Lost young people

by Elizabeth

I have come across a number of young people who seem to be unable to move on. We are going through a recession and work is not always available.

Kids go through secondary school without any motivation or idea of what they intend to do when they leave school. They have just gone from day to day bumbling through and doing what they absolutely have to do. School has not really interested them and maybe some of them would have been better to start work and the people employing them be responsible for their training at an earlier stage

There are so many pastimes where they have not had to make any effort or engage in any physical activity, sport or other interests they might have a talent for. When there is dysfunction and lack of communication and togetherness in a home, young people may retreat into their bedroom, and engage in some activity that removes them from the unhappiness they will be experiencing.

The teaching of life skills will be lacking, a lot of young people leave home without knowing how to interact with other people, not knowing how to cook a meal, or do basic housework. They may have learned to do their washing. There may not have been shared family meals where there was shared talk and they have been left to go and help themselves to what they wanted to eat.

Parental guidance of the right kind is not always available, people are busy and concerned with their own problems and not always aware of what children might be going through.

They may be impatient if a child comes to them with a problem and brush it off without stopping to listen, thinking that they cannot be bothered. Later on it occurs to them that the family member has shut off into their own little space and when something has to be done such as leaving school and getting work, they find that their family member is refusing to come out of that space. They are left wondering why they are being faced with a problem of a child who lacks motivation to do something because they failed to have a good communication with them in the first place.

A complete outsider may be the person to finally assist the shut in one, showing them what is outside and helping them to find something they are good at.

No one wants to see a young person ending up in a dead end badly paid occupation because they did not do well at school, or a young woman become pregnant at a stage in her life when she should be studying and doing something towards her future.

There is no need to give up on people who have gone off the rails when they were young and immature. Often, when they have grown up a lot, they have turned up trumps and done better because of the hard lessons they had to learn when younger.

There are a lot of well known and respected people in the media who have gone on to prove themselves. They have found their interests and what they are good at and capitalized on them.

Do we want to see so many lives just wasted because no one cared to help and encourage when it was so sorely needed?

I was in that situation years ago as a teenager and looking back feel that so much more could have been done by family members to help me to move on and grow up when my mother died. It took me years to really find myself.