Approaching Adolescence

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  

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Approaching Adolescence 

Guest:                        Dennis Rainey

From the series:       Stepping Up (day 3 of 5) 

Bob:  One of the key steps a young man will take as he progresses toward courageous, authentic, biblical masculinity is the step where he begins to assume more responsibility.  Here’s Dennis Rainey.

 Dennis:  You know what?  As a young man, get used to stepping up.  Get used to taking on more responsibility because it is the stuff of manhood.  It’s why God created you.  Back in Genesis, chapter one, you were designed to reign over the creation and make a living by the sweat of your brow and be a part of God’s redemptive work on the planet.

Bob:  This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, March 9th.  Our host is the President of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I’m Bob Lepine.  We’re going to explore today what has to happen for a young man to move through adolescence and to embrace authentic masculinity.  

Welcome to FamilyLife Today.  Thanks for joining us on the Wednesday edition.  

We’re going to have to start with some definition, maybe, or some discussion here at the beginning.  You’ve just finished a book that you call Stepping Up, a Call to Courageous Manhood.  You’re challenging men to step up.  

One of the things you address in this book is the idea that men go through a middle phase, from boyhood to manhood, the phase of adolescence.  You know there are people in the culture today who push back on that whole idea of adolescence and say that’s an artificial construct.  Back a hundred years ago there was no such thing as an adolescent.  You just went from boyhood to manhood.  So what do you say to that, huh?

Dennis:  Well, they’re right.  It wasn’t even in the dictionary at the turn of the twentieth century.  In the early nineteen hundreds there were two steps, boyhood and manhood.  There wasn’t anything in between.  You stepped up from boyhood to manhood and probably did so at a much earlier age back then than we do today.

Bob:  So you’d have teenagers, young men, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old getting married, taking jobs…

Dennis:  Oh, yeah!  Right.

Bob:  …taking responsibilities for families.  The idea that there would be an extended period where you would learn and study and grow and just kind of enjoy life before you got down to the duties and responsibilities of adulthood?  That just didn’t exist.

 Dennis:  It didn’t.  In fact there’s a guy who wrote a book, Dr. Michael Kimmel, called Guyland.  In it he describes a world where young men live.  He said it’s a stage of life, an undefined timespan between adolescence and adulthood that can stretch out for a decade or more.  It’s a bunch of places where guys gather to be guys with each other, unhassled by the demands of parents, girlfriends, jobs, kids and other nuisances of adult life.  

What he’s saying is he actually wants to add another step between adolescence and manhood, one that can go on into the late twenties.  In fact, it’s happening!

Bob:  Guyhood?

Dennis:  Guyland, I guess.  I don’t know.

Bob:  You get your video game controller and you work a job where you can go home and sit down with the dudes and crack some beers and get out the videogames and have a blast.

 Dennis:  Yeah.  In fact, listen to this statement that Dr. Kimmel concludes with.  He says, “In this topsy turvy Peter Pan mindset, young men shirk the responsibilities of adulthood and remain fixated on the trappings of boyhood while the boys they still are struggle heroically to prove that they are real men, despite all the evidence to the contrary.”

Bob:  Well, he’s really just saying that adolescence has been extended in our culture and there’s kind of this state of perpetual adolescence.  In fact, again as you’ve addressed in this book and you’ve spoken to men, you’re calling all of us to step out of what is that inertia that pulls us back into the irresponsibility of adolescence and say “Step up to the responsibility of manhood.”

 Dennis:  I don’t think it’s wrong that adolescence ultimately emerged.  I think what has become a trap, however, is when young men are allowed to stay in some in-between world, in between boyhood and manhood for an extended period of time where no one in the culture, no one in their family, no one in their lives, is stepping into their lives and saying, “It’s time to grow up.  It’s time to assume responsibilities.”  

I have to say it’s interesting in this culture to watch a bunch of single people, for that matter single men, moving into their thirties delaying marriage with one foot in boyhood, one foot in adolescence.  I think they need some older men in their lives who are on the steps above, looking down at them, and not in an arrogant fashion, but reaching down to them, saying, “Come on up.”  

It may be frightening.  It may feel like it is more responsibility, because it is but you need to get out of childhood.  As Paul said in 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 11, “When I was a boy I acted like a boy.  I behaved like a boy.  I spoke like a boy.  But when I grew up I put away childish things.”  We need a generation of young men putting away childish things.

Bob:  But you know the messages they’re getting in the culture, the messages on TV, from their peer group, the messages in the movies, and even the message of their own flesh, it’s not calling them to put away childish things.  It’s saying, “This is a time for fun.  Enjoy it!”

Dennis: Well, you were a teenage young man one time.

Bob:  I was!  I remember!

Dennis:  Do you remember it?  I mean, it was totally confusing and life was a lot simpler back then.  But what’s happening today I fear, is the older men in the lives of these young men, instead of reaching out with their hand and calling them to step up, they’re not challenging them to much of anything.  They’ve forgotten what it was like.

Let me just read to you what I wrote in the book in terms of what teenage boys are facing today.  “A teenage boy’s body is changing in strange and foreign ways.”  Think about it!  I mean, hair growing in some unusual places!  What’s he supposed to do?  He’s starting to think about things he’s never thought about before.  All of a sudden, sexual allurement and the mystery of sex becomes powerful.  If you’ve never been spoken to about this, wha...