When they are assailed by despair, young people should let universal concerns into their lives.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Young people should ponder over problems that might confront them and be prepared to cope with them in a way that their parents, their leaders, and their Heavenly Father would have them cope, that they might keep themselves clean and pure.
I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.
What I would say to the young men and women who are beset by hopelessness and doubt is that they should go and see what is being done on the ground to fight poverty, not like going to the zoo but to take action, to open their hearts and their consciences.
So many young people are coming out of a generation that has experienced deep woundedness and brokenness, and they are full of life. They are eager to engage. They care about community, and they care about one another.
Children should always feel like the adults are living in this world to nurture them, to take care of them, to protect them from any bad thing that might come.
Children and teens need to explore the dark side as a healthy part of growing. If a child is protected from everything dreadful, he will have no coping mechanisms in place when finally confronted with disaster.
When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over.
Young people think that nothing bad will ever happen to them.
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
Like children, adolescents need a framework. Otherwise they can't cope. When someone has unlimited freedom, it means there's nobody who cares what they're doing.