It was the third time I’d heard it that week and it was truly beginning to annoy me.

“He’s young. The real world is all new to him. Give him time; he’ll figure it out.”

“She’s only 20-something and being responsible for adult matters is all so hard. We have to give her a break.”

“We need to just forgive that debt. He had no idea when he was getting the degree that he’d have to sacrifice so to pay it back. He’s young. He doesn’t understand money yet.”

I don’t think we do young adults any favors when we make statements like these. They would be far better served by a challenge to behave in a mature, responsible manner. They need grown-ups to teach them to be grown-ups.

Adolescence is an invention of an affluent society. Now, we not only perpetuate this stopgap between childhood and adulthood where teenagers hang out and are excused for being self-centered and impulsive and reckless, we extend it well into the third decade of life. I know this will ruffle feathers, but I don’t think that more time and more excuses are what adolescents-who-are-really-young-adults need. I think they need to be inspired to live for something more than their selfish whims, to learn to lay down their lives, and to be pushed a little become what they were created to be. We do them no favors by continuing to excuse immature behavior.

They were designed to serve, to work with a purpose, to live according to God’s will now, not some time in the distant future. Young adults need to be challenged to ask themselves who they were truly created to be. And it’s not a video game whiz who only occasionally leaves the couch to help himself to the free food in mom’s refrigerator and click mindlessly through online want ads. Neither is it the incessantly whiny new graduate who blames everyone else for the consequences of her own irresponsible behavior.

When they are children, we need to impress upon young people that they were created in the image and likeness of God. That means that they are supposed to grow up to behave as Jesus would. And they are supposed to act like grown-ups. They are supposed to embrace the newfound independence that comes with age and use it to a greater good. They are supposed to have enough self-control to do something better than party into oblivion every weekend or sit around complaining incessantly about how unfair real-life economy is.

When she was 19-years-old, Katie Davis decided to delay going to college. She didn’t do that because she was twisting in the wind and unable to commit. She didn’t do it because her lack of focus in high school had left her without a lot of options. The former class president and homecoming queen did it because she heard God calling her to serve the poor in Uganda. She did it because she believed in something bigger than herself and she had the necessary self-discipline to act on that belief.

She was only going for a short time. That was four years ago. She’s still there. She is a homemaker in a four bedroom concrete house in Uganda where she is raising 13 foster children. Ugandan law prohibits her from adopting them until she is 25. Since arriving in Uganda, she has founded Amazima, a nonprofit organization that feeds and educates about 2,500 Ugandan children, many of them orphans. She is a 22-year-old single mother who is wholeheartedly embracing adulthood and has left adolescence far, far behind. Her book, Kisses from Katie, should be required reading for every perpetual adolescent who is unwilling to act like a big girl, every overgrown child who is overwhelmed by a life of relative affluence, every whining new graduate who refuses to accept adult challenges.

Davis wasn’t sprinkled with some sort of magic dust that propelled her past adolescence. She made a choice. It makes me wonder. If Davis can feed and educate and create home for all those children, far from the comforts and abundant riches of this country, what can the rest of the 20-somethings do here, in America, where necessary resources genuinely flow as abundantly as water through the ubiquitous pipes of clean indoor plumbing?

Foss, whose website is elizabethfoss.com, is a freelance writer from Northern Virginia.

link

Pretty good.


I agree with all these messages of youth today to "GROW UP" and get out of the parents house if they are there by choice. And truly not by need or some twisted immaturity. Nearly every young person today I meet that is still at home (age 21 and up) is there because they "think they can't make it out there without enough money" or just are plain scared.