nothing more than a stained-glass adaptation of the trendy technocratic utopianism of the consumer society--bourgeois transcendence with a thin patina of sentimental theism." (page 60).

Will the church in this time have something real to say to young people dying in the midst of "trendy technocratic utopianism"?  That is the challenge for the church of our time.  Can we speak words of real grace and mercy and love to a generation driven by perfectionism and sentenced by that impossible standard to inevitable failure?

If we wish to respond, then we who are the parents and grandparents must push back at that perfectionism, that official optimism, and walk with our children toward real hope.