Walker Moore, right, and son Jeremiah Moore, on their way up Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.
I sat down this week for a couple hours with Walker Moore, who just got back to Tulsa after carrying a 12-foot cross to the top of the highest mountain in Africa. The story of his trip was fascinating – it will be in Saturday’s paper - but it was a side conversation on the way out the door that intrigued me.
For the past 25 years, Moore has been taking young people on missions trips designed to be a kind of rite of passage to adulthood. He calls them Christian bar mitzvahs.
Unlike most cultures historically around the world, modern American culture does not offer young people a clear path to adulthood, Moore said. As a result, many of them wander around in an extended adolescence that can reach into their 30s.
Sociologists have documented that. They say the transition to adulthood is traditionally marked by five milestones, completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child.
In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had reached all five milestones by age 30. In 2000, fewer than half of women and only a third of men had reached the milestones. Forty percent of people in their 20s move back in with their parents at least once; two thirds of them have lived with an unmarried romantic partner, and they get married an average of five years later than in 1960.
While sociologists may debate whether this “failure to launch” is a reason for concern, most parents would not wish it for their own children.
As Bob Dylan said in the 1960s, "The times, they are a-changing," and not necessarily for the better.
Moore says parents, grandparents and other significant adults can help young people make the transition to adulthood by enabling them to have four essential experiences.
First, young people need a rite of passage, an event in their lives in which they purposefully leave childhood behind and acknowledge that they are now taking responsibility for their lives;
Second, young people need significant tasks, not just busy work, but jobs they know truly contribute to the family’s well-being;
Third, they need logical consequences to their behavior. In his book, “Rite of Passage Parenting” Walker tells the painful story of his teen-age son Caleb’s arrest for drunk driving and eluding police. As a police chaplain who knew the officers, he was given the opportunity to take his son home, but he refused to give him special treatment, and said the police should take him downtown and book him.
Fourth, parents, and especially grandparents, need to regularly make what he calls “grace deposits” in young people’s lives, statements and actions that communicate to the young people that they have intrinsic worth.
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