The Consequences of a Mentorship Drought

How a lack of basic life mentorship is crippling our young people

Photo by Sweet Life on Unsplash

In my fourth book, which I should be writing right now, Re-Collecting Your Life, I write about a crisis of mentorship that is affecting our society. And I wanted to give you all a preview of some of my thinking on this issue, because I think it’s an issue of grave importance.

I believe we are experiencing a crisis of mentorship in America which has been passed down for generations. I don’t know exactly when things started to shift. It could have been around the time of the Silent Generation, dealing with the trauma of the Great Depression and WWII. It could have been the Boomers with their embrace of individualism can careerism. But at some point, basic life mentorship ceased to be a common experience. As a result, young people (and the rest of us) are largely left to ourselves to figure out how to navigate life. And then we wonder why so many young people are failing to launch!

As I’m using the word, mentorship involves both Christian discipleship and general life advice. You pray and read the bible together, but you also talk about what kind of a career to pursue, how to deal with procrastination, how to talk to someone your interested in dating. And my sense is that while churches still provide some of that discipleship, the broader kind of mentorship I have in mind is largely neglected.

Meanwhile the world has narrowed the use of mentorship to refer almost exclusively to career-optimizing relationships. If you do a search for mentorship, the results will almost exclusively be about career mentorship. Even when searching for an image for this post, the results were mostly pictures of two people looking at a computer screen in a work setting. We have abandoned a robust understanding of the term.