How to be the adult in a roomful of teenagers

Are there teens in your community? Make sure to treat them right

Based on my personal, nonscientific observations gleaned from a career spent in schools, churches, and community nonprofits where I have endured everything from judgmental comments about my makeup to nonconsensual contact with hordes of Labubus, adults falter in their interactions with teenagers when they lack clarity on what they are supposed to offer in their relationships with young people.

Having witnessed a number of people squander the privilege of being the adult in the room—not the friend, not the “cool mom,” but the adult—and having made the mistake myself of failing to provide something substantive and useful to the teenagers in my orbit, I am attempting this post as a public service. This is obviously not an exhaustive essay, but if you are a reader who is over the age of twenty or someone who does not refer to TikTok trends circa 2022 as “things that make me nostalgic for childhood,” this is meant as a brief recommendation for how to calibrate yourself in the presence of younger people who are in a formative stage of life that requires your thoughtfulness and consideration.

Do not interact with teenagers (or any minors, period) hoping that they will satisfy your emotional needs.

I offer this first recommendation graciously but unequivocally. You are not there to be affirmed for how fun, how understanding, or how relevant you are. You may be momentarily shaken when they respond contemptuously to your Lauryn Hill playlist with the comment “only my mom listens to that sh-t,” but your job is to reject their ageism, misogyny, and occasionally atrocious taste so that you do not fall into the dangerous trap of seeking their approval. When I say “dangerous,” I mean dangerous for them: adults erode their own levelheadedness and good judgment when their goal is to receive emotional gratification in their relationships with minors.

In benign instances, this tendency could bring whatever activity you are responsible to oversee to fall into chaos—the classroom becomes loud as hell, the dodgeball game that should never have happened ends in tears and at least three unexpected breakups—and I can attest to this because I’ve been the fool who, out of a desire to be recognized as “supportive” and “fun,” agreed to be the only adult refereeing a game where kids furiously throw balls at their social rivals and pretend not to hear when you ask them to stop aiming for the face. It’s your job to know the limits of a situation and lead everyone to adhere to them (in my case, to say sorry guys we can never play dodgeball like this ever again) even if your act of responsibility and care causes you to be hated!

In its most malignant forms, I think the emotional insecurity of adults, when indulged and unchecked, can lead to acts of abuse. I hated writing that sentence, and I’m going to hate writing this one, but truly, every time I read news stories about adults inflicting harm on young people, I inevitably come across some detail about the adults’ isolation, loneliness, or other variety of neediness, which they attempted to satiate in the most selfish and destructive ways.

Now, I, too, am a human being. I, too, will cry a little bit on the inside when a group of thirteen year olds tell me that they have been appraising my wardrobe and must tell me that my 90s denim is comedic in its ugliness. Occasional insecurity is normal and I’m not here to pathologize it. I’m just here to say that because emotional vulnerability is normal, it should be dealt with regularly. In order to be a good adult for the young people in your life, it is incumbent upon you to cultivate friendships with people your age and to be very comfortable with who you are. These are necessities, not luxuries. When you are the adult in the room, you have to be prepared to offer, not require, nourishment.

These thirteen year olds are not my friends and therefore not the people I talk to when I am processing my feelings. This means I can laugh when they mock my outfits and engage them with questions about the ethics of fast fashion and the impossibility of keeping up with TikTok trends before leaving to hang out with my fellow thirtysomethings, whom the teens derisively and correctly describe as “your friends who probably use retinol.”

When you do interact with teenagers, take them seriously as intellectual and moral beings.

I was pretty annoying as a high school student. I joined a local youth group in seventh grade and by the time I was a freshman, I was full of urgent questions that I brought to church every weekend, expecting someone to explain gendered violence in the Old Testament and the Bible’s relationship to systemic racism to me *on the spot.*

I was like this every weekend. On weekdays I showed up to high school journalism class and pestered my teacher about letting me write what I now realize were unpublishable stories concerning hookup patterns and sexual proclivities among my fellow students. She kept telling me no. I started writing my requests on her whiteboard when she wasn’t in her classroom and leaving them there; she stopped teaching soon after I graduated, probably worn down to the bone by me and every other kid that she should have just kicked out of class. Incredibly, she entertained my requests for three years, and tried to explain to me some kind of ethical argument for why I couldn’t publish anything I wanted about other minors, which I didn’t pay full attention to but, in hindsight, was my best preparation for surviving social media.

My youth group always had interns or volunteers hanging out, and one of them eventually noted all my questions and said he would do some reading and get back to me. This sounded like a cop out, but he actually called me a few days later to share the results of his research and to deliver what seemed like a genuinely considered response. He also encouraged me to read more about these topics if I was serious about learning more for myself (I looked him up and he is now a professor of the Old Testament. He is probably doing a great job).

Both these adults walked the line. They didn’t indulge all my ideas, which is one way of not taking teenagers seriously—if you assume someone has an inner life worth cultivating, you should challenge them to refine their thinking—but they asked me appropriately difficult questions and pushed me to think everything through. They also didn’t shut me down. My teacher actually let me co-edit the school paper during senior year, which, as an adult, I now see as an act of good faith on her part, a demonstrated trust that I had learned something and could be given a chance to use it.

So, I’m writing recommendation #2 primarily because other adults extended this consideration to me: as a teenager, I had access to people who did not consider it their job to control or placate me but to coach me. I’m aware that not everyone has this. Historically, my culture is prone to seeing teenagers as liabilities to be managed or assets to be mined, two tendencies that can preclude humane, nurturing behavior towards young people.

These tendencies still manifest themselves. Sometimes I flip through textbooks that are so intellectually lazy that I cannot believe anyone would give them to young people, or am shown influencer videos against my will that leave me confused and dismayed at the kind of platitudinous, sloppily reasoned ideas that teenage brains get hosed down with every time they are exposed to a phone. My hypothesis is that intellectually lazy responses to teenagers are rooted in desires to control rather than to nurture them (here is the right thing to think! Now think it!) whereas weird, exploitative interactions with teenagers come from an extractive impulse (see: attention economy); anyway, I don’t like any of these things.

Taking teenagers seriously does not mean giving them stupid answers. It does not mean telling them what they want to hear. It does not mean shutting them down when they ask a challenging question. It means acknowledging the fact that they are growing, and, if you can, offering them something useful to aid the process.

Enough for this round. Tune in next time for an essay about facilitating hard conversations, a skill that I have honed through living in the tiny, intense area of overlap between progressive activists and devout evangelical Christians 💗