Your Teenager Is Not Crazy

by Jerusha Clark

  We’ve seen the specific neurological reasons why things and brands entice us; let’s turn now to what happens in the mind, heart, and soul when people choose materialism or contentment.

  Psych 101

  Materialism involves the focus of our attention, desires, and energies. It’s an insatiable desire to get and a preoccupation with possessing what we believe will make us happy. Materialism also implies the choice to view physical things and consolations as more important than other values. Even if one doesn’t make this decision consciously, it’s made nonetheless. Ultimately, the measure for success becomes equated with how many objects, comforts, and considerations one can amass. In bumper-sticker lingo, it’s a “whoever dies with the most toys wins” philosophy.

  Sociologists have studied human desire for many years. Their central questions: Why do we want, and why does our wanting never lead to what we think it will provide—lasting satisfaction? In his book The High Price of Materialism, Dr. Tim Kasser reveals,

  Existing scientific research on the value of materialism yields clear and consistent findings. People who are highly focused on materialistic values have lower personal well-being and psychological health than those who believe that materialistic pursuits are relatively unimportant. These relationships have been documented in samples of people ranging from wealthy to poor, from teenagers to the elderly. . . . The studies document that strong materialist values are associated with pervasive undermining of people’s well-being, from low life satisfaction and happiness, to depression and anxiety, to physical problems such as headaches, and to personality disorders, narcissistic, and antisocial behaviors.8

  Let’s break this down and evaluate the scientifically observable pros and cons of materialism. Cons: lower levels of happiness, pervasive undermining of well-being, depression, anxiety, physical complaints, and social problems. Pros: a temporary burst of chemical pleasure that fades quickly. Considering this, it’s hard to imagine anyone choosing a materialistic mindset. And yet, as a popular blogger asserted bluntly, “It sounds horrible, but we all do it to some extent, even if we don’t go overboard.”9

  In one sociological experiment, people were repeatedly exposed to consumer messages, words associated with material goods and acquisitions (e.g., buy, status, asset, and expensive), as well as images of luxury goods (things considered “out of reach” for the average person). Study participants not only became more anxious and depressed but also exhibited increased selfish and competitive behavior, a lower sense of community responsibility, and “disinclination to trust other people.”10 Researchers concluded that since the average person views roughly 250 cultural advertisements a day (everything from billboards while driving to pop-ups while web surfing), we can safely assume that the temporary effects evidenced in this controlled study are triggered in all of us, every day.

  Imagine how all this affects your teenager, an adolescent whose brain is under construction and who doesn’t yet have the neural connectivity to evaluate and reject cultural messages designed to promote insatiable desire, selfishness, social competition, and distrust of others.

  If you want to escape cultural manipulation yourself and help your teenager live with greater personal satisfaction, less anxiety and depression, and a more pervasive sense of well-being and social connectivity, here are some practical steps you can take:

  Shop less. A national survey reported that the typical woman makes 301 trips to a store annually, spending an average of 399 hours and 46 minutes shopping for everything from peanut butter to purses. Factored over sixty-three years, the average woman will have shopped for eight and a half years before hitting retirement age. Yikes! When we shop, we’re exposed to far more consumer messages, our brains are continuously primed for spending, and our teenagers see us coming home with enticing bags and boxes. It’s all very titillating. We can consciously choose to break this cycle, however. Of course we need to shop for food and clothing, but do we need to spend an average of 100 hours and 48 minutes looking for clothes and 49 hours window-shopping every year? If you want your teen to put less emphasis on things and live for more than the latest technology release or fashion trend, shop less.11

  Practice gratitude. Research shows that people focused on material goods and comforts have social, personal, and physical problems. Grateful people, on the other hand, complain of fewer psychosomatic problems (i.e., anxiety, depression, headaches, stomachaches), have more satisfying relationships, and accomplish more in school and other goal-oriented pursuits.12 They also show greater empathy and express less aggression.13 We don’t think it’s a stretch to say that all of us want our kids to be healthier, happier, and better able to relate to others. If gratitude is a key to that, why not start today? What if at every meal that you ate together (not just at Thanksgiving), your family members articulated something they were grateful for that day? Gratitude isn’t just an expression; it’s a practice. It’s something that has to be intentionally implemented into your lifestyle because it won’t happen naturally. The natural bent of our hearts is toward desire, selfishness, and discontent. Even if for a while your teen says the same thing over and over, they will hear you expressing gratitude, and a genuinely grateful heart is infectious.

  Give the gift of experience. Instead of adding more “stuff” to your life, gifts of experience strengthen relationships and remind us that true life is experienced together, not through things. Take your teen to a concert or to get a pedicure. If you’re able to save for it, consider a getaway for big occasions (a sixteenth, eighteenth, or twenty-first birthday, for example). Since spending time with family members is more important than another “thing,” you can encourage others to give the gift of experience as well. Be creative and enjoy the memory making!

  Slow down. It takes time to live in contentment. A busy, hectic life is conducive to seeking fulfillment in temporal pleasures. The more stressed you are, the more stressed your teen is, and the more entertainment, material possessions, and comforts will appeal. As Dr. Richard Swenson observes, “We can learn to voluntarily take segments of our lives off-line, to voluntarily step off the default cultural treadmill from time to time to regain our equilibrium. It is not mandatory to participate in everything progress throws our way.”14

  Live generously. Like gratitude, generosity is a practice that fights the pull of consumerism and materialism. It sounds ironic and it certainly flies in the face of the messages with which we are constantly bombarded, but the more people give—of not only money but also time and energy—the more satisfaction they report with life. There’s a reason the phrase, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” became popular apart from its biblical origins; it’s a truth we can feel down to the very cellular level. Generous people express deeper peace, a stronger sense of well-being, and fewer physical complaints. Model this for your teenager, help him or her to practice generosity, and talk about the benefits you can see as a result. Here’s one practical way to do this: after your teen receives birthday or Christmas gifts, encourage him or her to choose a few things to give away. This keeps gratitude for what has been given and generosity to others closely connected in teenage minds.

  Faith 101

  “Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions” (Luke 12:15 NASB).

  Jesus spoke these striking words after a man tried to involve him in a family inheritance dispute. Uttering the ancient equivalent of “Show me the money!” this man wanted Jesus to settle his financial problems and give him security. People have longed for the same from the genesis of humanity, and the endless striving for comfort and confidence has led many down the path of envy and greed. We need to be on our guard, and we need to teach our teens the same wariness and wisdom.

  Envy and greed often sneak up on us. Most Christians wouldn’t identify themselves as materialists. After all, people of faith know better, don’t they? Unfortunately, many Christians live as “practical atheists�
�� when it comes to their personal finances, and they model a fixation on what can be accumulated and accomplished for the teenagers who live with them.

  When we make decisions about money, business, success, entertainment, or really anything else without considering God’s truth, we operate as practical atheists. Alternatively, we can communicate to our ever-watchful, ever-judging teens that we are committed to looking at stuff and success differently.

  G. K. Chesterton famously wrote, “There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”15 When we choose to desire less, we escape entrapment. We aren’t owned by stuff.

  Sadly, most Americans don’t choose to live this way. Despite what our dollar bills claim, adolescents see adults live with an “in things we trust” rather than “in God we trust” mindset.

  Augustine taught that God desires to give good things to us, but our hands are usually so full of material things that we cannot receive his gifts of grace.16 When we throw off everything that hinders, however, as Hebrews 12:1 commands, we are able to receive what God longs to give us: not “one more thing,” but the one thing that truly satisfies and can never be taken from us (see Luke 10:38–42).

  We must practice letting go. We must decide to stop grasping, clinging, and clenching, and to tell our teens the truth about what constant striving does to us. We can also talk about the cost of getting what we want. In the colloquial, you might say, “If the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, you can bet the water bill is higher.”

  When stories come up in the news or situations present themselves (which happens almost every time we’re at the mall!), point out to your teen what envy and greed do to people. Both reduce us. They wrap us up in tiny, self-centered packages of what we desire and what we perceive as our needs. Bring to their attention how most of the things people wanted so badly last Christmas eventually end up at the dump or Goodwill.

  Things don’t last forever; science verified this hundreds of years ago in the second law of thermodynamics. According to this principle of entropy, given enough time, the universe and everything in it will dissolve into complete chaos. Once again, however, science simply affirmed truths God proclaimed ages before: “The world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but are from this world. And this world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever” (1 John 2:16–17 NLT).

  Let’s help our teens truly live. Teach them to get enough by desiring less.

  Try It Today: Talk to Your Kids about Debt

  Many—perhaps even most—Americans live shackled to debt. Whether you condone or condemn debt in principle, no one claims that living with massive amounts of debt is healthy, makes you happier, and lowers your stress. On the contrary, studies show again and again that the more debt people incur, the less they enjoy life. Adolescents should learn this before they begin handling their own money.

  Credit companies have spent years developing, marketing, and now distributing cards to teenagers. Their strategy: create child consumers who grow up to be adult debtors. Don’t allow this to happen to your teenager.

  If you’ve struggled with debt and can speak to your teenager from firsthand experience, seize this opportunity to let God use something negative for good. Sharing your mistakes can be life-changing and perhaps life-saving for your teenager. Regardless of whether you’ve endured financial struggle or enjoyed financial success, speaking honestly with your teen about the weight of debt is essential.

  15

  Hold On, I Just Have to Send This

  Fourteen-year-old Jason clearly did not want to be sitting in my office that afternoon. I (Jeramy) had received a call from his distraught mom a couple days before.

  “Jeramy, I don’t know what to do. We fight about everything. Can you please talk to him?”

  As a youth pastor, I got calls like this frequently. I never knew if setting up a meeting would lead to a transformative talk with a teen or a frustrating exercise in trying to engage the equivalent of a human wall.

  My time with Jason fell into the latter category. Not only did he seem angry that his mom had dragged me into “their stuff,” he also spent more time looking under the table at his phone—which was lighting up like a pinball machine—than at either me or his mother. After about ten minutes of trying to battle for Jason’s attention, I politely asked if he would please put his phone away.

  Apparently it took an extraordinary amount of energy for Jason not to roll his eyes; his face contorted with the effort. With a resigned sigh, he stuffed the phone into his jeans. Bing-bing-bing. Jason’s cell continued to send Morse-code-like signals from the depths of his pocket, alerting him of incoming texts.

  What happened next I could neither have predicted nor believed possible. With his hand resting on top of his pocket, Jason started texting through his jeans. He was so keenly aware of every button on his phone that he felt confident sending messages without looking at the screen. To this day, I’m not sure if Jason thought I wouldn’t notice or if he just didn’t care. I simply asked that he completely turn off his phone until our time was over.

  Since I met with Jason, technology has skyrocketed from being a problem to being the problem for many families. Even with limits and filters, guidelines and agreements, technology remains a major source of contention. Understanding what’s happening in our teenagers’ brains won’t entirely eradicate the tension of navigating technology well, but it will give you greater peace, wisdom, and a strategy to move forward.

  Bio 101

  According to recent studies, average teens are exposed to between seven and eight and a half hours of electronic media per day.1 Much of this is spent in digital multitasking (e.g., texting while watching videos online or social networking while doing homework on the computer). Not surprisingly, the near-constant digital input our teenagers receive impacts their brains in striking ways.

  As you now know, how teens choose to spend their time shapes their brains. When adolescents focus their attention in particular ways, energy and information flow through neural pathways and into their entire body through the nervous system. With every incoming digital signal, your teen’s brain fires, activating specific circuits. The more particular pathways are activated, the more they’re strengthened (“hardwired”). Thus your teen’s brain is radically changed by spending hours using technology or being exposed to it.

  Digital media stimulates the brain’s reward system, and because the teenage brain is particularly sensitive to pleasurable titillation, all it takes is the latest digital message, app, or game to send it into delighted distraction. If the reward center of the brain is overused, however, the experience of gratification decreases. Neurologically speaking, striving for too much pleasure diminishes your ability to enjoy it. Instead of recognizing this, most under-construction teens seek increasingly greater stimulation, trying to recapture what eludes them, hungry for another “like,” a new social media friend, or the chance to defeat the next level.

  The current generation of adolescents, ages twelve to twenty-five, are both incredibly tech savvy and incredibly tech sensitive. In some ways they’re victorious over technology, and in others they’re dangerously vulnerable to it. Adolescents are susceptible to all of technology’s influences: the good, the bad, and the ugly. One of the ugliest realities is that the insatiable need for stimulation accompanied by diminished satisfaction is the basis of addiction.

  An activity can become addictive if it (1) provides pleasure and gives relief from unpleasant emotions, (2) requires increasing activity to satisfy, (3) makes a person feel uncomfortable or distressed when access is denied, (4) creates conflict with people or life responsibilities, (5) becomes difficult to set aside, despite attempts to do so, and (6) ultimately dominates someone’s life, both in what they do and what they think about. Do a
ny of these descriptions apply to your teenager’s tech usage?

  Dr. Susan Moeller discovered that most students, when asked to abstain from media for twenty-four hours, reported disturbing feelings about their tech-free day. Across twelve countries, one thousand students expressed similar sentiments: “I was edgy and irritated . . . and insecure.” “I began going crazy.” “I felt paralyzed.” “Emptiness overwhelm[ed] me.” “My phone has my whole life in it. If I ever lost it, I think I would die.”2

  Clearly, technology has a major hold on today’s teens.

  We know of very few people who would argue that unlimited tech use is healthy for teenagers. But how much is too much? At what point does the brain’s reward system become flooded and less able to enjoy other pleasures, including conversation, without animation and alerts? When do the demands of the digital world exceed the brain’s capacity?

  We spent some time discussing these issues with Dr. Jay Giedd, father of four adolescents and the neuroscientist whose pioneering research on the brain forever changed the way the world understands teenagers.

  “Is technology good or bad for teens?” we asked Dr. Giedd. His answer:

  Both. The adolescent brain is wired to change and to tackle problems. Our digital world is challenging people to adapt at unprecedented rates. With heightened neuroplasticity, teens are uniquely positioned to do this. Technology allows adolescents instant access to information and enables them to become more globally aware than ever before. These can be incredibly positive things.

  That said, teens must be taught how to sift through large amounts of data, identifying what’s true and useful, discarding junk and ignoring “noise.” This is no small feat. Formerly teens were taught to memorize information; now they need instruction in using instantly-accessible information to solve problems and tackle challenges. We also need to look intently at what’s being hard-wired into their brains.3