Teens are experiencing way more stress than they should. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NPR, and the Harvard School of Public Health polled parents with teens in high school and found that one third of all teens were experiencing a lot of stress. These teens are becoming physically ill and emotionally compromised.
According to our American and World teen culture, they are supposed to act like adults and be able to make rational, well thought out decisions. They are supposed to predict how their actions today may impact their future. They should know which colleges they want to apply for by the time they are 17 years old and they should have a pretty good idea which area of vocation they want to enter into. They should have excellent grades, extracurricular sports, musical talent, volunteer in their communities, sky-high test scores, and be earning college credits while still in high school if they want to even think of getting into any of their first-choice colleges.
But teens are not adults. According to Erikson’s Stages of Development, teens are in the stage of Identity vs. Role Confusion. They are on a quest at this age to figure out who they are.
They are children that are transitioning into adults. Their brains are transforming and growing at a rate similar to when they were toddlers and they are not fully equipped to be able to make completely rational decisions and think of all of the long-term consequences. They are impulsive and experimental, and sometimes “irrational.” They are finding their identity and learning where they belong in the world. They shouldn’t be so stressed. They shouldn’t have to be adults just yet.
If you have teens, or preteens, start looking into the concept of The Gap Year. The Gap Year is a break from school stress for one year prior to starting college or joining the workforce. It’s an opportunity to grow and learn in a myriad of ways. It allows our young men and women to follow their hearts and learn what they love and hate about the world and figure out what they stand for and who they are. There are hundreds, thousands of different Gap Year programs out there: from volunteering in Costa Rica to mountain climbing in Africa to language immersion and volunteerism in France, to dancing in Ireland to missionary work in Guatemala to … anything your teen can imagine. There are expensive programs and incredibly affordable programs and scholarships. Colleges are finding that students who start college after a Gap Year tend to have a better idea of what they want to study and are more committed to their education.
Teens will have their entire lives to settle down. These are the years where they seek their identity. They have to search for it. They can’t know it and plan it before the quest even begins. Give them a Gap Year to forget about stress and enjoy themselves.