Recently a 13 year old teenager successfully climbed Mount Everest. It’s the highest peak in the world above sea level, reaching over 29,000 feet. He received criticism from every angle; his own father was accused of child abuse. But the kid climbed Everest, because he could.

If there wasn’t so much already written about it, I could write endless words about the poisonous lie of adolescence and its grip on youth culture. Kids are told they’re too young, too small, don’t know enough, it’s too dangerous, “you’ll understand one day.” It’s true that teens can be impressionable and they’re not always fit to make huge decisions. You wouldn’t give a child a loaded gun, a surgeon’s scalpel, a blank check. But then it should be our jobs as the old people to teach the youth instead of saddling them down with warning labels and training wheels. It’s our job to help them understand, and they do want to.

Much has also been written about our coddled generation of oversensitive teens. In Albert Mohler’s book Culture Shift and this blog entry, he writes, “… today’s parents are now spending a great deal of their time doing little more than protecting their children from life … Our kids are growing up to be pampered wimps who are incapable of assuming adult responsibility and have no idea how to handle the routine challenges of life.”

He goes on to rebuke parents who continually protect their children from failure, bad feelings, and difficult situations. Some parents create a permanent state of dependency with cell phones, calling their grown children in college to ensure their perfection at every step. Then there’s “grade inflation,” where outraged parents and students demand better grades for fear of anxiety. Grades become worthless.

We could easily throw the old standby, These kids and their new toys; when I was ten I would never ____; I can’t believe the kids these days. Except that doesn’t help. Somewhere along the line every troubled teen was dismissed as an ignorant adolescent, and that only perpetuated it. Look outside: a whole world of forty year old boys with beards because they were never weaned off the bottle. And when they finally take responsibility for themselves and quit blaming every tired cliche, they’ve already lost most of their lives.

There was a time when children were raised to be adults. Today children are raising children to be children. They hurt and have no place to go; still others are overly sensitive and inflate their problems to ridiculous degrees. I fear for a broadening spectrum of adults that condescend to younger people. Of course the kids are young; of course we should protect them; of course there must be rules. But at some point this causes more harm than good. A bird that is kept too long in his nest will fall in his first flight, never having used his wings. And so we have a generation of emo-kids that know no real role models, no support system, no guidance. Instead they have been told what not to do instead of what they can do.

With younger people I try to abide by a simple rule: never talk down to them. Youth learn fast. They know if you’re being sincere with them, or not. I used to hate it when during a panicked situation, I’d ask how I could help and someone would reply, Don’t worry about it. Even people of the same age do this to each other, as if to say, You won’t get it and I don’t have the decency to explain. We can do better than to treat others with special gloves.

We tend to see youth as either fragile embryos that need persistent pampering or as kids who don’t know any better. And for every coddled kid, there is one who genuinely hurts. I wish someone had told Phoebe Prince, a 15 year old girl who hanged herself after being bullied for months, that she was so much better than her situation. Undoubtedly she experienced an unrelenting, wicked evil that cut her deep, and I cannot diminish the hurt she must have felt. I only wonder if someone had really talked to her like an adult. At some point she must have reached out to a friend, her parents, an older person to share her feelings, and I can imagine the response: Don’t worry about it. Or maybe she heard, They’re kids being kids. Or, It can’t be that bad. After she died, the kids who bullied her logged onto Facebook and mocked her death. Is that really kids just being kids? If only someone had taken her seriously.

All throughout the Bible I see younger people taking up the mantle of responsibility. They had people in their lives that didn’t talk down to them, and even when they didn’t, they refused for anything less. God took them seriously; they took Him seriously. David was a boy when he killed a soldier over nine feet tall. Timothy was about my age when he took up Apostle Paul’s mantle. Esther was a teenage queen. Ruth couldn’t have been over twenty when she gave up everything to follow Naomi. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were teenagers when they refused to bow down to the king and accepted their death in the furnace. Jesus was twelve when he challenged the temple priests, men who had studied God’s Word their entire lives.

I mourn for a whole generation of youth that is dismissed as a half-people in limbo. Children have real concerns, goals, dreams, hopes, hurts, and a world to endure. Youth want to step it up, but they can neither do it all by themselves nor can they be babied through it. If you treat kids as a joke, they’ll treat everything the same. Treat a kid like he has wings and just maybe he’ll make it.