Youth are not simply ‘the problem’ as much as the locus of serious issues troubling the culture. Although, ‘it takes a whole village to raise a child;’ it takes the struggles of youth to raise a whole village.
Michael Meade
Look around you. How many Americans, regardless of age, are caught in an adolescent holding pattern, waiting for the time when they will magically become adult? In the meantime, they will dream the infantile American Dream of wealth and power, addict themselves to alcohol and (legal and illegal) drugs, become enamored of the glittering surface of the material world, fall into puppy love and get married, readily dream the clever dreams manufactured for them by media and politicians, fight their own kind with rocketships, lasers, and nuclear bombs, worship celluloid and stereophonic personalities, become obsessed with sex, wallow in the depths of narcissistic depression, persist in self-destructive excess, dislike having to be responsible for personal actions, fantasize as a way of facing tomorrow’s verities, try to stay forever young, ignore the eventuality of their own death, put off cleaning up their messy room in the house of the Earth, and restlessly cruise the neighborhoods of the world looking for action. These signs of cultural crisis, and many more, point to the inability of the culture itself to provide meaningful rites of passage by which Americans can initiate themselves into expanded stages of growth.
Steven Foster with Meredith Little
The Book of the Vision Quest
If you RESPECT me, I will hear you.
If you LISTEN to me, I will feel understood.
If you UNDERSTAND me, I will feel appreciated.
If you APPRECIATE me, I will know your support.
If you SUPPORT me as I try new things, I will become responsible.
When I am RESPONSIBLE, I will grow to be independent.
In my INDEPENDENCE,
I will respect you and love you all of my life.
Thank you!
Diana Sterling, Parent as Coach
Who will cry for the little boy, lost and all alone?
Who will cry for the little boy, abandoned without his own?
Who will cry for the little boy? He cried himself to sleep.
Who will cry for the little boy? He never had for keeps.
Who will cry for the little boy? He walked the burning sand.
Who will cry for the little boy? The boy inside the man.
Who will cry for the little boy? Who knows well hurt and pain.
Who will cry for the little boy? He died and died again.
Who will cry for the little boy? A good boy he tried to be.
Who will cry for the little boy, who cries inside of me?
Antwone Fisher
WHEN DID I BECOME A MAN?
James Ryle
Copyright 1991
When did I become a man? I really need to know.
Sometimes I wonder if I am. Can someone tell me so?
Was it when I smoked a cigarette out behind the school?
Was it when I joined the other guys and acted like a fool?
Was it when I took a drink of booze and drove around the town?
Was it when I made myself look big by putting others down?
Was it when I scored the final play that gave our team the win?
Was it when I finally got the "A" that made my parents grin?
Was it when I had a hot date and we did it all the way?
Was that when I became a man? Did it happen on that day?
Was it when I pledged allegiance to the flag and fought a war?
Was it when I came back home and wondered what the fight was for?
Did it happen in the chapel when I walked the wedding aisle?
It seemed to for the moment if we're judging by my smile.
Was it when my kids looked up one day and called me "Pop?"
Or was it when I got the job and made it to the top?
So now I am a man, at least that's what I'm told to say.
But if I am, there's just one thing that still gets in my way.
If so -- I have to ask it, and the question drives me wild --
but, if I've become a man, then why do I still act like a child?
When I Became a Man (at 42)
In America, when and how and by whom is a boy initiated into manhood? With his confirmation or Bar Mitzvah? How about Boy Scouts? When he passes his driving test? Magically on his 18th birthday? His first beer, his first sexual experience, his first Varsity football game? Going off to college? Joining a fraternity or the military? His first "real" job?
I made my confirmation at 12; I passed my driver's test at 16; I made it to my 18th birthday. I drank beer, I had sex, I played sports, I went off to college -- I even joined a frat. And after all that, I got a real job. These were rites of passage, yes, but they were hollow ones for me. Nowhere, in any of those possible initiations, did I feel like a boy becoming a man.
So, right through college, and, I have some shame in saying, for approximately two decades after, I remained an uninitiated boy. On the outside, I was a man with a Master's degree, a good job, a house, a car, a girl friend, friends -- and on the inside, buried so deep that for years I could dodge it and even fool myself, I was a boy.
In many other cultures, especially in so-called "primitive" societies, boys between the ages of eleven and fifteen are much more clearly initiated into adulthood. As James Hollis details in Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men, in what may seem to us cruel rituals -- knocking out a tooth or clipping off an ear -- a group of men in the community take the responsibility of breaking the hold of the mother's world, and introducing a boy to the spirit and culture of manhood. The whole process might take several days, or several weeks, and involve not only some sort of symbolic wounding, but also song and dance and vision quest. The boy returns to his community with badges on his body and images in his heart that are deep, permanent reminders that he has crossed over the threshold of boyhood into adulthood. He is a man, and he knows he's a man because he feels that in his skin and spirit.
Where is our group of men, fathers, elders willing and able to bestow the necessary wounding and blessing that will transform us from boys to men? Should boot camp, or Wall Street, or prison, or the NBA be our best options?
My father's death ignited my own initiation into manhood. But rather than the loving presence of a group of men, it was the sudden absence of one man that inflicted my necessary wounding; and I wasn't 12 or 14 -- I was nearly 39. I was then on my own again for the next three years, until my New Warrior weekend in 2001.
On that weekend, I was initiated into manhood by a group of strong, loving men. On my forty-second birthday, thirty years overdue, I finally became a man.
Copyright 2006, Peter Putnam. From the book THE SONG OF FATHER-SON.
