Maybe what some teens need is a little rumspringa. Among some of the Old Order Amish — the plainly dressed country people who ride in horse-drawn buggies in various parts of North America — there is a tradition known as rumspringa, which means “running around.” Tom Shachtman writes in his book (called, simply, Rumspringa) “during rumspringa, Amish youth…go on their own in the outside world. They have license to do things they have never done before. An individual’s rumspringa ends when he or she agrees to be baptized into the church and to take up the responsibilities attendant on being an adult member of the Amish community.”

Shactman says, “The Amish count on the rumspringa process to inoculate youth against the strong pull of the forbidden by dosing them with the vaccine of a little worldly experience...there is no firmer adhesive bond to a faith and way of life than a bond freely chosen.”

And it seems to work — more than 80 percent of the Amish youth who go through the rumspringa experience do return to the church.

Questioning beliefs

Those statistics may provide some reassurance to parents of more mainstream religions who find their teens questioning the religious beliefs they were brought up in.

Many teens announce they don’t want to go to church anymore, or decide to check out other religions, and it’s hard for parents to know the best way to respond.

This questioning time, says Robin Everall, professor of counselling psychology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, is “an expected part of adolescence. As a child, you’re told what to believe and how you fit into the institutions you belong to. But teens are trying to understand why they believe what they believe, and they need to analyze it in a different way than they did as a child.”

Everall adds that adolescent development is not as predictable as, for example, the stages that toddlers go through. “So one teen may be rethinking and questioning religion at 13, while another might not start to consider these issues until he’s 21 or 22. You can’t just compare your teen to other teens you know.”

Originally published in Today's Parent, April 2008