Blog | Topic: Parents

Are Parents Afraid to Talk to Teens about College?

Last fall I spoke to a group of college bound high school students and their parents at Sayre Woods Bible Church in Old Bridge, NJ. I opened my talk by mentioning an article by an admission’s counselor from the University of Pennsylvania. The article is entitled “Fear of Talking” and in it the author observes that parents and teens are not talking about one of the most important transitions in life. He writes, “[The students] talk to me about their hopes for college, but few have the same conversation with their parents.” Why aren’t parents and teens having meaningful conversations about college? Fear. Here’s a quote worth considering:

“Parents don’t think they put stress on their teens. Teens disagree. There is an implied understanding, an unarticulated perception of expectation between the teen and parent; but with so much at stake, you would think teens and parents would intentionally sit down and actually talk about what the other thinks, hopes for and expects. Too often you’d be wrong. Teens and parents tend not to talk to each other about this crucial matter because they are afraid to talk.”

Afraid to talk? It isn’t easy engaging teens in conversations about future plans. Teens do tend to be under a lot of stress. They do, in fact, have many pressures, real and perceived, about succeeding in life. And, truth be told, our busy schedules and lives can sometimes limit the opportunities we have to talk to them about things that matter most. But here’s what I’ve discovered: creating space to have meaningful and honest conversations about life after high school often lessens the pressure and stress. It’s not easy, to be sure. And we may not always like what we hear teenagers say. But I think it is better to be on the same page, to know where teens are coming from, than to assume we know what they are thinking.

One of the reasons I am passionate about doing the College Transition Seminar is to be a catalyst for conversation between parents and their kids before heading off to college. The most meaningful feedback I receive is when a parent or teen lets me know that something I said sparked a much needed conversation. My prayer is for that to happen at all of the College Transition Seminars!

Related Resources:

Book: Make College Count: A Faithful Guide to Life and Learning (includes discussion questions)

Article: “Silence is Not Golden: The Why and How of Sticky Faith Conversations at Home” by Kara Powell & Brad Griffin

Seminar: The College Transition: Your Purpose, Your Faith, Your Community

College as Calling?

“Your college education is meant to prepare you for prime citizenship in the kingdom of God… Your calling is to prepare for further calling, and to do so in a Christian community that cares as much about the kind of person you are becoming as what kind of job you will eventually get, and as much about how you will do your job as about which job you do.” – Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

If you could put all of your thoughts, feelings and emotions about to college into one word, what would that one word be? I like to ask this question when speaking to college bound high school students. Most often I hear the following: scared, nervous, stress, money, freedom, party, excited, adventure and opportunity. I then challenge the group to consider another word: Calling. Should college simply be the assumed next step after high school or should we be thinking more deeply about this major decision? What would it look like if we thought of college as a calling?

First, we need to discern if college is in fact where God is calling students. This will require good conversations with God (in prayer) and with people who know them well. Youth workers and parents should be sure to create space for open and honest conversations about whether or not college is the best next step for life after high school.

Second, if students do get a sense that God is leading them to college after high school, we need to prepare them for what’s ahead. Invite students to talk to people that have gone before them and to ask questions about what to expect in college. Here’s a good activity: have students ask someone who is 20 years removed from college what they would do differently if they could do it all over again.

Finally, if college is a calling, students should be “sent.” This will require the community of faith coming around the college-bound students in prayer, letting them know that the body of Christ is behind them and with them as they go. During college breaks, create opportunities for students to report back to the congregation on how things are going in their calling.

Transitioning to college is not easy. Many students are overwhelmed by the pressure to go and to succeed. Framing the decision in terms of calling reminds students that college is a gift and that their lives are in God’s hands.

Christian College Versus… COST?!

When I started doing College Transition Seminars in 2005, there was one question that was on a lot of Christian parents’ minds: Do you think we should send our son or daughter to a Christian or secular school? I still get this question from time to time but I don’t hear it as much. Today, the most pressing concern on most people’s minds is the cost and value of higher education. For many years, the value of higher education was understood as self-evident. Students were told that they needed to go to college to be “successful” and debt was justified on the basis that employment opportunities would be abundant.

The economic times have changed. Today many would-be college students are second guessing the culturally assumed next step after high school. And for good reason. Outstanding college student loans are expected to exceed $1 trillion this year. Time Magazine listed “Questioning the Value of Higher Education” as one of the top-ten trends of 2011. What’s more, a plethora of books have recently been published that strongly critique higher education, with titles such as: The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Pay For; Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses; Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. (The New York Review of Books highlights these titles and more in a very helpful article: “Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?”)

The March 2012 issue of Christianity Today put the spotlight on higher education, particularly Christian colleges and universities. The featured articles recognized the financial burden that higher education has become, but also made a strong case for the value of attending a Christian institution of higher learning. To their credit, the authors do recognize that a Christian college isn’t “for everyone.” The articles are worth reading, especially if you are trying to make an informed decision about life after high school. I found the following interview very informative: “Sailing into the Storm: Philip Ryken and D. Michael Lindsay on the Challenges in Christian Higher Education.” Two college presidents (Wheaton and Gordon) discuss the relevance of Christian higher education, the theological issues facing Christian universities, and more. Here’s a good exchange:

CT: Imagine a scenario with me: A student’s parent says, “I’m sending my child to your college to stay out of trouble, find a spouse, graduate, get a great job somewhere, settle down, and start a family.” Isn’t that the American dream?

Lindsay: Those are important components of a whole life, surely. If that’s all you’re looking for in a college experience, then I don’t think it’s worth the investment. What we want is to enliven the minds of young people who have a chance to change the world. I did research on senior leaders. Over half of them had a liberal arts degree. Over half the leaders I interviewed cited the vital importance of a mentor during college.

Ryken: Our parents’ deepest desire is for their sons and daughters to become the men and women God is calling them to become. If you look at what enables young people to sustain a consistent faith in Christ into adulthood, two of the factors are living in a like-minded community that really encourages them to follow this Savior, and having mentors who show them how to live the kind of life they’re called to live.

Read the rest of the interview here. I think both presidents do a good job of keeping the “big picture” in view and offer helpful guidance to those hoping to make a wise college decision.

What is College For?

Why do you think people go to college? I ask this question during the introduction of the College Transition Seminar. It is always interesting to hear how students and parents respond. “To get a job” is probably the reason I hear the most. And, of course, there are the playful, more peripheral answers: to get married, to party, and to play sports. But then someone will sheepishly raise a hand and suggest: “to learn something.” A few weeks ago at a church in Florida, in fact, I counted eleven answers that were given before someone mentioned, “learning” or “education.”

College is certainly about more than learning. The time between adolescence and adulthood includes a variety of character-forming decisions and activities. But it does surprise me when a room full of college bound students don’t naturally list “learning” as a reason for going to college. In his informative book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco  challenges readers to think more deeply about the aims of a college education.

Dr. Delbanco explains that historically there have been basically three prevailing answers to the question, what is college for? The most common answer is an economic one. A college education makes an individual more competitive in the job market. The second answer is based on citizenship. An educated society is required for a democracy to flourish. The third answer is rarely considered, however Delbanco thinks it deserves more attention: an educated person enjoys a fulfilling life. “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life,” Delbanco quotes former college president, Judith Shapiro, to make his point. Delbanco laments:

“In Today’s America, at every kind of institution—from underfunded community colleges to the wealthiest Ivies—this kind of education is at risk. Students are pressured and programmed, trained to live from task to task, relentlessly rehearsed and tested until winners are culled from the rest. They scarcely have time for… contemplation.”   

And contemplation about education, and life in general, is desperately needed! According to Delbanco “most students have no clear conception of why or to what end they are in college. Some students have always been aimless, bored, or confused; others self-possessed, with their eyes on the prize. Most are somewhere in between, looking for something to care about.”

Students are craving something to care about. The pressure to perform and achieve is intense and often leaves students feeling empty. I recently had a conversation with a youth pastor who was worried about his students. Many of them were stressed and overwhelmed about their Advanced Placement (AP) courses. What’s more, the students who were not taking AP classes were looked down upon and ridiculed. At one point in our conversation, the youth pastor passionately asked, “Where is Jesus in all of this?”

This summer marked the fifth anniversary of the publication of The Outrageous Idea of Academic Faithfulness. My good friend Don Opitz and I published this little book to try to answer the question this youth pastor appropriately asked: does Jesus care about our academic pursuits? Our hope is that our book serves as a guide for students who are perhaps “aimless, bored or confused.” It is also a challenge to students with their “eyes on the (worldly) prize.” We invite students to consider Kingdom-shaped answers to the questions, what is college for and why is learning important? Here are a few answers we suggest:

“We want you to find the deep satisfaction of pursuing your daily labors (for now, primarily attending class and studying) as service to God. We want you to experience the unending challenge of exalting Christ as Lord of your thinking… to imagine the application of your learning—your studies and plans and dreams—as an expression of love, or better yet, as a conduit for the love of God.”

“Christ is the very source of learning, and his disciples are the intended recipients of that wisdom and knowledge. As we learn in faith, not only will our own capacity for wonder and insight and love increase, but others will benefit as well.”

“Being concerned about grades is appropriate, but too often students become obsessive about grades and success and begin to lose the bigger picture. Learning needs to be pursued with the right motives and applied to worthwhile purposes.”

“Two things can happen to a college student, and both of these things are very bad. Unfortunately, both are also very common. You can lose the capacity to dream, and you can lose the gumption to act.”

“The Bible portrays a seamless continuity between our knowing and our doing… Learning isn’t merely for job readiness or self-advancement. Learning ought to be a way to love God and neighbor, a way to care for the creation and develop healthy communities.”

“If your capacity for delight and wonder and curiosity and compassion is being enlarged while you are in college, then that is a very good sign indeed… that is what most of us really want for ourselves. Academic faithfulness is the sure cure for collegiate boredom, apathy, and listlessness.”

When the topic of academic faithfulness or Christian scholarship has been raised, Christian students often see the challenge as beyond them, as a task for the stout and the wise, for the uniquely gifted. We think every Christian student has been called by God to think faithfully about learning. But students shouldn’t have to engage this conversation alone. A study guide has been created to be used in small groups as well. Our prayer is that The Outrageous Idea of Academic Faithfulness invites more and more students to ask better, bigger questions about faithfulness and learning.

Professor Delbanco’s new book, College, should help to keep this important conversation in front of many students and parents as they make important college decisions. I am grateful for Delbanco’s wisdom and hope his book is widely read.

(Read an interview from Inside Higher Ed with author Andrew Delbanco.)

Worth Reading: Five Articles for Good Discussion

Over the past few months, I have been mulling over five different articles that I have found to be very interesting and worth discussing. The themes of the articles have found their way into countless conversations with friends and family. The articles are not very long and well worth reading. What follows are the title of each article along with a quote that I think summarizes the main point. Enjoy!

“Childlike Faith: Are Kids Born with Belief? What developmental science tells us about children’s religious beliefs.” Interview by Holly Catterton Allen for Christianity Today.

“Children have a natural disposition to see the natural world as having purpose. Research has shown that children have a strong inclination to see design in the world around them, but they are left wondering who did it… If a child is exposed to the idea of a god that is immortal, super-knowing, super-perceiving, the child doesn’t have to do a lot of work to learn that idea; it fits the child’s intuitions.”

“College grads, 30 isn’t the new 20: Our 20s are life’s developmental sweet spot. They matter. A lot,” by Meg Jay for the Los Angeles Times.

“Newly minted college graduates… are living with a staggering, unprecedented amount of uncertainty. Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the 21st century opiate of the masses. It’s easy to stay distracted and wait for deliverance at 30. It’s almost a relief to imagine that twentysomething jobs and relationships don’t count. But a career spent studying adult development tells me this isn’t true. And a decade of listening to young adults tells me that, deep down, they want to take their lives seriously. The 30-year-olds who feel betrayed by their 20s almost always ask, ‘Why didn’t someone tell me this sooner — like when I graduated from college?’”

“‘The Demise of Guys’: How video games and porn are ruining a generation” by Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan for CNN.

“The consequences could be dramatic: The excessive use of video games and online porn in pursuit of the next thing is creating a generation of risk-averse guys who are unable (and unwilling) to navigate the complexities and risks inherent to real-life relationships, school and employment.”

“Spoiled Rotten: Why do kids rule the roost?” by Elizabeth Kolbert for The New Yorker.

“Today’s parents are not just ‘helicopter parents,’… ‘They are a jet-powered turbo attack model.’ Other educators gripe about ‘snowplow parents,’ who try to clear every obstacle from their children’s paths. The products of all this hovering, meanwhile, worry that they may not be able to manage college in the absence of household help. According to research conducted by sociologists at Boston College, today’s incoming freshmen are less likely to be concerned about the rigors of higher education than ‘about how they will handle the logistics of everyday life.’”

“When Are We Going to Grow Up? The Juvenilization of American Christianity. We’re all adolescents now” by Thomas E. Bergler for Christianity Today.

“As they listen to years of simplified messages that emphasize an emotional relationship with Jesus over intellectual content, teenagers learn that a well-articulated belief system is unimportant and might even become an obstacle to authentic faith. This feel-good faith works because it appeals to teenage desires for fun and belonging. It casts a wide net by dumbing down Christianity to the lowest common denominator of adolescent cognitive development and religious motivation… I believe one key is to renew our commitment to the church as an intergenerational family… Young people need adults in their lives who are modeling a vibrant spiritual maturity. One reason no one wants to grow up in America is that many adults don’t make their life stage look very attractive.”

What is CPYU’s College Transition Initiative?

“More can be done to encourage those teens who do want to examine the purpose or direction of their lives by engaging them at deeper levels before the first year out of high school.”

This was sociologist Timothy Clydesdale’s challenge to clergy in his important book The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School. It is also the perfect way to describe the motivation behind the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding’s (CPYU) College Transition Initiative (CTI). “More can be done…”

Here are the words of CPYU’s President, Dr. Walt Mueller:

“CTI grew out of CPYU’s desire to help students make the most of their college years. Sadly, many of the stories I was hearing supported research indicating that high school students were not transitioning well to college. Many of those students were facing problems and issues that could have been avoided if they and their parents had taken time to be more prepared.”

The mission of CTI is to provide resources for students, parents, church leaders and educators to help students be more spiritually prepared for life after high school. Resources include seminars, books, articles, expert interviews, conferences and events, and a regularly updated blog. All of these resources are an attempt to create opportunities for students and parents to have more meaningful conversations about life after high school.

CTI’s resources cannot prepare students completely for college, of course. They can, however, help to paint a realistic picture of the cultural landscape ahead. They can offer advice to students from people that have gone before them about how to navigate deliberately and faithfully in such a setting.  The resources can also start better conversations, enabling parents and students to begin to ask the right questions before setting off on the journey.

In his very influential book The Fabric of Faithfulness, Dr. Steven Garber reminds us what’s at stake:

“For those whose pathway leads them into the world of the university, decisions are made during that time that are determinative for the rest of life. In the modern world, the years between eighteen and twenty-five are a time for the settling of one’s convictions about meaning and morality: why do I get up in the morning? What do I do after I get up in the morning? One then settles into life with those convictions as the shaping presuppositions and principles of one’s entire life.”

I’m convinced that Dr. Garber is correct. The college years are developmentally critical for a healthy and successful adulthood. This is a very important time in a young person’s life and because students are largely unprepared for the increasing tide of pressures they will face, CTI is committed to helping students and parents transition smoothly to the “world of the university.”