Nobody tells adolescents about power.
We tell them about sex. We tell them about drugs. We tell them about college applications and résumés and internet safety. We tell them how to avoid pregnancy, how to say no, how to drive, how to vote.
But almost no one tells them what they are actually experiencing.
Adolescents are not only discovering power; they are discovering that modern society often appears to reward power above other virtues.
It is the year the twelve-year-old realizes his teacher can make him sit still for seven hours, even when every instinct tells him to move. It is the year the girl who developed earlier than everyone else discovers that strangers look at her differently before she understands why. It is the year the late-developing athlete watches classmates become varsity players while his own body has not yet caught up with his ambition.
No one explains that these are not personal failures. They are encounters with different forms of power—institutional power, biological power, social power, economic power—and with the uncomfortable truth that life is shaped by forces larger than ourselves.
There is a moment in nearly every life when childhood ends without announcing its departure.
It is not a birthday.
It is not the first shave or the first kiss or the first day of high school.
It is the moment a young person realizes that the world is not simply a place to explore. It is a place organized by power.
No one gives this lesson.
Instead, adolescents assemble it themselves from a thousand observations.
Then it starts to assume. Soon it starts to conclude.
The person becomes a conversation. It is about them: without knowing them.
He simply feels it.
Adults call this insecurity.
It is something deeper. It is the first awareness that human beings do not enter the world equally positioned. Some possess beauty. Some possess confidence. Some inherit wealth. Some inherit stability. Some inherit trauma. Some inherit opportunity disguised as ordinary life.
The adolescent sees all of it before he has the language to organize it.
That absence of language creates shame.
A boy who cannot sit still concludes there must be something wrong with him.
A girl who matures early wonders whether she has done something to invite unwanted attention.
A quiet artist learns there are forms of masculinity that earn applause and forms that invite ridicule.
A late developer mistakes biology for destiny.
We call this “growing up,” as though confusion were itself an education.
It is not.
The world mistakes the result of circumstances for evidence of character.
Psychologist Albert Bandura spent much of his career studying how human beings learn from observation. We do not merely absorb information from direct experience. We watch. We imitate. We anticipate consequences. We learn what behavior is rewarded and what behavior is punished long before we experience either ourselves.
Every day our children are influenced more by what is demonstrated than what is taught.
The Bobo doll experiment has escaped the laboratory.
The dolls have become all of us.
Every triumph is public.
Every humiliation is archived.
Every mistake has an audience.
The lesson is no longer delivered in psychology journals. It arrives through a glowing screen carried in every pocket.
The result is not simply anxiety.
It is constant comparison.
Comparison has always existed, but comparison once ended when the school day ended.
Now it follows adolescents into their bedrooms.
Into dinner.
Into vacations.
Into the hours that once belonged to silence.
The developing mind is asked to process more examples of success, rejection, beauty, failure, status, and conflict in a single week than previous generations encountered in years.
We should not be surprised that so many young people feel exhausted.
They are not merely living their own adolescence.
They are observing millions of others at the same time.
And still we avoid the conversation.
We call it confidence.
Self-esteem.
Motivation.
Resilience.
Important words, all of them.
But none quite describe the experience itself.
The experience is power.
Not power as domination.
Not power as oppression alone.
Power as the ability to shape outcomes.
The ability to influence your own life.
The ability to influence someone else’s.
The ability to say yes.
The ability to say no.
The ability to create.
The ability to refuse.
The ability to endure.
Every adolescent is trying to discover where that power comes from.
School becomes the Cliff notes.
But beyond the veil of adults ignorance, the children explore.
Some look for it in popularity.
Some in athletic achievement.
Some in appearance.
Some in money.
Some in rebellion.
Some in solitude.
Adults often mistake these pursuits for immaturity.
More often, they are experiments.
The young person is asking a question that philosophers have asked for thousands of years.
Where does genuine power come from?
The tragedy is that we answer with rules instead of wisdom.
The problem is not merely that adolescence is painful. The problem is that adolescence is a philosophical awakening, and we treat it as a behavioral management problem.
We tell teenagers what not to do.
We nudge them towards Shakespeare, math and geography, while not providing them with access to Foucault, Erickson or Dewey.
Schools ask children to solve problems, except for the problems that shape their own lives. They teach answers before they create spaces for questions. The unintended consequence is that some children learn that the institution values their performance more than their experience.
Schools teach facts but fail to provide a forum or time to let kids marinate on the consequences or meaning.
Where is John Keating urging kids to rip out the pages of their poetry books?
Where is Ferris Bueller telling kids not to take life to seriously?
Where is Rudy teaching kids there is beauty in playing for each other?
Those are the voices of adolescence and they are moot because of a paradigm, a consciousness that we are better. Not because we try, but because we can determine the outcome before it is known.
Adolescence is the first great encounter with prediction. The world begins predicting the person, and the person starts seeing themselves in those predictions.
We rarely explain why power without restraint destroys the person who possesses it as surely as the person subjected to it.
Real maturity is not becoming powerful.
It is learning that power acquires legitimacy only when governed by restraint.
It is true of teenagers discovering, often for the first time, that they possess the ability to wound another person with words, to include or exclude, to encourage or humiliate.
Every human being will eventually possess some form of power.
Adolescence is when a person discovers that the world is not only something they experience; it is something that evaluates them.
Power arrives in many forms.
Some must be accepted.
Some must be confronted.
Some must be questioned.
Wisdom is confronting the question.
Courage is learning that not every answer deserves your obedience.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
