Luck High School 
Luck, Wisconsin
Teacher: Barbara Petersen

 

Rite of Passage

By Jessica Miles

12th grade

 

868 words

There is no easy answer to this question.  I find it difficult to answer it for others, but I can answer it both for myself and as I imagine it would be for others.  I believe that telling a child one day, “You are a child,” then rushing the child through a ceremony and pronouncing, “Now you are an adult,” is pointless.  The action is empty and unbelievable for the adolescent.  Teens have their own rites. Attempting flat out to replace those accepted, meaningful rites of initiation with adult proscribed rites would fail.  Teens would blow it off.  “Yeah, yeah.  I’ve done your stupid rite.  Quit pestering me now.” would be the prevalent attitude.

Teens scorn adult ideals because they are past the point when they blindly accept what their parents tell them.  They’ve moved from innocently asking “Why?” to angrily protesting adults’ assumptions and beliefs in everything.  Adult ideas are considered to be inferior and out of touch.  An adult rite of passage would at once have no meaning for the teen and simultaneously reek of a condescending dictate.  “Now you are a child,” then POOF!  The adults wave a magic wand and the child grows up.  It doesn’t work like that, and teens resent that adults consider it that way.

   
Children and teens today mature faster.  The sheer amount of information available to them ensures that.  They are more critical and cynical than their parents were.  They have lost the hopeful idealism that once personified “childhood.”  When these not-so-naïve children become teens, they disbelieve everything their parents stand for and say.  With that philosophy, teens are going to submissively accept what their parents decree as a rite of passage? Forgive my incredulity, but I doubt it would happen that way.  At best, such a suggestion would be met with subtle, secret resentment.  At worst, there would be open rebellion.

This is what I see, but I’m on the outside looking in as well.  I’m closer than an adult but still a stranger.  I see teens as isolated from their parents, indeed from all adults.  They depend on each other. They form their own inner culture.  I exist on the fringes of this culture, separate because

I think more like an adult than like my peers.  Of all the influences in my life, my peers are among the least.  I don’t confide in them, and they return the favor.  Their concerns aren’t mine.

What I know, my morals, and my beliefs are set by the dual influence of the books I read and what I’ve learned from my parents.  In the privacy of my mind, I could care less what my friends think.

Since I was in the fourth grade, I have read at the adult level.  I have read books written by adults for adults, and that has shaped the way I think.  I have had very little contact with my age group until I reached high school.  My closest friends were the words on the printed page.  I see what teens do and think much of it stupid, irrelevant, and pointless.  I feel as distant from them as adults feel from me. At the same time, because of my age, few adults would consider me a peer.  To many adults I’m an immature bug completely lacking coherent thoughts.  It’s isolation, when my truest self is in the books I read and the privacy of my mind.  I see the world, but I have no true place.  I cannot be adult, and I will not be a child.

From the tone of that last paragraph, one would imagine I favor the rite of passage.  I do, provided it convinces adults to accept me as equal.  For myself, the rite would mean nothing.  It would be outward proof to adults of what I already see myself in my mind.  I place far more value in the gradual increase in trust and responsibility that my parents placed in me than in “poof, you’re one of us now.” An increase in trust and responsibility combined with an increase in respect would be far more effective than one meaningless ceremony. Respect is a very important part of how adults treat each other.  It is the key to accepting youth as adults.  It is what the rite of passage should cause but doesn’t necessarily because of the way relations between adults and teens work.  Where there is respect there is trust. Where there is trust there is responsibility.  A responsible teen is respected.  Nowhere does the cycle need a magic wand.

I believe teens should have the freedom and the trust to be what they want to be. Young children need guidance; teens need reasons. They need to know “Why?” before they blindly follow what adults tell them.  Reason, trust, and respect will work far better than a one time, half-hearted effort to declare adulthood.  I am what I am.  I can be no other way, nor would I be, given the choice.  Having adults accept and respect that would mean more to me than going through the motions of a rite of passage to convince them that I was capable.  I know I’m capable; it’s the adults who are confused.

 

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