The hypothesis in our book Anna, Age Eight is that if communities ensure that all families have access to ten vital services, we will significantly decrease ACEs and increase health, safety and resilience. One of those sectors is youth mentors. What follows is our book’s segment of the vital role of a mentor in the life of a child.
Good youth mentors take on a sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi role, minus all the violence and interstellar travel. They can throw a psychological lifeline to kids in this tense and stressful situation. They come from the brave new world of Your Future bearing glad tidings of what life is like when you do not live under mom’s roof. They are exhibits of the sweet freedom to come, but also models of how to relish it with responsibility and ethics. On their best days, they understand you in ways that mom (or your adoptive aunt and uncle) can’t.
We generally talk about youth mentoring as if it were a nice, pleasant, anodyne thing to do. Hang out with some kid and play board games or do crafts a couple of times per month, and in exchange you will bubble over with good vibes for having made an “impact.” But this understates the case. Youth mentors save lives.
Not in obvious ways, of course, and not often literally, and not every time. But youth mentors can serve as guardrails for life. On their best days, they are anchors of stability in an unsettled world. They are windows that look out onto the vast possibilities of life after the parental police state. They are people we wish to become. They are a combination of coach and therapist and confidant. They are givers of occasional advice, and while it may not sink in right away, it often sticks in the long term somehow. Often, this advice isn’t even spoken: The mere presence of a stable adult who maintains healthy relationships with their peers and holds down a good job stands as a secular version of Saint Francis’s admonishment to preach the gospel every day, and to use words when necessary.
There’s one more annoying detail about the concept of youth mentoring in the popular imagination. Somehow, we have come to think of it as something that is done for the benefit of poor children. While this is not untrue, it negates the reality that kids from resourced households benefit greatly from youth mentoring – we just don’t call it that.
Perhaps you had, all things considered, a great childhood. Odds are good it was still marked by intense confusion, stress, and insecurity. School is awful, parents are clueless and mean, romantic relationships are scary, life is just so intense, and that’s the best case scenario. What made it better, or at least tolerable? Youth mentors by another name.
Maybe it was the family across the street that adopted you for entire weekends so you could get away from your own and imagine the vast possibilities of life. Maybe it was an aunt or uncle to whom you could tell secrets, or maybe they just represented some ideal that you didn’t see at home and found comforting. Maybe it was a good teacher. Maybe some family friends moved to another state then arranged for you to come visit and do grunt work on their home construction project, opening up further possibilities. These are just a few of the experiences and relationships we have had personally, and we shudder to think of what life would have been like without them.
MY MOMENT OF TRUTH
For years, I traveled the country on a breakneck schedule, talking about ACEs, trauma, and creating family-friendly cities in general while evangelizing for youth mentoring in particular. While I didn’t work for Big Brothers Big Sisters, I would still happily tell anyone who would listen that volunteering with them was one of the best things a person could possibly do.
The “day of reckoning” moment about my own lack of volunteering was probably inevitable. After some interior back and forth, I took the plunge.
I ended up being matched by Big Brothers/Big Sisters with a shy 14-year-old who first appeared in an oversize dark sweatshirt that barely revealed the bottom half his face. He was an insightful young man with a quiet keen intellect. And spending time with him has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. We took long strolls through Santa Fe on Saturday afternoons, having colorful conversations about his growing up in rural New Mexico, sharing a house with five siblings, and responding to the attention of girls. We visited a college of design, library and art galleries. We both shared a love of tech and scary movies. I was also able to help with his school work, and learned a lot about how the system can let a brilliant young person (with high marks in math and engineering) struggle with the other topics without so much as a parent-teacher conference initiated. Being a mentor has been one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. If could be for you, too.
Youth mentors are one of ten vital sectors we are strengthening to end ACEs in New Mexico and Kentucky through our Resilience Leaders program. The sectors include behavioral health care, medical care, housing, food, transport, parent supports, early childhood learning programs, family-centered school, youth mentors and job training. To learn more about ensuring youth mentors for every youth as part of data-driven and cross-sector ACEs prevention, please download free-of-charge Anna, Age Eight. www.AnnaAgeEight.org
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