Newell-Fonda High School
Newell, Iowa
Teacher: Connie Doonan

 

 

Mentors The Way To Go

By Mark T. Olsen

12th Grade

 

 

Throughout America many teenagers are slowly becoming more and more a part of the work force.  Some of this is due to the high rate of single parents who need the additional financial support from a working child.  This need causes many teens to drop out of school and take up full time work.  These teens walk a fine line; they do not know if they have become adults or are still teens that are working instead of attending school.  America needs the ability to allow adolescents to know when they have crossed the line between child and adult through a rite of passage that is clearly defined.

           

The reason that one of these is needed is because that many young people do not have a positive role model in their life.  The main role models for most young people are their parents and some parents are not mature enough to parent their children.  Some of these include teen mothers and those parents who marry and have children at too young an age.  These immature parents do not have the ability to positively motivate their children to make good choices in life.  One main reason for this is that the parents have not made good choices themselves and do not tell their children that the choices that they made were not the right ones.  One of these bad choices is that only one parent raises the children.  This means there is the lack of a parent in the home to give proper parenting advice.  As a result their children will eventually make the same wrong choices and fail in the same areas that their parents did, possibly even worse, and do not realize that they did anything wrong.  This will eventually cause a steep downward spiral that can not be turned.

           

The way to stop this downward turn is to give young people good role models to follow.  Mentors could be a source of positive role models for faltering teenagers.  During the vital learning period between the ages of six and fourteen, mentors could aid young people with their schooling and help them with life skills when a parent is not around.  This would be an after school program for the latchkey children of America.  Mentors can set a good example by showing young people how to make good decisions.  Once a child has a good role model to follow, they will then be enabled to follow the same pattern of a good lifestyle. This transition period could take up to five years, but it would aid greatly those who, at present, have no role models t look up to.

           

These young people who have been mentored by positive role models will go on to make good decisions in life and will be better equipped to pass these skills on to their own children.  They will also become mentors themselves, helping other young people to make good decisions.  This will start a pattern that passes on good decision making from adult role models to both their children and the other young people that they have mentored over the years.

           

Having been mentored themselves, these now young adults are mentoring young people just as they were mentored.  In the mind of these young adults there is no question to whether they are adults or adolescents.  They would be able to know that they have passed the threshold from adolescence to adulthood.  This would no longer hinder their further decision making for the earlier part of their adulthood.  Being a successful mentor would enable young adults to have confidence in their decision making and to benefit from their experience.  Not only would this help build the positive self image of these young people, but the country as a whole would benefit by having well motivated workers who have confidence in what they are doing.  They will have been highly educated because they were motivated to work hard throughout their schooling.

           

The need for a right of passage for adolescents has presented itself in America.  Americans need to realize that today’s young people do not know when they have truly become adults.  They need some direction from an outside source because their parents are not helping them with the tough decisions of life.  They need something or someone to show them the right way to go and help them along the way.  This problem has to be addressed before today’s young people are so lost that they do not know if they are growing up or just growing old.

 

Questions

 

Q1.  Margaret Mead says that young people need to live up to their full potential, which is like the Army’s “Be All That You Can Be” slogan.

 

Q2.  Separating young people from the truth about birth and death is no longer a problem today.

 

Q3.  Yes, I agree with that statement.  Culture:  1. Preparation of land and producing of crops                                 

       6.The civilization of a given race of nation at a given time, its customs, its arts, and its conveniences, may be called its culture.

 

 Q4.  Margaret Mead was advocating an integration of the primitive and the civilized.

 

Q5.  My peers and I want adults to recognize what is going on and to enforce “boundaries and structure” but to the next generation of young people and not to ours.

 

Q6.  I know that there have been parties where there was beer.  I know that some students go out and smoke during the noon hour.  I know that there are under age smokers in our school.

 

Q7.  Have the black teenager get out into the public and show that they are not as bad as many people think.

 

Q8.  It would not be a relief to me if all I had to do was go to class and learn because it would leave no time for socializing.  I would not be happy going to a single-sex or home school.

 

Q9.  Yes it would be helpful because it would show that what we are doing in school actually has some merit it the real world and in our future.

 

Q10.  Students do need contact with adult role models that show them the right thing to do and how to make the right choices.  If this were to happen the moral integrity of students could possibly go up.