Making teens self-reliant

Jayanti Roy

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Comments and conversations about slothful, selfish and social media-addicted teens are becoming increasingly frequent as frantic parents, frustrated teachers and frowning society pundits find it difficult to deal with them. This book is there to help teenagers chart their paths in concrete terms to be self-reliant and well adjusted. Parents, mentors and teachers can also benefit from the book in many different ways.

The older generation would remember the Scouts and Guides movement for school students founded by Lieut-Gen Robert Baden-Powell in 1907, which aimed at developing youngsters into holistic personalities with initiative, outdoor skills and independent thinking. Students can join Scouts and Guides only if their schools offer it as an extra-curricular activity. If the schools do not subscribe to the movement, a precious opportunity is lost. This gap is covered by the book which is inspired by the Scouts and Guides movement, borrows from its principles, activities and training format to lay before the teenager a blue print to develop his/her potential, learn relevant skills and sharpen the personality to become a useful and liberal citizen.

For this the teenager will have to create a squad of like-minded peers who are also interested to develop their every day skills, have one squad leader, a mentoring adult, and then take up the challenge of acquiring 99 skills. According to the author, these skills will make them World Conquering Teens or WoCo teens. The skills are further categorised into four covenants — personal development, family and home, community and outdoors. Discussion on skills is followed by a list of challenges that needs to be mastered to win badges and shields and to move ahead. Most of the skills enlisted are quite relevant to the new world youth, attuned to indigenous situations and also useful in the globalised scenario — for this the book should be appreciated. However, an elitist and anglicized bias in selection of the skills emerges as some of the challenges are quite simplistic and are naturally acquired by youngsters coming from less-privileged background. They do not have to go through this fun method of skilling to master these challenges. Hence, the book will resonate more with certain sections of the teens.

The text does have a conversational tone and an easy flow. Interesting facts, illustrations, photographs, quotes pepper the book and add to its attraction quotient. The author has been careful to maintain a tenor suitable to the millennial reader, though at some places it seems a bit condescending and paternalistic. There are certain assumptions and generalisations too, but these can be ignored due to the content which has brought terms like self-reliance, great outdoors and citizenry in the teen vocabulary again. Even if the teens do not follow the exact format prescribed in the book, they, along with their parents and teachers, at least know the skills desirable and achievable for a millennial teen.