A unique strategy to engage and empower youth

There is an urgent challenge facing young families today. Too many kids in grades 7 and 8 are expressing feelings of hopelessness, some even cultivating suicidal ideations. Too many in early high school gravitate to drugs, toxic social networking, or just hanging out listlessly for comfort and support. For too many, the mental dropout rate is astounding even if there is a physical presence at school. These kids are NOT bad, or lost, or stupid, or sick in need of correction; it is that we are failing them. We give them help after they fall but we still do not know why they are falling.

A Meaningful Life, published by Prometheum Institute, is a new book specifically directed on the vacuum created when adults who do not really know why to live leave their children either to fend for themselves or with superficial ideologies that last only for the moment. There is an accumulating deficit within their very souls while the challenges of life become more imposing and opportunities for escape less accessible. The book, written as a dialogue between a theologian and a doctor, guides readers through a rigorous examination of purpose, identity, and the human spirit, how to help young people to know, appreciate, and build a personal and powerful identity that stays stable in states of turmoil or social upheaval. It does not offer easy answers, simple rules, or religious indoctrination, but leads readers to examine logically and scientifically who they are and why they are.

It is offered to adult caregivers — parents, teachers, counselors, community leaders — who can then discuss its ideas with the young people in their care, but also to the youth who wants to build self-realization. Please read excerpts at https://ameaningfullife.info or download to read at your convenience, evaluate the book, and consider how this resource might serve you as a professional, the families in your care, and the youth themselves. Our youth are in danger — and they deserve more than awareness campaigns, supportive treatment for feelings we do not understand, or emergency responses after the fact. They deserve the tools to build a life of meaning and purpose.

"The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for." Fyodor Dostoevsky. (The Brothers Karamazov)