Youth may not be wasted on the young

Feb 03, 2019 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

The title of this week’s piece references a famous quote attributed to Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw, “Youth is wasted on the young”.
Many have pondered and despaired over nature’s cruel joke in postponing key revelations of human understanding until the greying years when our faculties lack the vigour to fully utilize them. In other words, the wisdom acquired through experience and hindsight is the stuff at which our young people scoff. Some call it the generation gap, and few know how to fill it.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany have confirmed what many of us older heads know – that teenagers are reckless, don’t listen to advice, and don’t even want to know about the risks involved in whatever they’re doing, preferring to operate ‘under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty: what some might call ignorance’. Maybe true, but they’re our children and we love them. We just have to help them not waste their potentially halcyon days.
It’s probably not so bad though when you consider what mischief-makers and risk-takers youths can be – the normal teenage stuff. Research also showed that although (most) adolescents are healthy, strong, and capable of just about anything, rates of death and disease rise alarmingly as soon as hormones start to kick in. I know! It’s hard to imagine in hindsight how I, for example, so innately mild-mannered, could have done the outrageous things I did in my teens and early twenties.
In this ‘darker side of adolescence’, it adds, youths are more likely than younger children or adults to engage in risky and impulsive behaviour including unprotected sex and experimenting with drugs, both of which have become enormously worrying trends here in Guyana, especially among schoolchildren. Obviously, these can be compounded, and easily so, by other issues that negatively affect their emotional and mental well-being. Real psychological hurt may ensue.
So we have children who experiment and take risks. Then there are teenagers who, as it were, go beyond the pale, and move from adventurous and impulsive to dangerous and sometimes deadly. These are mainly the ones trying to cope with the emotionally-challenging transitions of puberty and adolescence as they stumble towards adulthood, and are thwarted by frustration and failure, at least in perception. Actual psychological disorders can further cloud that perception.
Over the last two weeks, Guyanese were stunned by the purported actions of two young people – secondary school students, both of whom may have been hurting, in different ways. I wish to make a point here: It is easy to empathize with, and have compassion for, a teenage schoolgirl who commits suicide, regardless of what triggered the action. It may be harder, yet equally necessary, to express similar sentiments for a schoolchild (especially male) who threatens harm to fellow students and school officials, and possibly even initiates a physical attack.
Children who harm others, and themselves, are often children who are hurting. (Hurt people hurt people) The pain may be emotional, physical, or psychological. The ‘others’ can be siblings, friends, and authority figures such as parents and teachers. From insult and intimidation to self-harm and suicide, the inflicted trauma can range from mild to crushing for those involved.
When children are hurting, they occasionally express in writing what they feel they cannot say out loud -sometimes in their own form of ‘coded’ language which can be easily overlooked. Both of these young people allegedly wrote about what they intended to do, and maybe did. But writing may not be a forceful enough cry for the attention or help they need. The hurt and confusion that was felt, remains. So they act.
They may lash out, become bullying and aggressive; directing their inner pain outwardly. Or they may become withdrawn and uncommunicative, while seething with silent anger. Yet others show no signs of disruption in their lives, thereby ‘fooling’ the most perceptive of observers. Evidently, there are dozens of other cues as to the emotional and mental state of a child who needs help, but those I mentioned are among the commonest and most misunderstood.
During my teaching career I came across several children, mostly adolescents, who displayed signs of emotional and mental instability and inner hurt. I presume most teachers do. To the best of my ability, I tried to help them. My main ‘weapons’ were to befriend them, talk with them, (and sometimes discreetly with their parents,) empathize with their issues, and help them to see the funny side of things. Laughter was a vital element. Sometimes it seemed to work. At other times I failed. Here are two simple examples.
Annie (not her real name) was an 11 year-old who never smiled, or engaged in childish banter with her peers. I sensed a problem, and tried a few tricks I had learnt to ‘pull her out’. One worked. I told her I had the power to make anyone laugh and that she was no exception. I said I could already see a smile creeping down from the top of her head. “Now it’s by your forehead, now by your nose; now it’s at your mouth …” I was rewarded with a shy, disarming smile.
In the space of a few weeks she had told me of some domestic disruption at home, with her caught between her parents’ arguments. She said she was ridiculed about her looks and her big feet. She was good at English but horrible at Math, and I helped her with the latter. She became more outgoing, and I felt good about the progress she was making. Then one day a child came to tell me that she had locked herself in the school toilet. A teacher had spoken to her roughly, and in the locked room, she repeatedly stuck her arm with a sharpened pencil. She was taken bleeding to the guidance counsellor.
In another instance a 13 year-old girl wrote as part of a composition that she was thinking of committing suicide, and that no one knew she had been raped by a family member. She said she wished she was ‘as smart as Mr. Nichols’ daughter’. She was intelligent, feisty, and aggressive, and was repeatedly threatened with expulsion. Once I had to lock a classroom door to keep her away from a child she wanted to fight, while she kept pummeling the door. We talked and eventually she calmed down. She is a woman now, still feisty, and we still talk, on Facebook.
What I have written so far may appear simplistic and inconclusive relative to the caption, but let it suffice for now as input from a layperson. It’s possible, I think, to look at a problem too deeply; too professionally, and miss some of the more common symptoms and remedies. Teenagers are teenagers, and adults are adults. There are gaps in between, and like I said earlier, some of us don’t know how to fill them.
Children and teenagers are by nature, immature. They grow up in a world largely made by and for adults. And as the poet Khalil Gibran pointedly observed, they are ‘not your children’ but ‘the sons and daughters of life longing for itself’. Listen to them, laugh with them, and teach them with the key understanding that yes, they have independent minds; but also dependent problems. They might not admit it but they do depend on us to help them navigate those hormone years. Then we ourselves may find that youth is not necessarily wasted on the young.

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