Idyllic Childhood Lost?

In the last few weeks, while learning many aspects of my new job as high school resource teacher, I’ve also had the wonderful opportunity to get acquainted with my new teenaged students and it has struck me how vastly different the adolescent experience is from one person to the next. Thinking back to my own high school years, of which I can remember blissfully little, I don’t recall having to face many of the issues that I’ve come to hear about in the last couple of weeks. It has shocked me to hear that one student has had to deal with the death of her brother and boyfriend within the same year. Another student, who has also lost a brother, is often late to school because he is helping his single mother, who lost a leg to cancer, get ready for her day. One student arrived to class sporting bruises on her face that she immediately claimed were from a rough game of lacrosse – but I found out later, were the result of a dispute with her father. Another battles depression. The list goes on and I have to wonder – is this state of adolescent affairs new or has it always been so desperate? The lives of these kids seem so far away from the kind of life I remember when I was young. In grappling to understand the plight of these children, I have to wonder– have times changed so much that adolescents of today are dealing with a lot more than those of the previous generation? Certainly circumstances have changed: the break up of the family unit is common place, the exposure to violence in the media has increased, the uncensored “googling” of any and all information, the advent of text messaging, Face Book and on-line chat rooms; I’m sure that a lot has changed in the last two decades and the pressures teenagers are having to deal with may indeed be greater than my own seemingly idyllic childhood. What ever happened to parents staying together for 33 years, Saturday morning cartoons vetoed because “kids need to play outside on nice days”, home baked bread, family dinners around the table, chores with no allowance, neighbourhood water fights in the summer, running around barefoot and unsupervised, having tree forts and secretly kissing the boy next door? Digging back through my own adolescent memories, I can not come up with something as singularly devastating as losing a sibling, or fighting the unseen evils of depression or being beaten by anyone, let alone a parent. In the getting to know of my students, I’ve become very aware that I haven’t experienced that kind of chaos and I feel very fortunate to have come from a solid, loving home. I can only hope that through this strong and seemingly rare trait that I’m able to show my students the compassion and understanding they deserve because everybody knows that being a teenager is difficult and given the chance, nobody would do it twice.