Star-Struck Teens

Celebrities influence what we do, buy, and say from fashion trends to music to clichés to destructive behaviors. They are trendsetters. They teach teens to be cool and how to succeed. They have the very things most teens want: power, money, freedom, sex, clothes, toys, and a whole lot of (perceived) fun!

The question is, do today’s celebrities serve as a more positive or negative role model? If a teenager learns behaviors enabling him or her to make productive and positive choices more easily and more often, that’s a good role model. Most parents agree, however, positive role models are hard to find in the entertainment, sports, music, and political industries.

Adolescents are very impressionable, and young adults often leave the strongest impressions on them. Celebrities who are perceived as rebels, breakers of rules, or outcasts that made it are alluring. Those types of celebs can easily become an object of affection. Take Lady Gaga—she is an idol for kids who feel like they're on the fringe. She appears to not care what anybody thinks, and that's an important message for her fans who most likely care what everybody thinks about them. In fact, on Facebook, as of July 2010, she surpassed the ten million mark, the highest number of fans for a living person. The president, Barack Obama, was running second, and Oprah Winfrey third.

Many celebrities are wonderful, gracious people and make a positive impact in our world with their desire to make things better. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to the stargazer, there are far too many awful celebrity role models being emulated with disastrous consequences. It is this type of celebrity modeling we—parents, youth leaders, mentors, and teachers—need be concerned with.

Like cockroaches, the bad role model celebrities find their way into the hidden crevices of life: the computer monitor, children’s schools, college campuses, doctor’s offices, the gym, and the workplace. From print media to radio to television to Twitter, their message is always the same, “It’s all about me.” Not only are celebrities and the pop culture feeding our teens narcissistic messages, but their contemporary brains are massively remodeled by such technological exposure.

Adolescence (from the Latin adolescere meaning "to grow up") is a time of soul searching for identity and acceptance. For many teens today, being famous is an elusive goal. Compared to the generations before, there has been a dramatic shift in the way teenagers perceive success. Pew Research finds 81 percent of young adults say getting rich is their most important life goal; 51 percent say the same about being famous. The voices of influence tell them fame is a cure for all of life's challenges. Searching, they are vulnerable and easily influenced; exposed to unattainable beauty standards, sexual temptations, alcohol abuse, violence, illegal drugs—a variety of toxic influences that threaten to undo all we teach them.

There is hope! Mom and Dad, you have the greatest influence over your children. When asked what influences adolescents the most, more teens answered, “my home,” rather than celebrities, school, friends, religion, music, television, movies, or magazines. Our challenge is to model how we want our teens to behave. They learn not from how we tell them to act but how we act in their presence.

This is an excerpt from my book, Torn Between Two Masters: Encouraging Teens to Live Authentically in a Celebrity-Obsessed World.