It couldn’t be more perfect if it was a full-fledged conspiracy that had the singular purpose of keeping our children helpless.  They simply cannot deal with the unpredictable, the uncharted, the unfamiliar.  We have taken away their capacity to think on their feet.  They have been understood and collaborated with to a point where they are ineffective at navigating even the most innocent of confusing situations.  Their brains freeze up and they lurch to some bizarre response, pursue fight or flight or simply have the deer in the headlights look that says we have enabled them to the point of possible no-return.

Two examples: One young man was ready to leave the program and be employed full-time at a job we had lined up for him.  19 years-old and being given the opportunity to earn $28,000 a year plus benefits.  To see if he was ready, we gave him one last real life test.  It was a Thursday and he had just told one of the staff members that there was no way he would blow this chance.  He came by the office and jokingly said something borderline inappropriate to the boss.  He was immediately confronted and told that he needed to rethink what had just happened and come up with a better response.  He looked lost.  Again, it was demanded that he make a different choice.  Out comes the old behavior - oppositional, screw you, “I have no idea what you are talking about”, you can’t tell me what to do.  One last time, a directive to fix this and still he was blank.  In 120 seconds, he had blown a pretty sweet deal.

Another young man was volunteering at a startup program that had just received funding.  As such, there was no equipment yet, no routine established, no official start date.  His response was to say that the situation was “fishy” - how could a program have no equipment?  It was as if he thought that we are all just dropped into situations where everything we need is already there.  He was literally overwhelmed with the idea that nothing was ready yet and it was going to have to be created each day.  He quit.  Full-time job, money for college, high demand skills being taught, all weeks away, and he could not deal with the uncertainty that it wasn’t there this minute.

We have done this to them.  We have rendered our children impotent in the face of the spontaneous, the unusual, the seemingly incomprehensible.  We have robbed them of what is necessary to be creative, patient, visionary.  What is it that we get out of making our young people helpless?  What grand advantage, what sick rationalization, what pathological need moves us to ensure that our children are ill-equipped to navigate the parts of life that are potentially the most exciting, rewarding, open-ended, change producing?