When they do share with us, we adults fool ourselves, or we are threatened, or we are in denial. Individual adolescents may choose not to do these things, but it s part of their world. If we as adults took it upon ourselves to get consistently involved in adolescent life again, we would be surprised at what we could do. I was once present when an eighth-grader gave a speech in which she absolutely outlined the presence of drugs and alcohol and how they worked in her middle school. The teachers all denied that it was true.
Adults just don t want to deal with it.
Adolescents also need to hear from us. They need us to talk to them about our lives as adults, what we re thinking about, what we re struggling with. They need to know that the same world that confounds them also confounds us. Another thing that I found in my book is that unlike a decade or two ago, these adolescent problems are here and now, no matter who we are or where we live. We adults kept these problems at an arm s length by pointing out that it was the adolescent in the inner city, or the adolescent with behavioral problems, or the adolescent of divorced parents.