Adolescents are Adults
Mark was president of the youth group at church and had a meeting there in less than an hour. He was still not home from track team practice. He had agreed to tell the coach that he had to leave early so he could be on time to lead the youth group.
Mom and Dad realized that it would be hard for a high school junior to tell his coach that he had to leave practice early. As the minutes ticked away, Mom and Dad became more concerned that Mark be at church for the youth meeting. Finally Dad said, “I’m going to drive over to the school and talk to the coach myself.”
As Dad drove up to the school, Mark was just coming out.
Seeing his father, Mark indignantly said, “What are you doing here? I’m an adult! I can take care of myself!”
“I thought it would be easier for a father to talk to the coach. It’s hard for a team member to tell a coach what to do,” Dad tried to explain.
“You still think of me as a little kid,” said Mark, not quite forgiving his father for not having confidence in him.
Mark’s dad was not alone in thinking of his teenager as a child. Nearly everywhere we turn we see something telling us that teens are children. A cover story of Time magazine (December 9, 1985) was “Children Having Children,” subtitled “Teen Pregnancy in America.” I have seen television broadcasts with the same title on both the local and the national news. The fact is that children cannot have children. Only adults, people who have passed puberty, can have babies.
David Gergen, Managing Editor for News, wrote the editorial, “Childhood Lost” for U.S. News & World Report (October 28, 1985, p. 78). He used the words “child” and “children” eight times in his editorial. In the article he talked about “teenage pregnancies,” “youngsters between 15 and 19,” “America’s 17 year-olds,” “high-school-dropout rates,” “teenage girls,” and people at “their 18th birthday.” Clearly teenagers were children for him.
Leaving K-Mart I picked up a pamphlet put out by the “Lost Child Network.” In large black letters it said, “Please call us if you think you’ve seen one of our children.” Four “children” were pictured, and their ages were five, seven, twenty-two, and twenty-eight. The two older ones had been missing since they were seventeen. Are they children in their twenties, or even when they were seventeen?
As parents, we may look at our adolescents and ask ourselves, “Are they really adults? If they are, why don’t they act like it?” Even though people treated teenagers like adults for thousands of years, teens today just do not act like adults. Maybe teenagers are just maturing earlier sexually, but in other ways they are even less mature than they used to be.
Are They Adults Physically?
In the last chapter we saw that people reach puberty several years earlier than they did a century ago. Perhaps that earlier maturity is only sexual, and other physical developments occur no earlier. That is not the case. Sexual development at puberty, accompanied by the growth spurt, is one of the last physical developments.
You need go no further than your medicine cabinet to see that the pharmaceutical world considers your adolescent an adult. Bayer aspirin has a “children’s dosage” and an “adult dose.” Ages are not given for the adult dose, but the oldest one for children is “11 to 12 years 1 1/2 tablets.” Adults can take 2 tablets, so apparently anyone over 12 years old is an adult. Tylenol has an adult dose of up to 2 tablets and “children (6-12) 1/2 to 1 tablet.” Again people over 12 are adults.
The dosages on decongestants show the problem drug companies have in treating teenagers as adults. Sudafed has a children’s dosage and another one for “adults and children 12 years of age and over.” Robitussin has the same thing. It has a dosage for “children 6 to under 12 years” and one for “adults and children 12 years of age and over.” The phrase “children 12 years of age and over” shows that they consider teenagers as adults physically but not as adults socially.
Restaurant owners realize that children become adults at about the age of twelve. They know that treating adolescents as children would wipe out their profits. Nearly all restaurants charge teenagers adult prices because managers know that teens eat as much as—or more than—other adults. Any mother can tell you that.
Of course, people continue to change physically after puberty. They continue to grow slightly taller even up to about twenty years of age. You are probably well aware that people continue to put on weight through middle age and even into old age. That does not mean that they are not adults until they stop growing. They are physically adults as teenagers, soon after their growth spurts.
Can They Think Like Adults?
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget led the study of the development of thinking. He found that the final change in thinking begins at about the age of puberty (The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence, Barbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, Basic Books). Although not everyone reaches this stage of “formal operations” in which they can think abstractly, those who do enter it begin to do so at the age of eleven or twelve.
Of course, Piaget was not the first one to notice that children and adults think differently. Remember how the Apostle Paul described differences between his childhood and adulthood. “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” (1 Cor. 13:11). Notice that the major differences he mentioned were in language, thinking, and reasoning. In these he went from being a child to being an adult.
School authorities realize this. They do not allow students to take courses requiring abstract thinking, such as courses in algebra and chemistry, until after the average age of puberty. Trying to take these courses too soon can bring disaster. One college student told me, “I took algebra in eighth grade and had no idea what was going on, so I failed it. I repeated it in ninth grade and it was simple. I got an A.” What had happened was that he and matured into the stage of formal operations that year.
Not everyone agrees with Piaget’s stages of mental development, but most agree that few, if any, new abilities appear after adolescence. To meaningfully measure the intelligence of adults, psychologists had to use a whole different approach than they used to measure the intelligence of children. The first successful intelligence tests, shortly after 1900, measured a child’s “mental age” and divided it by his age in years, giving an intelligence quotient, or IQ.
When the early testers measured the IQs of army recruits in World War I, they were shocked. They found an average mental age of only about fourteen or fifteen among the eighteen-year-old recruits. The testers thought the recruits were mentally retarded. Of course, the problem was that little mental growth takes place beyond puberty. Adolescents are adults, not children, in their thinking.
Can They Make Adult Decisions?
Although teenagers were considered able to make important decisions for thousands of years, today we assume they cannot. In 1979 Chief Justice Warren Burger said that adolescents were not able to “make sound judgments concerning many decisions.” He thought of adolescents as being little different from children in their ability to make such decisions.
In spite of this legal opinion, many psychologists have shown that adolescents can make adult decisions. Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg has studied moral development and proposed several levels of it. The highest level of moral development begins to appear only in adolescence. It is not found in ten-year-olds, but begins to appear by the age of thirteen (The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice, Harper & Row).
People at this level of development can make decisions on the basis of moral principles rather than on the authority of other people. Luther was a defensive lineman on his high school football team. When the coach told the defensive team to take the opposing quarterback out—out of the game, not just out of the play—Luther could not follow that order. He could tackle the quarterback, but he would not bring himself to hurt him enough to get him out of the game. Adolescents can make these kinds of moral decisions. Rather than simply obeying people or rules, they can think about other people’s rights and general principles.
Of course, like other adults, adolescents do not make all their moral judgments on the basis of ethical and moral principles. However, adolescents who have matured in their thinking can make moral judgments this way. Even people who disagree with the idea of stages of development would agree that the moral judgments of sixteen-year-olds are very similar to those of older adults, and quite different from those of six-year-olds.
Why Don’t They Act Like Adults?
At this point you are probably thinking, If they can think like adults and make moral decisions like adults, why do they act like children? Why don’t they act like adults? The idea that adolescents should act like children is a part of our invention of adolescence. This began about 150 years ago when educators concluded that it was harmful to mature too early and talked about the “disease of precocity.”
For nearly a hundred years, people believed that if children developed too rapidly they were ill. If children began to act like adults too soon, they could even go insane. Rather than thinking of such children as “gifted,” parents took them out of school and encouraged them to play and do manual labor. They did not want their children to develop the terrible disease of precocity. They did not want “early ripe, early rot.”
Between 1900 and 1920 we even started many organizations to turn adolescents from adults into children. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Boys’ Clubs, Camp Fire Girls, and boys’ and girls’ agricultural clubs are only a few of these organizations. With the invention of these, we officially started calling people in their teens “boys” and “girls.” In our thinking we changed them from adults into children.
Today we just accept the “fact” that adolescents are to act like children rather than like adults, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We do not want them to grow up too fast, so they do not. Some people try to slow adolescent development. For example, Larry Richards wrote:
Unfortunately, our culture forces teenagers’ development too rapidly, especially boy-girl relationships. With my own teens I felt that slowing down adolescence was a positive thing and so I very consciously insulated my teens from the fast pace of growth that adolescent culture assumes.
One way I did this was by not letting them get their driver’s licenses until they were out of high school (“The Stages of Adolescence,” in Parents & Teenagers, Edited by Jay Kesler, Victor Books, p. 157).
We saw the effect of what people expect illustrated dramatically in our community. When our former youth minister’s house was “toilet papered,” he got angry, chastised the youth group as a whole, found out who did it, and made them clean it up. Not another house was toilet papered for three years. When our new youth minister came, he was surprised that the teens were not toilet papering houses. He challenged them to do his house without getting caught. Within a few months, someone’s house was being toilet papered nearly every weekend.
If you expect your teenagers to act like irresponsible children, they will. On the other hand, if you expect them to act like responsible adults, as people did for thousands of years, they will.
Why Are We Always Fighting?
You may have found yourself in repeated conflict with your adolescents and wondered what is wrong with you. Adolescence itself really does involve conflict. The problem is that you probably do not understand the nature of the conflict. You may think that the problem is between you and your teenagers, but your family is only part of a larger problem.
The real conflict is between society and its adolescents. Adolescents are adults, but society treats them like children. Our society has created adolescents but made little provision for them. It has not given them a real role to play. Adolescents are nearly at their peak but not allowed to participate. They are at the starting gate of life with no place to go. Since the gate will be closed for six to ten years, the results of such frustration are predictable.
Such teenagers often become alienated and disliked. Other adults, feeling ill at ease around teenagers, often do not even like to meet a group of teens on the street. They may cross to the other side rather than pass a group of rowdy teens. Parents also feel frustrated because teenagers take time and money, keeping parents from reaching their own goals. Even being a parent of adolescents seems to strike fear into many hearts. A recent book, How to Live with Your Teenagers, is subtitled “A Survivor’s Handbook for Parents.”
Parents have the unenviable position of being frontline troops in this conflict between adolescents and their culture. They are responsible for supporting their teenagers, keeping them quiet, and keeping them in the school system until the adult world has a place for them. The conflict is between adolescents and society, but parents are the focal point. Each adolescent and his or her parents are the available representatives of a larger war.
In the mid 1970s columnist Ann Landers asked her readers, “If you had it to do over again, would you have children?” She was not prepared for more than 10,000 letters, the largest response she had ever received to a question at that time. And 70% said no! The most bitter letters were from parents of adolescents. Formal research has shown similar results about parents being dissatisfied. Boyd Rollins and Harold Feldman (“Marital satisfaction over the family life cycle,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1970, 32, pp. 20-28), both professors in human development and family relationships, studied the satisfaction of nearly 800 couples during eight stages of their family life. The first stage was the beginning family, couples married five years or less without children. The last stage was aging families, couples from retirement to the death of the first spouse. They asked people if their present stage in life was “very satisfying.”
Satisfaction was high in the early years of marriage until the oldest child was two. Nearly 70% of both husbands and wives reported they were very satisfied. After that the decline started. The two lowest times were stages five and six. Stage five was “families with teenagers,” families in which the oldest child was between thirteen and twenty-one. Stage six was “families as launching centers,” the time between when the first child goes until the last one has left home. By stage six, only about 10%reported that they were “very satisfied.”
Satisfaction did not begin to increase until the last adolescent was gone, and it did not reach the levels of the first years of marriage until retirement. Husbands and wives were least satisfied during their offspring’s adolescence. Rollins and Feldman concluded that this was probably more an indication of “satisfaction with parenthood” than of satisfaction with marriage.
Sociologist Karen Renne (“Correlates of Dissatisfaction in Marriage,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1970, 32, pp. 54-67) studied factors that produced dissatisfaction in marriage in more than 5000 married adults. She found the greatest dissatisfaction in homes with “children under 19 present.” The least dissatisfaction was in homes that “had children, but none present now.” That is, parents are happiest after their children leave home, and unhappiest when they are adolescents. At that time the parents are on the front lines of the conflict between adolescents and their culture.
What Can Parents Do?
The basic thing you can do is treat your adolescents like adults. Call them “men” and “women” not “kids.” Let them make decisions as long as they act like responsible adults. Learning to make decisions, like learning to drive, takes practice. Your teenagers cannot learn to make decisions by just watching you make them. Of course, you have to be sure that you act responsibly yourself to serve as a good model for them.
As a young man, Timothy was a pastor. Paul told him, “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity” (I Tim. 4:12). Do you look down on your teenagers because they are young? According to the Apostle Paul, you should not.
As a young man, John Mark had started on a missionary trip with Paul and Barnabas. However, he quit and returned to Jerusalem when they got to Perga in Pamphylia. Paul would not accept such irresponsible behavior even from a young person. Later when Paul wanted to go again, “Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, but Paul did not think it was wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work” (Acts 15:37-38).
Some parents let their adolescents make minor decisions, but not ones that will really affect their lives. For example, they let them decide what to wear, or whether to sing in the choir or not. But when it comes to what courses to take in school, the parents say that the teens cannot make that decision because it really affects the future. We have looked at how teens are mature physically, mentally, and morally, so let us consider the kinds of decisions they can make.
Let them make physical decisions. In terms of physical decisions, allow teens to make decisions about eating and sleeping. As long as they eat nourishing foods, let them choose their own diet. Our own teens cook Sunday dinner on alternate Sundays. They are responsible for everything from planning the menu to cooking the food. If they forget, we all have sandwiches.
It seemed like Gus was always going through the hamburger line for lunch at school instead of going through the regular hot lunch line. Finally, Mom said, “Gus, you need to be more careful to get a balanced diet.”
Gus said, “Mom, a cheeseburger with everything has all four basic food groups.” He was right.
You may be able to get teenagers into bed, but you cannot make them sleep. Rather than getting them into bed early—and angry—we have found it better to let them decide how much sleep to get. Of course, that is true only as long as they get enough to not sleep through school and not be hard to live with. People need different amounts of sleep, and about half need less than the traditional eight hours. One of our teens sleeps about six and a half hours a night, another about nine, and both of those are responsible decisions.
When I was a teenager, the light had to be turned out long before I was ready to go to sleep. Although the ceiling light was out, I had a book and a flashlight under the covers. I do not know how many batteries I drained while reading through those evenings.
Encourage them to make “mental decisions.” Have teenagers make decisions about what they study. Many teens take piano lessons because their parents wish they (the parents) could play. Lois decided she wanted to play the piano. Her parents agreed to pay for lessons as long as she took them for a full year and practiced regularly without complaining. At the end of the year Lois decided she did not want to play the piano after all, and she wanted to quit. Although her parents thought she would be sorry later, they went along with her decision. Adolescents are adults and must learn to live with the consequences of their decisions.
Have teenagers choose their courses in high school as well as college. Point out the advantages and disadvantages of different courses and majors in light of what they want to do, then let them decide. If they make the wrong choice, they live with it and should not blame you. In the high school office a teacher gave us a stunned look of disbelief when she saw us allow our son to choose an elective speech course over an honors English course. As far as we were concerned, the choice was his, and he could always take an English course in the future.
Include adolescents as full adults in conversations when you have guests. Ask their opinions, and respect what they tell you. Adolescents are to be heard as well as seen. We include them in family decisions about vacations and where to eat out. This helps them to learn to make decisions within the limits of a budget.
Adolescents should be expected to take responsibility for many activities in their lives. They can call and make appointments for the doctor and dentist. Everything from decor to cleanliness of their rooms should be up to them, as long as they take it seriously. Of course, if you expect them to clean it thoroughly once a week and keep it generally picked up the rest of the time, you should do the same with the rest of the house.
You should have a will naming guardians for your teens, and the teens should have a voice in the choice. The guardians we had named for our children lived in a different state by the time they became teenagers. We then asked our teens who they would like as guardians, and all three immediately named different families. After nearly two weeks of discussion, they finally settled on one family. When we asked that family, they (including their teens) discussed it and agreed. Since they may have to live with the guardians, teenagers should have a voice in choosing them.
Help them with moral decisions. Your adolescents must learn to make moral decisions as well. Chances to make these are found nearly every time you turn on the radio or television. We and our teens listen to the words of the singer on the radio. Whether to keep listening or not is a moral decision. We ask, “What values is this television show promoting? Are these ones that we, as Christians, can approve?” If not, we make a moral decision to turn it off or change the channel. If you want to go even further, you can write the sponsor and express your distaste.
When your teens choose their friends and leisure activities, they are making moral decisions. When they choose a movie or a party game, they are making moral decisions, and you need to help them see the implications of their decisions. Even how teens drive is a moral decision. If they drive recklessly, they are a danger not only to themselves, but also to others. If our teens drive safely, we encourage it; but reckless driving means loss of the use of the car.
Encourage your teens to see the moral decisions they make (or will soon be making) politically. Some of those are presented as moral decisions, such as laws on abortion or capital punishment. We have some interesting and heated discussions around the table on these issues, and our positions sometimes conflict. In addition, teens need to see that decisions to build a nuclear weapon or even take the curve out of a county road are moral decisions. The money then cannot be used to help others get food or medical care and may result in the destruction of human life.
Adolescents have the ability to make adult decisions. It is the parent’s responsibility to see that the teenagers have all the information they need, and then let the teen make the decision. The only way to learn how to make decisions is to actually make them, and live with the consequences. We must let our teens make important decisions. They are adults and should be treated like adults.
Minimize the Conflict
You essentially have no choice about your assignment to the conflict between adolescents and their culture. Although there will always be some conflict, you can take steps to make it less severe.
One thing you can do is to make it clear to your adolescents exactly what the conflict is. Help them to see that the conflict is not just between you and them, but between their culture and adolescents in general. Make it clear that even though society may see them as children, you see them as adults. Treat them as adults, and expect adult behavior from them.
Tell them that you do not like your situation any better than they like theirs. As one psychologist put it, “Misery loves miserable company.” If they see that you are acting the way you are only because society demands that of you, they will better understand you, just as you better understand them. Neither of you asked to be placed on the front lines of this cultural conflict.
To carry the war analogy a little further, you may have to lose a few battles to win the war. When you have disagreements with your adolescents, they need to win some. Of course, legally you have the power to tell them what to do, but it is better not to use that power too much. If you do, when they turn eighteen and you do not have that power, they may turn against all that you stand for.
Some battles are not worth winning. Remember the parents of the 1960s who won the battle of the haircut, but lost their sons. One woman (wearing earrings in her pierced ears) in my class said, “When I was in high school, I wanted my ears pierced, but my father wouldn’t let me.” Fortunately, that father had not lost the war, but she said it with such intensity that I knew he would have been better off losing that battle.
We lost the battle of “sitting as a family” in church. As parents we thought it important to worship as a family, and to us that meant sitting together. We had always done so. When our children became teenagers, and many of their friends sat together, it became a real issue. After fighting it for a while, we came to a compromise. We sit as a family in the morning service, and anywhere in the evening service. We concluded that it was more important to have them in church with their friends and happy than with us and resentful.
Remember that your teenagers are adults and need to make decisions. As parents you need to let them see you make decisions, make them with you, and finally make them by themselves. If you have been teaching them how to do this as children, now is the time to begin to turn the responsibility over to them. They will make some wrong decisions. As long as these will not have lasting or devastating results, let them make them and learn from them. Of course, if they repeatedly act irresponsibly or are about to make a mistake that will leave permanent scars, step in and stop them. However, before you do, be sure the battle is worth fighting and will help you win the war.
2005 Update
Postmodern Thinking
Postmodern thought is not an intrinsic part of adolescence; however, during the past couple of decades, it has become the way many adolescents think. “Postmodern” does not mean that it developed from modernism; it means only that it developed after modernism. It is a challenge not only to Christian thought, but also to the rational thought of modernism. Like other Christians who grew up during the age of modernism, missionaries are often disturbed when they hear postmodern thought from their children. Of course, we can consider only a couple of the characteristics of such thought here: two basic concepts, truth and tolerance.
First, in considering truth, Christians and modernists alike believe that there is one truth, and that we can find it. Christians believe it is revealed to us by God, and modernists believe that it can be found by observation and reason. Postmodernists believe that truth is a product of each person and his or her own culture. Thus each person constructs his or her own truth and reality within the culture in which he or she lives. Rather than one truth, there are many truths. Furthermore, all of these truths are of equal value so that truth found in the Bible is no more or less valid than what is found on the Internet or what a friend believes.
Second, for postmodernists tolerance is essential since there is no one (absolute) truth, and therefore they insist on treating all truths with tolerance. In addition, for them tolerance means that we must affirm all truths as equally valid. Christianity is truth. Buddhism is truth. What their friend believes is truth. All these truths are equally valid. A cardinal sin in postmodernism is to say that your truth is better than another person’s, and you are an arrogant bigot if you believe you have the only Truth. There is no Truth, only truths.
In a paper written by a non-Christian postmodern student in a Christian college the student said, “Still, however, I am told that refusal to maintain faith in this invisible character will result in eternal damnation. At least if I let myself down I won’t spend an eternity in pain and suffering. Christianity, at this point, seems more intolerant and judgmental than any ideology I wish to be associated with.” Of course, the “invisible character” is God. Notice that since this student creates his own reality, if he does not believe in God and hell, he will not go there for eternity. If he does not believe in hell, it does not exist! He may disappoint himself, but he will not go to hell.
Of course, postmodern thought impacts every aspect of our lives. Some titles available from a state university press are:
God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology
The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals
Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology
Postmodern Politics for a Planet in Crisis
Spirituality and Society: Postmodern Visions
Sacred Interconnections: Postmodern Spirituality, Political Economy, and Art
Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration
This book is not about postmodern thought, but the philosophy has a profound influence on several areas vital to adolescents, the first of which is morality.
Moral Choices
Although adolescents have an adult’s capacity to make moral choices, many postmodern teenagers (even churched ones) no longer have any absolute standards of right and wrong. In the 1990s Josh McDowell and Bob Hostetler, under the supervision of the Barna Research Group, surveyed 3795 adolescents attending youth groups in 13 evangelical denominations (Right from Wrong: What You Need to Know to Help Youth Make Right Choices, Word). They asked 193 questions about a wide range of topics, but a few relate to morality.
Among these churched youth, 86% said that that “reliable” accurately described them, and 60% said that “high integrity” accurately described them. However, 66% of them said that during the last three months they had “lied to a parent, teacher, or other older person, and 59% they had “lied to one of your friends or peers.” It is little wonder that 70% agreed with the statement “What is right for one person in a given situation might not be right for another person who encounters that same situation.” Such statistics are rather abstract, but since each person constructs his or her standards of right and wrong, students in my classes at the turn of the century provide clear examples.
Students in my statistics class had to repeat the calculation part of each test until they could do it correctly. Each test asked them to do exactly the same calculations, but the computer generated hundreds of versions—each with different numbers—along with the correct answers for each version of the test. I gave all students a sample version of the test in their syllabus so they could practice doing the calculations. Students picked up the actual test at my office, took it to the computer center to do the calculations, and then returned it to my office when they completed it an hour or two later. If they did not do the calculations correctly, I returned their tests with the correct answers, and they could repeat another version again the following days until they could do them correctly.
Since one student had difficulty, I had found a tutor for him. One day after the student had turned in a perfect test on the first try, I ran into the tutor and congratulated her for the fine job she was doing since the student had just turned in the perfect test. The tutor said she had just spent the last hour tutoring him, and they had worked through a test—one with the exact numbers on the test I had given him as the actual exam. When we confronted the student, he said that he did not get help on the test I had given him. He had made a copy of that test and had the tutor help him on the copy. After that he put the copy away and did the test I had given him without any help. Since I had faced similar postmodern thinking before, I had a paragraph in the syllabus covering the situation, and he agreed to take the stated penalty. However, he wanted to be sure I understood that he had not cheated since he did not get help on the test I had given him. He only got help on the copy he had made. He maintained that his conscience was clear and was deeply hurt that I thought he had cheated.
Another example took place in a discussion about euthanasia and suicide in my developmental psychology class. Although other students were involved in the discussion, the part between me and one female student went something like this:
Me: If someone is old, sick, in pain, and wants you to take his or her life, is it all right to do it.
Student: Yes, it is all right.
Me: You mean it is OK to kill someone.
Student: Yes, there is a difference between killing and murder, and it is OK to kill people but not to murder them.
Me: Please explain the difference between killing and murder.
Student: If people want to die and you take their life, that is killing and it is OK. If they do not want to die, it is murder and that is wrong.
Me: Someday you may be a psychologist and if you kill all your depressed patients who want to die, that will seriously decrease your income.
Student: No, I would not kill them because there is a difference between physical pain and psychological pain. It is OK to kill them if they are in physical pain, but not psychological pain because they can be helped with that.
Me: Then it is OK to kill people who are in physical pain and want to die?
Student: Yes, if their quality of life is bad enough…
The discussion continued along these lines, but others in the class did not disagree with her—that would make them intolerant. Someone mentioned that perhaps we could look to see what the Bible had to say about it, but no one followed up on that. Remember that what the Bible has to say is no more valid than what the student had to say. During the discussion I remember thinking, “I’m 60 years old. In another 20 years I’ll be 80 and perhaps in a nursing home. These people will be in their 40s and perhaps in charge of the nursing home. I’m going to be really careful what I say.”
During the discussion several people wanted to talk about suicide, but I said that I wanted to talk just about euthanasia first. We would talk about suicide later. Finally, when we had finished talking about euthanasia, I said we could talk about suicide. The conversation with this same young lady went something like this.
Me: If you are old, sick, in pain and your quality of life is very bad, is it OK to kill yourself?
Student: (emphatically) NO! It is WRONG to kill yourself!
Me: You mean that is OK to kill someone else who is old, sick, in pain, with a poor quality of life—but it is not OK to kill yourself in the same circumstances?
Student: Yes.
Me: How can that be?
Student: If you kill someone else, then everyone is happy. The person got what they wanted, and their family is glad that they are not suffering. If you kill yourself, then your friends and family will feel really bad. It’s wrong to kill yourself.
When Moses was first presenting the Law, he said, “You are not to do as we do here today, everyone as he sees fit” (Deut. 12:8). However, things had not changed much, even in the time of the Micah, “In those days Israel had not king; everyone did as he saw fit” (Judges 17:6). It was still like that in the very last chapter and verse of the book, “In those days Israel had not king; everyone did as he saw fit” (Judges 21:25). It seems like it is still that way today.