Many mystery novels begin with audacious crimes or unexpected deaths. The mystery we’ll be describing in this chapter began with a group of adolescents who met with outrageously positive outcomes from a modest little program that just didn’t seem to amount to all that much.
It was a gray, cool fall morning when I first met Tonya. I had driven about ninety minutes from my home in Charlottesville, Virginia, to talk with Tonya and other students taking part in a program—Teen Outreach—that kept popping up in our evaluations with some surprising and remarkable effects in changing young people’s lives. I made my trip that morning to try to understand those effects, and didn’t realize at the time that my trip would be the beginning of a change in my view of what really matters for helping adolescents grow up.
Years of work evaluating programs for youth had turned me into something of a skeptic about even the most well-intentioned approaches. Many (indeed most) promising new programs for youth simply wilt under the harsh glare of stringent evaluations, but the Teen Outreach program hadn’t. Quite the opposite. Under the most rigorous evaluation conditions we could establish, this program—which did little more than engage kids in a few hours each week of voluntary community service and adult-led, small-group discussions about this service—had been consistently and repeatedly producing reductions in dropout rates of more than fifty percent!
Even more astounding, the program had also been producing reductions in teen pregnancy rates of fifty percent, even though teen sexuality wasn’t even its focus. This was strong stuff for a program begun by a single teacher with no funding, taking on problems that had withstood the best efforts of dedicated service providers for years, if not decades. A bit of volunteer work and discussions with an adult leading to fifty-percent reductions in pregnancy rates? When we published the initial evaluation results, pregnancy expert Doug Kirby was quoted in the Washington Post describing our findings as “the best evidence to date that social programs can prevent teen pregnancy.” But the question I’d been asked many times since and had always struggled to answer was, “Why?” Why did such a modest program have such huge effects? I was making the drive that morning in search of the answer.
I’d been conducting the formal evaluations of Teen Outreach from a distance—analyzing numbers coming in from around the country—for several years. Together with my good friend and colleague Susan Philliber, we’d done everything we could to assure ourselves the results were real: We’d compared participants to well-matched members of a scientifically selected control group—teens who had wanted to participate but who ended up on a waiting list as a result of a coin toss. We’d waited to see if the program effects could be replicated, and found that they reappeared consistently across thousands of kids and hundreds of schools. Though I found the results intriguing and certainly encouraging, I was also increasingly puzzled and even frustrated because, though I worked with adolescents for a living, I had no idea how such a simple program for teens could achieve such powerful results.
I met Tonya in a classroom at her school during a free period. She was a smallish, shy student with large brown eyes who’d been struggling to make it through the tenth grade. Her older sister had dropped out in twelfth grade after giving birth to her first child. Tonya wasn’t pregnant (yet), but she saw little in school to interest her, and was finding it hard to get up in the morning to go. But when she began with Teen Outreach, the program got her working in the Early Start Childcare Center for an hour or two a week, and then discussing this work with her friends and a facilitator back at school during a weekly health class period.
Tonya wasn’t a star student, nor was she even particularly well-spoken, but she had no trouble conveying her enthusiasm about her work. As she did, the profound power of this simple experience began to shine through. Though we were meeting early in the day and Tonya was clearly still waking up, her face lit up as she described what her work at Early Start meant to her. Three things stuck out, and all were new in Tonya’s life.
First, she loved working with these kids, and they felt the same way about her. “It’s just so cool to see their little faces light up when I get there. I’ve got a few favorites but all the kids are really cute, actually.” Her enthusiasm was infectious, and the kids took to her as much as she’d taken to them. To these preschoolers, Tonya—who’d never felt like she’d made much of an impression on anyone—was a rock star.
Second, Tonya learned from the adults working there. For example, she now understood that different roles came with different levels of responsibility (and pay), and that who got what depended in part on how far one had gone in school. She realized that one could make a modest but satisfying career out of caring for little kids. For the first time, she could envision a future for herself in the adult world.
Finally, Tonya saw that she actually could do something for others that made a difference. This child care center, like many, was chronically understaffed. Once the adult workers realized that she was reliable, they started turning to Tonya more and more each week, recognizing her talents. This had never happened in school, where her B’s and C’s were acceptable but far from noteworthy. Though sixteen and reasonably bright, the experience that her presence and skills were actually needed was a new one for her.
Conversations with Tonya and other youths who have participated in Teen Outreach helped us glimpse the first outlines of what we have come to call the “Adult Work Effect,” something far more powerful and effective than simply telling teens to “get a job!”
In contrast to the adolescent bubble, what Tonya and her peers described was a sense of having a place where what they did mattered. Tonya is typical of many youths with average grades in school who find that there are few places in their lives where they can stand out. Pulled out of the high school environment, placed in a child care center, and given real challenge and responsibility, Tonya becomes central to the lives of several of the toddlers at the center. They await her arrival. She makes them laugh. She can sometimes soothe them when they are distressed. She matters. Not in a competitive way. Not as an achievement for a college application. But to others she is helping.
It’s one of the simplest and most powerful of human experiences: the gratification that comes from helping another human being. It can inspire anyone, but to teens who have so few ways to contribute, it can be life-altering. Others may have had more skill than Tonya (even at child care); others may have had more drive. But on the mornings when Tonya was in Room One at Early Start, no one else was there helping these particular children. She realized that whether or not she showed up each week actually mattered to these children, and even to the teacher she assisted. She realized that when she pushed herself to smile and lead a song (even when she was tired and grouchy), it actually made the toddlers smile. Meeting these challenges also changed Tonya’s sense of herself. Someone wasn’t just mouthing the bromide to her that she was special. To these children, she was special. And that reality makes all the difference. Tonya’s experience, and those of thousands of teens like her, have led us to conclude we’ve hit upon a significant path toward helping teens escape the Endless Adolescence: doing work that matters to someone.
But we need to be very clear about what this path does and does not entail. Since we first published the results of the Teen Outreach Program more than a decade ago, the push for youth volunteerism has burgeoned, but with this growth also comes the need for a major caveat. For example, soon after the Teen Outreach results began streaming out to the public, we had a challenging conversation with an aide to the governor of New York about why simply mandating “volunteer” service—while enticingly cheap and appealing from a political standpoint—was unlikely to be effective. The problem is that much volunteer work that teens do actually matters little to anyone. The teens know it and gain little benefit from going through the motions of meeting quotas for volunteer hours. It’s not only useless, but discouraging and demoralizing for teens to show up to volunteer where they mainly stand around feeling in the way or doing busywork. Similarly, we’ve seen too many teens helping their dads clean out the garage to rack up their “volunteer” hours for school mandates. We can structure teens’ work in ways that do or do not foster development toward independent adulthood—and the difference this makes is huge.
Adults typically feel good when they see teens keeping busy doing volunteer work, but Tonya’s experience was having a far more profound effect. School dropout and teen pregnancy are two of the most destructive and expensive problems facing our teens; clearly, Teen Outreach is doing something much more than just keeping teens busy or giving them something good to do. Rather, as teens see themselves able to help others, they simultaneously come to see themselves as having a real future role in the larger adult society. This vision, in turn, translates into a willingness to take care of themselves and to prepare for that future. “The best contraceptive is a future you believe in,” is how Marion Wright Edelman, head of the Children’s Defense Fund, has put it in talking about preventing teen pregnancy, but the “doing work that matters” principle clearly has an impact even well beyond teens’ sexual behavior.
We would also be missing the most important lessons of Tonya’s story if we simply concluded that what all kids need is Teen Outreach. Let’s instead ask ourselves about the broader lessons embedded within this mysteriously powerful program. Does this approach work only for “at-risk” teens? Does it always require a formal program? Or can we find key elements of the Adult Work Effect that we can apply in broader ways to help our teens? Taking a look at teens from backgrounds quite different from Tonya’s helps us begin to capture more of the essence of this mysteriously powerful effect.
Our close friends the Lamberts had heard us talk about Teen Outreach and were struggling to find useful activities for their firstborn son, Will, in the summer after his first year in high school. On the April evening when they were going over possible volunteer activities they’d found for him on a United Way website, this talented, though somewhat lethargic young teen was anything but enthusiastic. “Why am I doing this?” “Do I really have to?” “Why can’t I just spend an extra few weeks at camp or relaxing at home?”
By the end of that evening, the Lamberts had given Will several choices of activities, but the only one in which he displayed even marginal interest was working at a nearby outdoor camp for kids with serious physical illnesses (Will liked the outdoors). When the Lamberts told him the next day that they’d signed him up for four weeks of fulltime work at the camp, he was underwhelmed, to say the least. The Lamberts relayed this to us and skeptically wondered if the Teen Outreach folks perhaps knew something they didn’t.
A few weeks later, though, the Lamberts dropped their sleepy fifteen-year-old off for his first day working at the camp. When they returned to pick Will up that afternoon, they were eager to find out how he liked it, but Will simply couldn’t stop talking about the work itself. “It’s a good thing I was there!” this thin, athletic boy exclaimed with a mixture of pride and concern. “They really needed help!” He went on to recount the various tasks he performed, from sweeping out the mess hall between meals to shepherding around a boy in a wheelchair over the bumpy camp paths for several hours in the afternoon. “I don’t know how he would have gotten to any of the activities, because there was no one else there to help him!” The energy and excitement of these few weeks of post-ninth-grade volunteering charged Will up through the rest of the summer, and he started school the following fall with more energy than usual. Will eagerly signed up to go back to the camp the next summer and was welcomed just as eagerly by the staff.
Now, Will probably did as much cleanup work in a few weeks at camp as he’d done the entire previous year at home. But knowing it mattered to real adults (parents don’t always count in this regard), and being treated like an adult in the assignment of tasks, made a huge difference. He truly didn’t seem to mind the hard work. It was particularly interesting how the experience seeped into other areas of his life. Though Will’s academic motivation would wax and wane across his high school years, his newfound motivation for work that made a difference to people grew steadily. By his junior year, this young man who found waking up in the morning difficult would often get up early, and instead of waiting to take the bus, walk and jog two miles to school in order to arrive before school started to tutor a recent immigrant girl who didn’t speak English. “She’s really bright, but she’s just learning English and she’s trying to read poems that anyone would find tricky to read!” Will recounted. He was struck by the hard fact that there would be no way this bright girl could possibly keep up in school without considerable help. The girl didn’t want to fail, and Will didn’t want to let her down. He was less willing to miss a tutoring appointment than almost any other obligation in his week. As with his experience over the summer at camp, he had caught a glimpse of real work that mattered in his tutoring, and its draw was powerful and lasting.
Will’s story is a hopeful one, since it suggests that we don’t necessarily need a formal program to inspire teens. It still leaves many questions unanswered, though, in explaining the mysterious process by which simple work can sometimes change teens’ lives. Are the effects we’ve seen just a matter of getting kids working, and if so, why aren’t more teens feeling these effects? What about paid work? It might seem that just having teens get a job would fill the bill of helping move them into adulthood. Perhaps at one time it did, but teen jobs are different now, and most work available to them does not inspire in the way Teen Outreach or work that matters to someone else—paid or volunteer—does.
Sixteen-year-old Jim’s first job provides a good example of the ways work can turn out differently than we might expect. Jim’s parents had been encouraging him to find a job for months, and when his best friend told him about an opening at nearby Sal’s Pizza, where the friend had been working, he was happy to apply. Jim’s parents were equally enthused and even filled out his application for him. Jim’s natural charm (plus his friend’s recommendation and the manager’s desperation!) were sufficient to land him the job, and for a while things seemed to be great. Jim found the work easy, enjoyed the socializing when his friends came in, and got more than his share of free pizza. He worked hard at it and enjoyed it, and so things progressed.
Jim got his first paycheck and was, at least briefly, richer than he’d ever been. After not that many weeks of work, he was able to buy himself all manner of great stuff—a car stereo, an iPod, a leather jacket, and a new cell phone. His schoolwork slipped a bit, as he often eagerly picked up extra shifts when someone failed to show, but he reassured his parents that he could make that up easily. Over time the work got easier, but not necessarily because Jim had mastered the requisite tasks. His nineteen-year-old manager took him aside one day and let him know that he really didn’t have to work quite so hard. It just made everyone else look bad. Jim didn’t have to be told a second time, especially when he noticed that the manager often gave himself credit for more hours than he’d actually worked. Plus, unlike school, much of his time at work involved talking and joking with kids his own age when business was slow. Working was easier than he’d thought!
It wasn’t until Jim held the job for three months that his parents recognized the problem that had been developing. School had fallen to last place on Jim’s list of priorities, and it now showed unmistakably in his grades. What little control Jim’s parents had over his behavior had also slipped significantly, partly because instead of depending upon his allowance from them, he could now use his own money to buy himself almost anything he needed aside from a place to stay. Food, of course, was not a problem, and in fact Jim often brought his friends to Sal’s, where he slipped them free food with his manager’s tacit wink of approval.
So what had gone wrong?
Well, while it seemed like Jim was taking a big step into adulthood by working, the reality was far different. For one thing, he was still being socialized by other teens “in the bubble.” And in fact, most of the socialization was coming from the nineteen-year-old manager, who had few ambitions in his own life and had little to pass on to Jim, save for his questionable work ethic.
Jim’s paycheck also exposed him to a far-from-realistic world. The term coined for what he experienced financially is “premature affluence.” What it meant was that Jim had free spending money in amounts that no adult working such a job and having adult financial responsibilities would ever be likely to have. Jim had no way to realize that the extra couple of hundred dollars a month he had to spend on whatever he wanted was far more discretionary income than even his parents, with far better jobs, typically had. We’ve worked with family after family like Jim’s, in which parents struggled to pay the bills while their teens were pocketing hundreds of dollars a month in pure spending money. Very often these are exactly the teens still living at home in their twenties, as they are not used to using earned income to actually survive, and are not asked to contribute to their family’s expenses.
This premature affluence fed directly into Jim’s attitude toward his schoolwork. Sal’s seemed like a fine job, and by working more, he could buy even more stuff he wanted. And he could buy it now, not down the road after college. What was the point in working hard at school when there wasn’t any payoff he could see? Jim’s parents tried talking to him about the future and the need to do well in school so he could move up to better jobs. In a vague way, Jim knew what they meant, but he also knew that he had a job that left him feeling quite well-off already. What was there to worry about?
Jim’s situation illustrates why helping teens move into truly adult work requires more care and thought than might first appear. At first glance, just taking on a paying job seems like one of the best ways to move teens toward adulthood. In the past it often was, but, to rephrase the old Oldsmobile car commercial, “These aren’t your parents’ jobs.” While jobs for teens used to involve demanding work supervised by adults, today’s “McJobs” often involve mindless, noncareer-oriented labor, supervised primarily by older adolescents. Teens aren’t given any responsibility to think independently, to decide how to handle tasks, or to meet challenges. Indeed from an employer’s perspective, the ideal teen work setting is one designed to run well even when populated and directed by uninspired teens.
We might hope that Jim’s situation is just an anomaly. Unfortunately, the systematic research done on teen work suggests it is far more typical than we might wish. Our colleague Larry Steinberg has done much of the pioneering research in this area, tracking what happens to teens who work for varying amounts of time in their high school years.
While small amounts of work appear relatively harmless, once teens hit fifteen hours per week of paid work during the school year, they experience negative effects in a whole host of areas.
Poorer grades and a greater likelihood of dropping out of school perhaps aren’t so surprising, given the amount of time paid work can drain off from schoolwork. But higher levels of alcohol and drug use? Yes, these are also associated with longer hours of adolescent employment, along with more cynical attitudes toward work and toward behaviors like workplace theft. We can see these effects in what Jim was learning from his supervisor. We also find that as teens take on more work, their parents feel that they have less control over them at home. Again, that’s not surprising given the financial pseudo-independence work provides.
In some ways the money provided by these jobs functions almost like drinking and smoking to teens. It can provide the trappings of maturity, but with none of the responsibilities of real adulthood—no bills to pay, rent to meet, or car repairs to manage. Teens come home feeling like adults and expecting adult prerogatives. The jobs themselves are often designed to be minimally taxing, and thus provide a poor model for real adult work. All of these effects lead us to add a second, cautionary principle as we map out the ways teens can use work to move into adulthood. At the risk of alienating those who didn’t like math in high school, we offer a simple equation to make our point:
High financial reward + Low demand ≠ an Adult job
So what exactly does it take to get the “It’s a good thing I was there!” effect from teens’ work? Does it have to be volunteer work to be helpful? Is paid employment always a bad thing? Not at all. Set up poorly, volunteering can and usually does devolve into another McJob. By the same token, paid work with the right components can provide an outstanding path to adulthood.
Pete Worrell, Claudia’s older brother, tells of going to work as a teenager in the 1970s in a men’s clothing shop in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he was the youngest employee by about twenty years. Pete describes folding some shirts in his first week at the shop, putting them out on a shelf, and then going about other business. Half an hour later one of the older men approached Pete. “What in the hell do you think you were doing with those shirts?” he huffed.
“They told me to fold them,” Pete answered somewhat defensively.
“Are you kidding? You consider those shirts properly folded? That’s not how you fold a shirt.” This was quickly followed by, “Come here. Let me show you how you do it right.”
And after watching, Pete realized that his folding job, though following the same basic pattern he’d initially been shown, wasn’t nearly so careful, and would in fact leave the shirts more wrinkled. This kind of lesson in how to do a job, even a small job, with thought and care, was repeated over and over in his first weeks at the shop. But how do we get a teenager to take these kinds of work lessons seriously? Pete himself, who now runs a boutique investment banking firm, offers several clues.
“Even at age fifteen I knew that folding shirts was kind of trivial,” he recalls. “Whether or not I flicked the cuffs in onto themselves just right to make them lie flat, I knew was not a life-changing event. What was a life-changing event was that I realized that these ‘men’s men’ weren’t going to consider me one of their club until I knew how to do it correctly, and I demonstrated that I could be relied upon to do it correctly again and again, because to them, even though they knew they were working in a relatively inconsequential job, this was the way that they demonstrated their pride, their craftsmanship. They let me know it was important that I shared this focus, or I would never be trusted to be in the club.”
Pete had two parents who were every bit as motivated as most parents to see him learn to do a job well. They had instructed and corrected him many times. But every former teenager knows that he or she often learns more from other adults than could ever be learned from one’s parents.
Being on time, for example. “This job also made me see that it was important that, every day, I show up, and on time,” Pete notes, “because these guys were waiting to take their own break until I covered one of them in the store. So my being there was not some silly after-school job. It was, I began to see, a small cog in what made that place successful. I mattered to them. They kidded me a lot, but they began to like me, and I still think a lot about the guys there.
“For me, that first job was a permanent character builder. It taught me: Show up on time. Do what you say you are going to do. Finish what you begin. No matter how trivial the job seems or how little you are paid”—$1.60 per hour—”you can do it with a sense of craftsmanship, and screw the rest of the world if they don’t understand that—nothing can take that away from you.”
These adult men had become Pete’s peer group. After working at the store for a while, he remembers, “I lost a bit of interest in gaining acceptance from my peers and realized that it was much more fun and more interesting to gain acceptance from people who you can learn a lot more from.” And these men were more than willing to apply peer pressure to get him to change his behavior. But unlike the peer influence within the typical adolescent bubble, these adult peers were intent on socializing Pete in a way that would serve him well in the larger world (and get their shirts folded properly at the same time). Part of Pete’s motivation was that he very much wanted to join the world of competent adult workers. He wasn’t just hearing another random adult lecture; these men were telling him the rules for working in the adult world he was eager to enter.
Imagine how the scenario would have played out differently today at a local fast-food restaurant with a high school student working with friends and supervised by a nineteen-year-old manager. The supervisor would be far less likely to be intent on teaching forcefully about a job well done (for, unfortunately, such an intense focus on pride and excellence is not what typically leads most young people into careers in fast food). And even if such a lecture were delivered, would it have the same impact if accompanied by quiet snickering in the background from one’s peers?
Finally, one other implicit element was crucial in Pete’s story. These men cared about him. They liked him and wanted to see him do well. They were gruff as could be, but didn’t hesitate to take the time to show him how to do good work … how to grow up. If there were an antithesis to the Lord of the Flies scenario we painted in Chapter 4, it might well be the workroom of the Men’s Shop in Manchester, New Hampshire, circa 1970. “Working with adults who care” thus becomes another of the prominent signs we look for as we map out routes into adulthood for our teens.
Pete’s parents also had a simple solution to the premature affluence problem we described above. It was called, quite simply, “expecting your teen to pay for some of their own stuff.” They asked him to pay for most or all his own clothing and recreational activities, and that request was more than enough to make clear that low-wage jobs, however engaging in other respects, are not the ticket to adult prosperity.
It should now be clear that the “It’s a good thing I was there” effect is not a matter of simply expecting our teens to get a job or volunteer. Rather, we want our teens to be doing work that matters to someone, entails real challenges, involves interacting with adults who care about the work, and comes with reasonable (not excessive) financial compensations. Finding or creating this kind of good work for our teens is going to take some effort, but when we succeed, we’ve taken a major step toward moving them out of the adolescent bubble. And just as the bubble has effects on a multitude of levels, so too does good work go a long way toward undoing some of those pernicious effects.
Identity issues, for example, seem to have become a taken-for-granted aspect of life in the adolescent bubble. In our self esteem—obsessed culture, adolescents struggle to feel good about themselves no matter how many trophies and certificates we present to them or how much we tell them we love them. The problem is, we’ve viewed teens’ self-esteem as though it’s going to be dependent upon what we say to them or do for them, instead of upon the things they learn to do for others. The Adult Work Effect suggests one antidote.
Austin, the teen in Chapter 3 who felt like he was a “failure at everything,” ultimately learned this lesson almost by accident one weekend when the computer network crashed at the office of his dad’s small business. The network support people said they could come in first thing the next week, but his dad had to get a project out by Monday at nine. As Austin heard his dad worrying about it at dinner Friday night, he thought to himself that the problem didn’t sound so hard. Finally, he spoke up and told his dad he thought he might be able to fix it. With some wariness, and after many warnings to be careful, his dad decided he had little to lose and let Austin take a look. The problem wasn’t as easy as Austin expected, and he spent five hours trying different things (while his dad was wondering if he’d made a mistake). Finally, just before eleven that Saturday night, as his dad—who’d been working by hand on stuff at the office—was about to call it quits, Austin had a breakthrough and got the network back up. The project would now make its deadline.
That Monday, when the “network guy” came in, he said the problem was relatively minor, and only a thirty-minute job if one had seen it before. But regardless of how long it took him, Austin had provided the help when it was needed, and he spent the next several months beaming quietly whenever he heard his dad recount the story to others.
Following one of these recountings, one of Austin’s neighbors mentioned that his computer was “acting weird” and that he couldn’t get his printer to work, and asked Austin if he’d be willing to take a look at it. Again, Austin took a good amount of time but ultimately solved the problem. When the neighbor insisted he take thirty dollars for his time, Austin was thrilled… partly about the money, but even more because he’d done something that mattered that much to someone. Word got around, and with his dad’s help Austin ultimately got a summer job working for the networking guy his dad had on contract. The work mainly involved simple stuff—swapping in and out hard drives, installing new memory, and the like—but the clients were grateful, and to Austin it was heaven. He’d eagerly recount his day’s work each night at dinner, and though to his parents much of what he said seemed to be in Greek, they were delighted to listen to their now-happy son.
I can’t say that Austin’s grades took any remarkable upswings—they improved a bit, but he simply wasn’t cut out to be a star student. The essential change, though, was that he now no longer saw himself as a failure; he knew he had something he could contribute. Even more important, he felt he had something to look forward to in his life. He eventually got more heavily into Web design in a freelance way locally—enough that he made more money than his friends who worked at fast-food restaurants. He’d begun to carve out his niche in the adult world—a world far larger and, for all its hard edges, in some ways far more accommodating to his adolescent interests and talents than most of what existed in his large public high school. Austin was no longer waiting for the gates of adulthood to magically open. He had found a way to do something that mattered to others, and his path to adulthood became more clear.
Though his self-esteem skyrocketed, he also gained something even more valuable. He gained a sense of his own self-efficacy. Self-efficacy refers not just to feeling good about yourself, but to having confidence in your ability to master tasks that actually make a difference in your life. Austin had previously seen himself as a failure because in many ways he didn’t fit into the narrow fast-track slots we lay out for teenagers; he wasn’t popular or good at sports or school, and thus couldn’t find those places where his talents could fit into his adolescent world. But once he started to get out of the adolescent bubble, this young Bill-Gates-in-waiting was on his way. And his self-image problem largely vanished in the night.
We tend to naturally understand the practical lessons of work—being on time, contributing, etc.—but we ultimately underestimate just how much pure inspiration the right kinds of adult work can provide. Good work can convert adolescent aimlessness into focused movement toward a career, and greatly reduce the likelihood of spending years in one’s twenties casting about for the “right” job. I’d experienced this myself as a late adolescent, although it wasn’t until thirty years later, in a conversation with some young U.Va. students, that I remembered just how important the experience had been.
I was approached recently by a group of college students from a local program called “Helpline,” who asked if I could meet with them. Helpline is a confidential hotline for callers who are experiencing almost any sort of distress, and it’s almost entirely student run. Long ago, I had worked on a prior incarnation of the hotline during my own years as an undergraduate at U.Va., and the students were interested in meeting with me to learn more about the program’s history. The only time I had in my schedule during which they were all free was at 8:30 A.M.on a Friday morning. (They all had this time free largely because students at U.Va., as at most universities, desperately seek to avoid both early morning classes and Friday classes.) I offered the time apologetically, but they instantly snapped it up, and all six students—the leadership team of the program—were there, eager and waiting, as I arrived at my office that morning.
Why? I asked myself.
They got nothing material out of their participation. No pay, no special status, no perks. And while participating in the hotline program might help their résumés, visiting me certainly wouldn’t. It was only as I began to reflect with them about my own experiences, thirty years earlier, that I realized why they had all shown up at a time when most U.Va. students were fast asleep. And that’s when I realized that I had also been the beneficiary of the “It’s a good thing I was there” effect.
I was in my second month as a seventeen-year-old first-year student at U.Va. When I registered for classes that September, I bypassed the “activity fair” that followed the registration process. While I’d always been a good student, I was reasonably lazy otherwise, and already feeling overwhelmed by my first days at college. It seemed that classes were going to be more than enough to manage, and extracurriculars were not something I was seeking. It wasn’t until six weeks later, when a roommate mentioned he was going to a meeting of a hotline that was being started in Charlottesville, and asked if I wanted to come, that this changed. I hesitated, as I had work to finish that night and I didn’t need or want extra stuff to do, but my roommate wanted company and was incredibly persistent and so I went.
The first night was fascinating. Almost right away we began learning what it took to help someone in crisis when speaking on the phone with them. And because the hotline was just getting started, it needed every volunteer it could get, so we were told directly that we mattered a great deal to its chances of success. Bottom line: This wasn’t busywork, it seemed important, and it was kind of fun. And it got more fun the longer I stayed with it. Eventually I became part of the early student leadership group for the hotline, and we spent endless hours planning, dealing with crises, fund-raising, and chatting. It was enjoyable and engaging, but it was also real. In fact, that was why it was so much fun. I’d taken a psychology course in high school and was taking one that first semester in college. But to be honest, I’d found both a little boring, and looking back, I have no doubt that it was this volunteer experience—not theoretical course work—that ultimately guided me toward my career as a psychologist.
So, as a seventeen-year-old, I discovered there were tasks that were “work,” that were “extra,” and that paid nothing … and could be the high points of my day. As I spoke with these fourth-year college students in my office that Friday morning, I realized they’d been learning much the same lesson. And upon sharing this story with many friends since, I’ve been struck by just how many recounted similar sharing tales of how the most meaningful experiences of their college careers happened far from the classroom.
We worry endlessly about how to motivate and direct our teens. What we forget sometimes, though, is that the chance to do real work where we’re needed tends to be inherently engaging. Teen Outreach had actually been teaching us that lesson for years before we caught on. If we’d been alert to it, the very fact that this young program was already oversubscribed enough to allow us to assign students to a waiting-list control group would have given us an early clue as to its power: Adolescents—that allegedly laziest of all age-groups—were eagerly signing up in large numbers all across the country to take part in a program where they voluntarily worked for others. There were no mandates or requirements, just good work and enthusiastic teens. This was certainly a testament to the people running the local Teen Outreach programs, but even more to the intuitive appeal of this kind of work to young people.
Once we’ve identified some of the key ingredients and the beneficial effects of good-quality work for teens, the question naturally arises as to how we can best build these experiences into their lives. In the two decades since we first learned about Teen Outreach, for example, we’ve found only one consistent limit to its growth, and that’s the challenge of finding enough volunteer sites to accommodate youth who are interested in volunteering. From the vantage point of a businessperson, or even a social service agency manager, the problem is easy enough to understand. Who wants a bunch of teenagers running around their workplace?
To be honest, setting up and supervising this kind of volunteer placement does take adult time. But it’s time that we used to routinely spend helping teens grow up. No doubt, craftsmen of yore used to sometimes roll their eyes at the young apprentices who were their charges. But two things were different then. First, there was an implicit recognition that part of almost every adult worker’s role was to train the generation of youth coming behind. There wasn’t yet a temptation to outsource this task to our schools, forget about it, then complain about the end result. Second, there was the recognition that these young people could actually be of at least some use with a bit of training.
One of the approaches communities often take toward including teens in the adult world is setting up teen apprenticeships. The impulse is a good one, although as with other types of work, apprenticeships can be done well or poorly, and we’re going to have to look beneath the surface appeal of the apprenticeship to understand the difference. For example, on her high school spring break, Caitlin, the high school student in Chapter 4 who “forgot” about her French test, got to shadow a local lawyer for several days—a real privilege, according to her school guidance counselor, and an experience her parents had pushed hard for Caitlin to get.
The shadow apprenticeship model has its interesting aspects, but it also has several fundamental flaws, as Caitlin soon discovered. First, contrary to the principles of the Adult Work Effect we’ve been outlining, Caitlin wasn’t doing anything to actually be helpful to the lawyer (who had offered the apprenticeship to the local high school simply as a way to be helpful to the community). We’ve come to call this model the “Disneyland apprenticeship” because it reminds us of those rides where one gets to pretend to be an astronaut without actually doing anything astronauts do, or anything at all, really.
In fact, Caitlin was not only not providing help to the lawyer to whom she was assigned, she was a bit of a drain on his time. Having to think about what she was doing, and whether it would be interesting enough, was one more task on the lawyer’s to-do list each morning. The lawyer knew this, and more important, Caitlin knew it too. Rather than sensing that she was becoming a contributing adult, she got an even more stark reminder of just how useless she was in the adult world. “I just didn’t want to look bored or like I didn’t have anything to do, because I didn’t want to bother Mr. Smathers,” was the way she described the experience to her mom. And because she was mainly following the lawyer around and watching him do his work, the work she was watching seemed clearly beyond her.
Caitlin got little sense of how she could someday gain the skills needed to take on such a job, and when she asked, she was just told, “Do well in school.” These Disneyland apprenticeships no doubt have their role—they give teens at least a passing view of what a real job in an area might be like—but there’s also little doubt that there’s a reason they’re typically limited to a few days or a week at a time.
We can engage teens successfully with an apprenticeship model, but it’s likely going to mean restructuring the typical approach. Three-day apprenticeships just aren’t going to cut it for teens or for employers. But what if instead of Caitlin’s three days just following a lawyer around she’d instead spent a semester volunteering for five hours a week after school? Could a law firm use an eager tenth grader’s time? Yes, if the focus were upon teaching Caitlin to do some useful tasks. At first that might involve little more than making photocopies, opening mail, and pulling law books from the library. Not the stuff of TV legal dramas, to be sure, but these tasks are necessary, indeed critical, in the adult world. Might Caitlin then graduate to some simple cut-and-paste tasks with legal documents? Given most kids’ computer skills, that certainly doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch—and some challenge and stretching is a very good thing for teens. Of course, Caitlin could also take some time to simply observe what happens in court—the exciting part—but now she’d also have a fuller picture of what legal work involves. Whether she could do enough work to completely pull her weight and balance the time spent training and supervising her is an open question. But the burden would be modest at most, since Caitlin’s time would still be free to the lawyers, and what she gained would be potentially huge.
Although arranging these kinds of experiences entails up-front investments of time, the right volunteer or work environment can almost effortlessly teach lessons that parents and schools often struggle to convey: the importance and satisfaction of a job well done; the benefits of taking on real responsibility; the need for consistency and focus. Parents and teachers alike often lecture, nag, and fret endlessly about how to convey these lessons, and spend inordinate amounts of time making teens redo jobs poorly done, often to little avail. But if we can put teens in the right environments—environments that can, with just a little planning, function as well as the growth-producing environments of old—we can stop struggling to drag teens into adulthood with lectures and complaints, and instead simply watch those environments do the honing and shaping work that they’ve done naturally for generations.
One thing that makes the task of finding good work for teens a bit easier is that once the lure of lots of pocket money is taken out of the picture, teens appear quite adept at identifying for themselves the work that will be rewarding. We spent several years with the Teen Outreach program, for example, trying to identify the best types of volunteer work for teens. We used all sorts of questionnaires and asked about all sorts of experiences. Ultimately, we found one factor that consistently separated volunteer experiences that did versus did not predict positive future teen outcomes: A good experience was one the teens felt that they had gotten to choose, instead of having assigned to them. Much as Will Lambert continually gravitated toward meaningful volunteer work (and had a choice about what kind of work to do from the outset), and Pete hung in there in what might have seemed like a tough, boring job folding shirts, so too other teens seem to have an intuitive ability to recognize when such work has a payoff.
Although we’ve focused our own research efforts on evaluating formal volunteer placements and programs, once parents, teens, and community members become aware of the power of the Adult Work Effect, the opportunities to employ it begin to appear all around. Helping a neighbor build a deck. Spending regular time at a parent’s place of employment and finding ways to help out. Volunteering in one’s church. Helping a teacher after school. Tutoring a neighbor or a little brother or sister. Making recordings for Reading to the Blind. Walking dogs at an SPCA. And beyond that, there are dozens of volunteer organizations in most communities that not only make a difference, but see value in inspiring others to volunteer. Perhaps it should be a part of every volunteer organization’s mandate to bring young people into the fold.
Once we begin to think along these lines, the possibilities are limited only by our imaginations. The rubric for developing these ideas is a simple one. It’s not so much a matter of racking our brains to dream up activities for our young people. Instead we simply need to consider every meaningful adult task performed each day by parents, friends, and colleagues and think about how one might engage a teenager in it.
“Putting the adulthood back into adolescence” might at first glance seem just another step in the increasing pressurization of adolescence, but we’d argue that when it’s done well, it has the exact opposite effect. By giving teens real work that matters to others, instead of just manufactured hurdles like standardized tests, class elections, and athletic team tryouts, we find we often reduce their level of stress. Knowing one has something to contribute to the larger adult world and a productive way of spending one’s time in it tends to be an antidote not only to the self-esteem issues of adolescence, but to much of its anxiety as well. That was certainly what Tonya, Pete, and Austin found. And yes, there’s still plenty of time to have fun in this adolescent-becoming-an-adult world. Indeed, relaxation rarely feels better than when it follows a period of hard and productive work—a lesson we find teens are often delighted to learn. It’s another one of the reasons we find teens more than willing to choose good work when it’s presented to them.
Fortunately, helping our teens engage in good work is just one of the ways we can begin to put the adulthood back into adolescence. To uncover others, however, is going to require making some fundamental changes in how we think about our teens. We began that process in Chapter 2, as we challenged the idea that teens were biologically confined to immature behavior, and we tried to push it further in Chapter 4, as we challenged the “nurture assumptions” parents make about their teens. Now let’s take these ideas a step further and begin considering just how we can identify and draw out the developing maturity that all teens actually do possess.