(Oronde Cruger, Consultant, Public Speaker, and Executive Director at Speak About It)
One in seven adolescents globally lives with a mental health condition, according to the World Health Organization. Anxiety, depression, and behavioral disorders have become significant sources of illness among young people, placing increasing pressure on families, schools, and health systems to respond.
Yet much of the language around youth well-being still begins with the same instruction: make better choices. Make safer choices. Know the risks. Think about the consequences. The advice sounds straightforward until it reaches a young person whose circumstances make the supposedly healthy option difficult to reach.
A teenager may know that a relationship is unhealthy and still feel unable to leave it. They may understand that asking for help matters while having no adult they trust enough to approach. They may have access to more information about sex, identity, and relationships than previous generations ever did while feeling less certain about what to do with it. Information can answer a question. It cannot always change the conditions surrounding it, nor can it tell them what to do once they have it.
Youth health education has long placed considerable emphasis on preventing harm, from unsafe sex and substance use to unhealthy relationships and poor mental health outcomes. Prevention matters. Yet surviving a situation and thriving within one are different experiences. The harder question is what young people need around them for healthier decisions to become realistic in the first place.
Oronde Cruger has spent 16 years working in relationships and health education, examining that question through a public health lens. An educator and speaker with a TEDx background, Cruger is currently studying public health at Johns Hopkins with a focus on adolescent health. His work through Speak About It has increasingly centered on what young people, particularly those carrying trauma or navigating marginalized identities, need to move from surviving to thriving.
“It’s partially about asking the question, ‘Why are they making the choices they’re making?’ But I also think that it’s looking at pieces of their identities and their previous experiences and the way that we, as the adult supporters of young people, sometimes don’t help to set them up for success,” Cruger explains.
Adults can also underestimate how much young people are already thinking about. Cruger remembers returning to a high school program shortly after the pandemic, when a student asked how to reconcile having a boyfriend who was mean with enjoying dominance in relationships. The question caught adults off guard. For Cruger, it illustrated something more important. Young people are already encountering complicated questions, whether adults feel prepared to hear them or not.
“If we’re seeing it and talking about it and thinking about it, they probably are, too,” he says.
The instinct to dismiss adolescent experiences can create another problem. Adults have lived through first relationships, heartbreak, mistakes, and uncertainty. A 16-year-old, he argues, has not. An experience that looks temporary from an adult perspective can feel enormous to someone encountering it for the first time.
“Getting older, you don’t necessarily know better, but you do quite literally know more,” Cruger says. “You have experienced more things in the world. So you have context in your life.” That context gives adults a responsibility to enter young people’s experiences without immediately minimizing them. Taking a teenager seriously does not require agreeing with every decision. It creates enough trust for the conversation to continue.
Cruger uses a plant to explain what thriving can look like. “A plant can survive with limited water and artificial light. Survival, however, is a low bar. Give it what it actually needs, and it can grow, flower, and become something far more resilient,” he notes.
The same question, in Cruger’s view, applies to young people. Are they receiving what keeps them going, or what helps them develop? Cruger argues that support has to be responsive because young people do not all require the same conditions.
“There’s not a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all for it,” he says. “It’s really about looking at how you can perceive some of your wants and your needs and really be able to tease apart what the differences between them are.” That requires adults to adjust their approach as young people change. A strategy that worked last year may fail today. A boundary can remain firm while the conversation around it evolves. Freedom can exist within parameters.
Most importantly, young people need to understand why a decision matters, giving them a framework they can carry into situations where an adult will not be there to tell them what to do. “We’re not trying to memorize answers,” Cruger says. “We want them to know how to think. And if we want them to know how to think, we have to explain our thought process.”
Trust becomes particularly important when mistakes enter the picture. Young people growing up amid social media scrutiny and the fear of public judgement can become intensely conscious of getting something wrong. Adults can either reinforce that fear or give them somewhere safe to recover.
“We need to create an environment where you can mess up, and it’s not going to be the end of the world,” Cruger says. “You can screw up, and you can still come back, and I can still love you.”
Thriving, then, starts with a question that reaches further than behavior. Before asking a young person to make a healthier choice, Cruger believes adults have to ask whether the support, safety, belonging, and information around them make that choice possible. That is where health education can become something more durable than a warning. It can give young people the tools to understand themselves well enough to make decisions long after the lesson ends.
