Guest Post: Are Your Teens Stressed Out?

Whenever I work with youth, I hear from them and their youth ministers that they are stressed out. Youth face pressure to succeed in their academics, their sports, and their social lives. Once they (and their parents) begin considering college, the pressure for scholarships and admissions letters increases. We face a youth mental health epidemic, with anxiety and depression on the rise across the country.

I see youth workers continually stuck on how to help these teens. All the usual methods – praying with them, listening to them, even helping with homework, feel like band-aids, and do little to solve the deeper issues. While some students face clinical depression or anxiety, and their best solution is a trained psychologist, what most of our anxious students need is a framework within which to order their lives.

The Problem With Our Current Framework

Our students are working under the materialistic, success-driven, individualistic framework of our American culture that tells them to be successful, to be worthy of love, to experience happiness; they need to get the best grades, get into the best college, get the best-paying job, and so on. It’s about being the best and maximizing your career (read: money-making) opportunities.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with success, the Bible tells us many times that the love of money is dangerous to our spiritual health (1 Timothy 6:10, Luke 16:13). In Matthew 13:22, Jesus tells us about a seed sown among thorns that are choked out by the concerns of the world (success) and the deceitfulness of wealth. How many of our students don’t have time for Mass or youth group (the practice of the faith) because they are seeking success through sports or academics?

In Matthew 19:21-22, we hear of the rich young man who Jesus called as a follower. The young man could not bear to give up his riches and worldly success. This is striking. Jesus calls us to give up good things to follow Him towards better things. How can you make sure your students understand the reality that that choice will come to them during their lives, and how can you prepare them to respond “yes” to God?

A Catholic Framework

In Matthew 6:24, Jesus tells us that you can’t serve both money and God. A Catholic framework rests on the fact that God is our highest priority. Everything we do should point to God. St. Augustine talked about “rightly ordered loves,” meaning we love God first, and everything else is a means to love God. St. Augustine doesn’t mince words: if our love terminates at a worldly thing, even a good thing, that thing is an idol. We avoid idolatry by using the things of the world as ways to love God.

We love our family, friends, and neighbors because God loves them, not because of what they do for us. We love them in a way that seeks their highest good – holiness.

We love academics because it is the pursuit of God’s truth, not because A’s make us worthy of love or grant us admission into elite colleges. We love sports as a means to stay healthy, to encourage our teammates, and to build the virtues of perseverance and fortitude, not because we seek fame and riches playing professionally. We love music and art because of the love of beauty, which originates in the person of God, not because of the scholarships we might receive.

Ordering our lives is a lifelong process, but without the framework of God as the highest good in life, our teens feel lost and anxious as they try to succeed to prove their worth.

Incorporating This Into Your Program

You should directly teach this idea, using any of the Bible verses I have mentioned or quotes from St. Augustine himself. But here are other ways to integrate this into your ministry.

• Have your teens create charts ordering their lives. Encourage them to put God at the top, then leave the rest up to them. Challenge them to draw arrows from each item towards God and to articulate how those items are an expression of their love for God.
• Use the stories of the saints to teach on radically ordering our lives. St. Anthony gave everything away to the poor to order his life. St. Therese of Lisieux gave up a comfortable life for a cloistered convent. Saints become Saints by rightly ordering their lives towards God.
• Host a “College Discernment Night” with high schoolers. Talk about their values – family, faith, academics, sports, etc. Discuss how the college decision is based on a myriad of values. Make it interactive, with students writing down their top 5 values or describing their dream college. You may consider inviting parents, but be sure the teens have space to think before discussing.
• Have middle and early high school students order their values and discuss how they live those out in high school. Talk about how secular activities can build virtue. Most students believe that everything they do is for a college application because there is no other framework offered. What if, instead, everything they do is to build virtue?
• Teach regularly on the virtue of simplicity, especially in wealthy areas. How does simplicity lead to freedom to love God and people, rather than objects? How do we practice simplicity?

Brooke is a cradle Catholic who has done a bit of everything in Youth Ministry – summer camps, high school campus ministry, parish ministry, youth conferences, etc. Currently, she lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and works at a Classical Catholic school teaching second and third grade. She loves her job because she gets to go to Mass every day and teach about Medieval Saints. You can find her at