Youth

If someone called you a child or said you were acting like a teenager, how would it make you feel?
Would you be upset? Offended?

Here's a question:
When did youth become an insult?

When we're young, we can be in such a hurry to grow up, to leave that youth behind.
And then when we're older, we look at the children and teenagers in our lives and pat their heads and say they don't understand yet or roll our eyes at one of their emotional outbursts.

But I think we're forgetting one crucial point:

Everyone's thoughts and feelings are

 just as real and valid to them

 as yours are to you.

Just because the things that are devastating to a child seem small to you, doesn't mean that they aren't truly devastating to that child. Just because a teenager's heartbreak is not nearly what she will experience in five years, doesn't mean it isn't the most painful thing she's felt so far.

We need to stop discounting and dismissing the thoughts and feelings of youth.

I was recently organizing my room and came across some old writing I'd done. There was a line from one poem that hit me and made me just sit for a while:

"Even the skeletons in the closet can support us and be the frame we're built on."

I wrote that when I was 15 years old.

To often, we forget what we were like when we were younger. We focus on our mistakes, on what we didn't know, instead of our beautiful minds and the depth and breadth of the thoughts we had.

As a child, our actions or words may not quite fit into the traditional mold of an adult world, but the intentions behind them are as valid as the intentions behind what we do as adults.

Children have a special gift for observation, a deep capacity for love,

 and a mind filled with unending wonder.

Teenagers have their own opinions of the world around them, and how it can or should change. They adapt, they react, they persevere. They are faced with so many challenges and voices each day, and they suit up and face them again and again and again.

Instead of dismissing a youth's thoughts or feelings as trite or naive, we need to treat them as valid - because they are.

Instead of looking back at our past selves and scoffing at what we used to think, we should try to rediscover that youth inside us.

There's a reason that Jesus asks us to become like a little child, 

There's a reason that marvelous things can come from the mouths of babes.

There's a reason God trusted Mary, Samuel, and Joseph Smith at a young age.

Youth is not time spent trying to get to adulthood.

Youth is precious and valid all on its own.

So no more putting down your younger sister's tearful breakdowns as overdramatic.

No more dismissing the amount of homework your little brother has.

No more writing off the over-the-top dreams of your child as irrational.

If we continually make youth feel like their opinions aren't valid, like they don't know enough to make their own conclusions, like their thoughts are naive and lack understanding, 

they will grow up believing us.

So next time a child tells you of their dream to live in a chocolate house,

 ask them to explain why they want to.

Next time a teenager storms off saying you don't understand,

 follow her and calmly and genuinely try to see her side.

Next time you get caught up in a past mistake you made,

 remember your intentions at the time and how you used that mistake to grow.

Let's celebrate youth instead of dismissing it.

Let's learn from children instead of 

insisting they don't understand yet.

Let's hold our sisters and brothers and children close and let them know that their feelings matter.