Jeanne Meijs - You and Your Teenager: Understanding the Journey

In anthroposophical understandings of the human being, a distinction is made between the physical body, the soul and the I. (Life forces, or the etheric body, are another element, but these are not dealt with in detail in this book.)

The soul holds all the impressions we have of the world and the people around us, all our cultural influences and habits our thinking and feeling and will.

Our I is our spiritual and moral centre, the part that makes judgments and decisions, that loves others. The I takes responsibilities and directs all the other parts.

These parts of the human being are important in this book because vital changes occur in the soul and the I during the teenage period of development. Meijs tells us that the tasks of teenagehood are to free the soul, and for the teenagers own I to gradually take over from the parents I the task of directing their life and choosing their future path.

We enter teenagehood with a soul full of influences from the outside from our world and from other people. These are the impressions we have gathered through childhood. Once we are teenagers, we need to free ourselves of the sense of influence from the outside. Much of the behaviour and many of the characteristics we think of as typically teenage are helpfully understood as part of the massive project of throwing out all the soul content we have gathered through childhood, and taking back only what we can make or claim as our own. This project frees the soul, enabling the teenager to become an adult who feels self- determined on the inside.

Our I does not fully develop until the teen years. With its development comes increasing autonomy and the capacity to take responsibility for ourselves, and indeed for others. It is our I, our spiritual core, that knows where and how we will find meaning in life, and so can guide us towards our lifes questions and purpose. This finding of future direction and of a place in wider society is crucial to the later years of teenagehood.

Bringing up a child is a much-discussed undertaking. You begin, but you never know what will be asked of you along the way. It is an undertaking that constantly changes, both in form and content. This is obvious when you look at the concrete situations in which you live together with your child. Every phase of their growth asks something different from you. Moreover, every child has different talents and an individual character, and their unique way of developing and pace of development vary all the time.

How long does it take to bring up a child? Generally speaking, children become independent around their twentieth year. They have left home, they have their own world, and they do not expect nor tolerate their parents acting as their educators.

In some cultures it is still the tradition that sexual maturity signals the time when children are declared to be adults. They are given in marriage or undergo initiation ceremonies that represent the bridge between childhood and adulthood. Puberty and teenagehood with all their trials, risks and challenges, are, in such cultures, reduced to a period of a few days or weeks. The child is taken into the soul of the people or family, and experiences the common soul content as their own. People then live inwardly out of a feeling of we, in which the developments and interests of the group are experienced as their own personal development and interest.

In our culture, children form a more individual soul life in the course of a teenagehood that lasts seven years. This lays the foundation for a subsequent strong, living experience of their own individuality.

Our connection with family and folk is not as close as in those cultures with a brief teenage period. We feel inwardly capable of choices and growth that deviate from the group to which we belong. In our time and culture, we seek a longer, more individuated path of development. And as parents we accompany our children to their life maturity rather than to their sexual maturity.

During their childs teenage years, parents are no longer carried by their maternal and paternal instinct. Your young child can still feel in a sense a part of you, but this is less and less the case during the teenage years. Those who educate and care for teenagers depend on sources of true human love, free of egoism. Depending on pure human love is something akin to walking on a narrow edge you often fall off. When that happens you are lacking in that beautiful, pure strength; your human love leaves you in the lurch, often at times when you desperately need it! This emotional cliff-edge is part of why the teenage period is often experienced as the toughest one by parents and educators.