Our wonderful teenagers

Last week I had the privilege of taking some of my daughter's year 11 English class to the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival. There was a special day for secondary school English students and they listened to three authors present their works and talk about the life of a writer and Ivy Lies talking about writing pop songs. Ivy Lies came to life when they played their music. Obviously happier expressing themselves in music than the spoken word.
But it was also the week when a King's College student drank himself to death, and this week, we learn that another boy from that college has died. Also last week a 13 year old knifed his maths teacher. What's going on with our young people?
I was, I must admit, impressed with the intelligence and depth of the questions asked by the young people at the readers and writers programme. I was impressed with their behaviour. I was completely unimpressed by one of the MCs, who decided telling off colour jokes was appropriate for a secondary schools programme. I don't know the name of the MC, although his face was familiar to me, I think from TV comedy programmes, but his likening of reading to making love to a woman (in graphic detail) and his joke about an octopus and a set of bagpipes (use your imagination) were completely inappropriate, and our lovely Christian College kids were not the only ones gasping in disbelief.
How do I connect this to the horrible events in the news?
I can only conclude that somehow we are selling our teenagers short. We are forcing them to grow up too early. We are teaching them that adult stuff - drinking, sex etc - is fun, and that there is no price to pay. So the young man who drank himself to death was kicking over the traces just one night. He almost certainly had no idea that a bottle of vodka could kill him. Why not? Because we are selling lies about adult vices. We are telling them it's fun, there is no price to pay. They can play in the adult's play pen and not pay a price. And the MC was pandering to this. "Hey kids, I know you really want to be adults so I'm going to treat you like adults. Not like your nasty teachers and parents who want to keep you children."
Research has shown that our brains are not fully formed, not connected up completely, until around 25 years of age. That means that all of our secondary age children are still growing, still susceptible, still able to suffer damage from careless adults peddling adult things. It's time we, as a society, took better care of them.
Someone asked me the other day if I thought I was wrapping may children in cotton wool having them at a Christian school.
My answer is - until they are adults (legally 18, biologically 25) - I am going to protect them from the adults that do not have their best interests at heart, who want to exploit their natural inclination to want to separate from me, to protect them from a society that is determined they experiment and experience everything before they are mature enough to work out what they really want from life.
And I do not apologise.
BTW I know King's College very well. I know that the events of the last week would have had a completely devastating effect upon the community of that school. I know that, as far as it is possible to tell, the events of the last two weeks have nothing to do with the school.