This is an excerpt from a new report, "Third Millennium Teens," by George Barna, Barna Research Group, Ltd., Ventura, California. In the full report are the results of several recent national teen surveys. Topics addressed include the role of faith and the church in teenagers' lives, prevailing religious beliefs, life goals, sources of information and influence, family life, Internet use, self-perceptions, common lifestyle activities, and more.

Three critical realities remain true today: Youth culture changes incredibly fast, youth culture drives adult culture, and people's formative faith decisions are largely in place by age 18. In this excerpt, KidsPeace-a nonprofit organization that works with young people around the country-has determined that safety, love, power, and trust are four key needs of young people. We sought to understand how well teens feel that each of the four key people groups in their lives-parents, siblings, peers, and teachers-support and empower them. We posed 94 scaled-assessment questions to a sample of 1,028 teens and developed a series of indexes related to the four core dimensions (safety, love, power and trust). The result was what we labeled "the peace index."

Clearly parents exert the greatest influence over teenagers. One of the pleasing findings was that teens award their parents the highest marks in terms of supporting them in each of the four index areas (peace, trust, power, and safety).

According to teens, parents do best at providing teens with love (index: 84.5) and safety (index: 86.4) but also do reasonably well at delivering power (index: 78.9) and trust (index: 77.5). The absolute scores awarded to parents in these four areas suggest that while few teens feel that their parents do a perfect job in these dimensions, their parents usually provide what the teen needs to maximize personal potential, to feel positive about themselves and to handle the challenges of life.

Teachers ranked second to parents among the four influence groups evaluated, substantially lagging behind parents and moderately ahead of the ratings achieved by both peers and siblings. Tachers were applauded by teenagers for protecting them from both sexual and physical abuse and for encouraging them to both persevere and to pursue their life dreams. Teenagers expressed disappointment with teachers for causing them to feel as if they're not important in teachers' lives, for ignoring teens' ideas when they make decisions, for communicating that teens are worthless, and for providing acceptance based upon behavior, beliefs, and achievements Siblings and peers generated statistically equivalent aggregate index ratings. Teenagers were most appreciative of their siblings for protecting them from physical and sexual abuse. They were most disgruntled with their siblings because they perceive them to focus on teens' personal weaknesses, for lying, for not protecting their belongings, for ignoring teens' ideas, and for conveying lack of worth.

Peers also did best at providing safety (72.9) and were worst at establishing trust (65.5). Peers were slightly better at delivering power (70.3) and love (68.9). It is interesting that although teenagers base many of their lifestyle decisions on input and reactions from their peers, teens are substantially more likely to describe their parents and teachers as supportive than they are to describe their peers in the same way.

******Big Picture Regarding Peace in Life****** Notice that the people with whom teens seem to experience the greatest peace are their parents-the very people, among the four groups tested, with whom they spend the least amount of "quality" time. The individuals with whom they spend the most "quality" time-their peers-are the people who provide them with the lowest sense of peace. Perhaps there is more to the old axiom "absence makes the heart grow fonder" than we realize.

Overall we found that higher peace scores were most common among students who view themselves as secure or self-confident. Lower peace scores were most likely from students who define themselves as angry, confused, lonely, or skeptical. There was also a group of self-characterizations that appear to have only minimal connections to peace. Those attributes were being an achiever, completely honest, happy, a leader, optimistic, sexually active, or stressed out. Attributes that appear to have no connection to peace include being physically attractive, religious, and well-liked.

Slicing the data a bit differently, we discovered that teenagers are most satisfied with the level of safety they experience in their lives as a result of the interaction with and support from these four groups of influencers. Trust was the attribute least likely to be provided by the influencers; three of the four influence groups (the exception being teachers) proved to be least proficient at providing trust.