"The word teenager has been around for less than seventy years.
"Prior
to the early twentieth century and, really, throughout history, people
were either children or adults. Family and work work were the primary
occupations of the group we now call teenagers. In fact, in 1900 only
one out of ten American young people between fourteen and seventeen
years old attended high school....
"So what was it like to be a
teen back then, before the idea of teens even existed? Good question.
To answer it, we'd like to introduce you to three young people from
different times in America's past. Their names are George, David, and
Clara.
"George was born in northern Virginia in 1732 to a
middle-class family. When he was eleven years old, he lost his father.
Even though his peers never considered him very bright, he applied
himself to his studies and mastered geometry, trigonometry, and
surveying (think algebra and calculus) by the time he was sixteen.
"At
seventeen years old, George had the chance to put his studies to use at
his first job. Talk about a job! Official surveyor of Culpeper
County, Virginia. This wasn't a boy's job, and it certainly wasn't
office work. For the next three years George endured the hardships of
frontier life as he measured and recorded previously unmapped
territories. His measuring tools were heavy logs and chains. George
was a man at seventeen.
"David was born in 1801 near the city of
Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father was serving in the state
militia. At ten years old, David was given command of a ship that has
been captured in battle and was dispatched with a crew to take the
vessel and its men back to the United States. On the journey home, the
captured British captain took issue at being ordered around by a
twelve-year-old and announced that he was going below to get his
pistols. (out of respect for his position, he had been allowed to keep
them). David promptly sent him word that if he stepped foot on deck
with his pistols, he would be shot and thrown overboard. The captain
decided to stay below.
"Clara was born in Oxford, Massachusetts,
on Christmas Day, 1821. She was the baby of the family, with ten years
separating hew and the next youngest. She was a timid child, so
terrified of strangers that she was hardly about to speak. Then
something happened that would change her life forever. When she was
eleven years old, her older brother David fell from the roof of a barn
and was seriously injured. Young Clara was frantic and begged to help
care for him.
"Once in the sickroom, Clara surprised everyone by
demonstrating all the qualities of an experienced nurse. She learned
better than anyone how to make her brother comfortable. Little by
little, the doctor allowed her to take over all of his care, with his
complete recovery lasting two years.
"A year later, at the age of
fourteen, Clara became the nurse for her father's hired man, who had
come down with small-pox, and then to more patients as the epidemic
spread through the Massachusetts village where she lived. Still shy and
timid, her desire to serve others drove her to overcome her fears. By
age seventeen she was a successful schoolteacher with over forty
students--some nearly as old as she.
"All three of these young
people were given increasing levels of responsibility at early ages, and
they not only survived, they rose to the occasion. Even more
important, as the quote we shared from Professor Heer shows, at the time
in which they lived, young men and women like them were not all that
unusual." - Alex & Brett Harris in Do Hard Things
I
don't believe that teenagers need to be working too hard and not being
in school, but they need to be encouraged to go have passions that they
can explore more than the latest fads. We need to raise their
expectations of what they can do in these productive learning years.
Letting them explore what they can do rather than keeping them down in
the "teenager" expectation.
Renee Madison, MA, LPC, CSAT is a counselor in Colorado. She can be reached for appointments at 303-257-7623 or 970-324-6928
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