Building Trust With Our Youth

Exaltation is a pathway of the Collective

Of the many explanations and definitions of Eternal Life, perhaps the most significant realization of recent memory is the lack of individualism in the Celestial Kingdom. The concepts of rugged individualism and complete independence are merely checkpoints along the celestial journey.

When Joseph Smith saw the Father and the Son, they were accompanied by a myriad of angels. When a baby is blessed, it is a collective. I remember Ross Farr, while blessing his child, once invited all Melchizedek Priesthood holders in the ward to join him on the stand. Ross will always be part of a large and entertaining collective.

The saving ordinances required for exaltation are all performed in the collective. When you are baptized, it requires an interview with the Bishop, a baptizer and two witnesses. Each saving ordinance requires others to be part of the process. The power of the Priesthood and Motherhood requires the act of service to be given to another. Neither can be magnified in isolation.

The endowment probably requires the highest numeric count when the whole of the process is considered. Joseph Smith explained that when exalted we will experience the same type of social infrastructure as we currently enjoy. (DC 130:2) This means families, couples, wards, quorums, knitting groups, running clubs, paint ball teams, business tribes, and book clubs. But I do not believe there will be political parties.

The Dependency Cycle

This leads me to understand that the sole purpose of parents and leaders is to teach our children the doctrines and skills of interdependency. Upon birth, unlike the animal kingdom, humans are born with an immature brain. Scientists argue this is to protect the mother from permanent harm when the infant passes through the birthing canal.

I admit, after witnessing the birth of five boys, the very concept of childbirth defies my capacity to comprehend. I’m eternally grateful I was born a male.

At birth, the child is completely dependent upon the mother or father, preferably both. For the next two years, the brain grows at a rapid pace, and then tapers off for another 20 years or so. Full maturation doesn’t occur until about age 26 and in some cases, present company included, that time frame is wholly insufficient.

By age two, the independent drive has begun. We’ve all experienced the delight of watching a two-year old fight for their space. “No me do,” is a common reaction when we try to help the child. This is a period of strong bonding and is accompanied by the chemical oxytocin in both parent and child. It creates the trust and home base of safety for the child.

This security base allows the child to venture into the world of independence. The teenage years are the drive of independence at full throttle. They are critical, but if thwarted by unskilled parents, leaders, or abusive adults, it can lead to a lifetime of pain, remorse, anger, and addiction.

Booster rockets are needed to propel the child from each stage to the next. You are familiar with the term: “Cut the apron strings.” It is a metaphor for allowing the child to escape dependency and enter independency. When a parent cannot let the child go, it creates a codependent relationship and it cripples the ability for either person to achieve independence.

Typically when this happens, the addiction of codependence surfaces. It has the potential to accompany parent and child into every subsequent relationship, including marriage, and therefore dam the person’s ability to achieve the God-like trait of interdependence or the ability to function in the collective.

As I bracket the age group of each cycle, keep in mind that the most productive space between two people is “Emotional Intimacy.”

Age Brackets in the Dependency Cycle

Here are the age brackets in the Dependency cycle. From…

0 – 8 a parent can get by with poor parenting skills and by bossing, telling, demanding, manipulating, and persuading. That doesn’t mean it won’t matter. On the contrary, according to Dr. John Medina, if you don’t teach your children, show the appropriate love, and bond with your children, during the early months and years, the damage maybe permanent throughout their life.

9 – 12 the parent must move from telling the child what to do, to teaching. Teaching means to delegate thinking to the child through questions. It’s during this stage that the skills of emotional intimacy must be learned. There is great risk in not accomplishing this before 13.

13+ at this point, the internal drive for independence is fully engaged. The child no longer needs the parent’s advice because a large supply of it is available in the free market and free market advice doesn’t come with strings attached, only consequences.

By the time the child matures into an adult, he is ready to culminate in the optimal space of happiness, interdependence. There is a mandatory sequence in this process; you cannot become interdependent without first becoming independent.

Rules of Engagement: for dealing with our youth.

1. Independence is not isolation.
2. Trust our youth to make good decisions.
3. Listen, no unsolicited opinions.
4. Teach don’t tell.

Independence does not equal Isolation

Since salvation is through the collective, and you cannot skip the Independent Cycle, how do we maximize the probability that our youth will achieve Interdependence?

Rule #1:             Independence is not isolation.

Almost 20 years ago, a young man, I’ll call him Kit, moved into my ward. I was the YM President and I was also his Home Teacher. I’d heard many stories about this young man. He ran away from home at an early age, his home life was stressful, and full of abuse. He was raised in the church, his parents were divorced, and his mother was now trying to raise her four children alone. He’d been living on his own for about two years.

Kit attended church the first few weeks out of compliance to his mother, but on the third or fourth Sunday, he didn’t show up for Sacrament meeting. I called him from the wall phone in the foyer and woke him up.

I invited him to Priesthood. He said he was too tired. I told him about the lesson. He was still too tired. I then informed him that Rick and Jace had been dispatched to bring him to church. He said that wasn’t fair and that he’d be ready in five minutes. I smiled and hung up. Rick and Jace were both starting offensive and defensive lineman for the local High School football team.

That Sunday, after church, the boys came over to our house to finish the lesson, a tradition that spanned over six years. That night I had a chance to interview Kit about his family and his attitude toward the church.

When asked about his feelings toward the church, he indicated they were not favorable. He’d been criticized, ridiculed, and judged by his leaders and ward members back home for things they knew nothing about. He felt the members were hypocrites for preaching a certain behavior in church and acting in opposition to their preached word in real life.

I asked: “How do you feel about the Book of Mormon?”  “I dunno” he responded.

“How do you feel about the Prophet,” I asked? “I hate the prophet and every prophet who has ever lived” he reacted harshly.

“Why,” I asked? “Because every time my mom wants me to do something and I question her motives or reasons, she responds, ‘because the prophet said so.’ I don’t care if the prophet is right or not, he’s of no value to me.”

Laman and Lemuel didn’t much care if Nephi was right either. Neither wanted to listen to their younger brother. The same scenario occurred to Joseph, whose brothers were responsible for him being sold into Egypt.

These stories are about grown men, who, for one reason or another, chose a dark path of limited awareness. They chose isolation from the light of Christ and the Spirit of God. Kit was on the path of isolation, not independence. Isolation removes all blessings of the gospel and it’s a recipe for misery.

Our young men, in large percentages, also choose darkness over light and I can’t help but think much of it is preventable if parents and leaders possessed the requisite skills to reach out and develop trust and respect. Instead, we try to build rapport, relate, preach, persuade, and manipulate the youth into fitting our version a young man.

When a youth commences the path to isolation, something is amiss at home. Trust has either been violated or abandoned. The primary source of growth, stability, love, teaching, and intimacy is the home. But when the home system fails the child, the Lord has put safe guards in place. In fact, multiple layers starting with Home and Visiting Teachers, youth leaders, Sunday School teachers, seminary teachers, and ultimately the Bishopric.

Rule #2            Trust our youth to make good decisions

Most adults fear teenagers. We don’t know how to talk to them or how to communicate with them. Watching the typical adult converse with a teenager is like watching myself asking a girl to dance when I was 14 at my first stake dance.

Here is a typical discussion I overhear in the hallways, foyers, and interviews:

PL            Good to see you, Phil. How ya doing with school?

Phil            Fine.

PL            So you’re a priest now, you’re planning on serving a mission aren’t ya?

What is Phil supposed to say? He is backed into a corner. This is called manipulation and it’s about being right. The adult is asking a rhetorical question and expecting the right answer. This is not giving the young man a chance to become independent. He is expected to act a certain way without the opportunity to make the decision himself.

We each have a stewardship to know our youth. This isn’t a job for somebody else. Somebody never comes through. Here is the WHAT of the doctrine, we are each our brother’s keeper. We are each responsible for knowing our youth, talking to them and listening to what they say.

How many of us are guilty of judging a young man because he has long hair? Or facial hair, or his clothes are not up to speed with church standards? Brethren when you stand in judgment of a Young Man, you cannot hide it. It’s like bad breath on fast Sunday and no quantity of breath mints will cover the odor.

Without attempting to be overly judgmental, I wonder how many young men in our stake in the past two weeks has had a dialogue with an adult, any adult, where the adult actually listened without judgment, without expression of an opinion, and without relating?

Rule #3            Listen, no unsolicited opinions.

Here is a typical PPI dialogue

Leader:             So Ralph, how are you?

Ralph:                        Fine.

L:            How’s the family?

R:            Fine.

L:            Your folks ok?

R:            Yea, they’re not bad. Mom’s been a little sick.

L:            What’s she got?

R:            I dunno, some flu stuff that’s going around. My brother is on some anti-biotics for bronchitis, so I guess she got it from him.

L:            Yea, my kids have all been getting the flu as well. In fact, my nephew was hospitalized over the weekend.

STOP! Did you notice what just happened? Who is the discussion about now?

When we, as leaders, are more concerned with being heard, we cannot develop trust with our youth. We are too busy getting them to listen to our stories, our wisdom, and eventually our advice. This may sound harsh, but it doesn’t matter how right you are in your advice or chastisement, if the person to whom you are directing your righteous thoughts doesn’t trust and respect you. They won’t listen.

Being present is part of listening. Remember the story of Elder Hales and his grandson? As grandpa Hales sat down to read the paper, his young grandson jumped into his lap. Grandpa Hales remembers hearing the sweet sound of his grandson’s voice in the background when suddenly two tiny hands cupped his aging face. Pressing his tiny nose to grandpa, his grandson questioned: “grandpa, are you in there?”

The most productive space between two people is “Emotional Intimacy.” The only way to get emotional intimacy is through mutual trust and respect.

Trust

Trust is a confidence in and a reliance on the integrity of another person. Trust is a quality that must be given away before you can acquire it. In a relationship, you develop trust by giving something away. By exposing yourself in small incremental amounts, you develop trust. Think of it like getting immunized.

Trust is discovered and decided based upon intuition. It’s an educational process of risking your feelings, an amount of money, your time, or your safety and receiving a return on your investment. As trust matures, it becomes a combination of power from both the emotional and rational sides.

When you interview a youth and give him undivided attention, it’s worth more than gold. Gold you can replace. Time, especially undivided time, is priceless. You invest your time and attention in the youth. If you are not there, or you are more interested in being heard or being right, the youth will sense it and will tune you out.

Rule #4            Teach don’t Tell.

When parents are proficient at the telling game, their children will check out around age 10 or 11. Experts have discovered that children at this age commence a search to discover if anyone knows them. When they learn that nobody really cares about them, they slip into mild depression. By age 14, they give up hope that anybody will ever know them, so they develop compensating skills to insert themselves into the world.

Addictions found in adults are usually a result of childhood experiences. Being addicted to pornography isn’t a sexual weakness of less valiant Priesthood holders; it is almost always a function of abusive parents, abandonment, inexperienced parents and leaders, neighbors, or some event that triggered a high susceptibility to the addiction.

Pornography, like any substance, does not create addiction. Most people who take pain medication do not become addicted. Addiction, by definition, is a dysfunctional way to avoid pain. Environmental experiences predispose us to addiction.

We often treat such people (addicts) with disdain and judgment. According to Ether 12:27 everyone in this room has an addiction. Some of your addictions do not require the strength of a large collective like the Addiction Recovery Program, however, each us of requires the healing processes of the Atonement and we cannot break out of the addiction without His power.

The most powerful tool against losing our youth is our ability to develop mutual trust and respect with them. Eternal Life, according to John, is to KNOW God. Why should it be any different with our youth?

You can test the verity of these words through an experiment of your own. The next opportunity you have, visit with a youth and just listen. Don’t offer your opinion, your advice, or your counsel, and by all means, don’t relate to them. Relating is the quickest way to abort or dam a relationship.

Relating changes the focus of attention from them to you and you cannot build trust in a relationship when you continually talk about yourself. I hate to break it to you, but most Young Men don’t care about you or your stories. They listen because they are polite. They are too busy trying to figure out who they are.

You allegedly know, so give them the gift of happiness and your undivided attention and observe how you feel when you finish a discussion without inserting yourself into it. It’s called satisfaction. When you offer unsolicited opinions and advice, you always wish you had said more, or said it different. That is an insatiable feeling and communicating this way becomes an addiction.

Summary

About eight years ago I was on a 20-mile hike with Kit, the same young man from my earlier story. Kit was now a returned missionary, sealed in the Temple to a lovely wife, and with a child of his own. He was serving in a Young Men’s Presidency. Statistically speaking, Kit should be inactive, on his 2^nd or 3^rd marriage, and saddled with multiple addictions due to his family of origin.

On the hike he wanted to know what we did to him that changed his life. I reflected on the collective efforts of a Bishop, the father’s of both Rick and Jace, and the loving spirit that my wife created for all the young men in our home. In gaining permission to share this story, I called Kit yesterday.

He explained that the actual transformation was during a Missionary Preparation class, when his friends, Rick and Jace, along with the other priests of the ward, were not allowed to answer the teacher’s questions because they already knew them. He, Kit, didn’t know any of them. It was a new gospel he had never heard before and it tasted good. He felt important, people cared about him, he wasn’t judged, his leaders listened, and he trusted those leaders.

I can’t help but wonder how many young men we have lost unnecessarily because we don’t develop emotional intimacy with them. The scriptures teach us that love will overcome fear. Love is the first principle of the gospel but intimacy is required for exaltation.

John the Beloved is alone in this penetrating doctrine of salvation: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent.” (John 17:3)

Eternal life is to know our wives, our children, our loved ones, each other, and our youth. To know someone is to be intimate with them. Our path starts with loving our youth and success is when we know them.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.