When you turn on your computer and begin to search the Internet, you start by opening your browser, connecting with your Internet Service Provider (ISP)--unless of course you are fortunate enough to have access to a T-1 or better line or digital modem or cable modem. Yikes, I am overwhelmed already. There are simply too many concepts, definitions and procedures involved with truly understanding computers. However, I quickly understood that if I opened the browser and started searching I could learn lots of usable things fairly quickly.

Adolescents are like computers. The concepts, definitions, and procedures involved with understanding them must be infinite in number and similar to translating Egyptian (for a non-Egyptian) in complexity. They don't come with detailed instructions as to booting them up (or out), placing meaningful information on their hard drives, or cleaning up the programming when it becomes fragmented. Teenagers are humans, ever changing and growing. Guiding and teaching them is far beyond digital data and processor speed.

Understanding either computers or adolescents requires a place to start, one that is not overwhelming. Since my expertise with computers ends with the first sign of trouble in a program, I will stick to adolescence, and even in my chosen field I feel inadequate. As a youth minister, volunteer youth worker, youth speaker, and youth ministry professor, I hope that I can at least get some preliminary understanding out in the open for parents, youth workers, and teachers. You probably won't read anything that you did not already know or suspect. Perhaps the arrangement of the information and the suggested applications to parenting and ministry will prove helpful.

As a youth worker and a parent, I can identify with Charlie Shedd, who has written a number of books on the family. Dr. Shedd said that before he was married he had a wonderful lecture entitled "How to Raise Your Children." When he began working with families who had children, he changed the lecture to "Some Suggestions to Parents." After he was married and had his first child, he changed the lecture to "Feeble Hints to Fellow Strugglers." Then, as his other children came along, he finally stopped giving the lecture altogether. This resource was written for the fellow strugglers who strive to understand adolescents so that they might minister the love of Christ to them.

So let's start by opening the browser. This online resource is written in browser format, so that if you see a definition or concept in blue, you can click the word, and the browser will take you to additional information that may be related to that word or concept. Then you may either keep reading from that place or click the "back" button to return to your previous place. For example, if you wanted to go right to some "Big Questions" circulating about adolescents and their development, you could click on "Big Questions" and go straight to that section to whet your appetite. You would then have the option to click the "back" button on your browser to come back and finish reading this section. Or not.

Be sure to let us know when you discover glitches in one of two areas: the resource did not work like it was supposed to, or there was not enough information on the topic. Either glitch can be corrected if we know about it.

Hopefully, the electronic browser format of this resource will facilitate a few other things as well. You can travel at your own pace, hyperlinking to the glossary or to other chapters as you desire to explore a topic a little further. Some of you are more widely read than I am. If you will contact me (ajackson@nobts.edu) or LifeWay, maybe the addition of new information and the deletion of obsolete information can be done more quickly—in a way that would do justice to the changing landscape of adolescent development. I will continue to admit that I am not an expert—merely one who has worked with and studied adolescents for a few years. It is a goal of this resource that further study and discussion would be initiated among various groups of folk who love, parent, and minister to teenagers.

One more hope that I have for this resource is that it will be for you a sort of index to mile markers. I am also aware that occasionally the pace of life is so fast and that our youth are growing up so quickly that we lose sight of where we (and they) are—somewhat like a long car trip where you have been driving so long that you have lost track of how long you have left to go and even if you are "making good time." Plugging in to the prevalent research while still anchored to biblical wisdom may help to give you a sense of the boundaries of the normal. Happy traveling!

Allen Jackson
New Orleans Seminary
©2000