Part 2 of a Rudder4Life Series on the Quiet Crises Shaping South Africa’s Young
Where Part 1 left us
In our last blog, we answered a question drawn from Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s Never Enough and Dr Mark Potterton’s Daily Maverick reflection on it: Does this child know they matter? We made the case that a Grade 8 learner in a Cape Town classroom needs to feel both valued and able to add value, unconditionally, not contingently. We argued that mattering is the soil from which South African youth development has to start.
This time, a second Daily Maverick op-ed, Themba Dlamini’s “Why the promise that you can be anything is quietly failing a generation”, pushes the conversation one step further. And it is a step we have to take, because mattering alone is not enough. A child who knows they matter but has not been formed is still exposed.
The sentence that changes the conversation
Dlamini’s line cuts cleanly through the noise: “Possibility without a centre is not freedom, it is exposure.” He describes a young graduate at 2.13am, scrolling through LinkedIn. Degree framed. CV polished. Options everywhere. And yet a quiet, low weight: What if I choose wrong? Dlamini backs the feeling with hard numbers, 57% youth unemployment among 15- to 24-year-olds, 5.8 million young South Africans out of work, and, globally, adolescent depression and self-harm have more than doubled since 2012.
His diagnosis is unsparing. We told a generation they could be anything. We did not teach them how to become someone. The gap between those two sentences is where the anxiety lives. That diagnosis matters for us because it reframes the developmental task. Part 1 said: the child must know they matter. Part 2 says: that is where the work begins, not where it ends.
The seedling and the soil
Think of mattering as the soil. Rich, watered, warm, the conditions under which a young person can take root without fear of being pulled up by the next bad mark or missed opportunity. Without that soil, nothing grows. Part 1 was about getting the soil right.
But soil alone does not produce a tree. A seedling in perfect soil still needs time, weather, pruning, the pressure of its own weight, and the seasons that teach its trunk when to bend and when to hold. That is formation. It is what turns a well-tended seedling into something that can stand in the southeaster without snapping.
Dlamini defines formation as “the slow, mostly invisible process by which a person acquires a centre, a set of commitments, habits, relationships and limits that remain stable when circumstances do not.” That is not the same as mattering. Mattering tells a child you are enough. Formation asks a different question: enough to do what, stand for what, carry what? Both matter. Neither is sufficient on its own.
Why the sequence matters
This is not abstract. The order is everything.
Formation without mattering is performance under pressure. A child drilled into habits, routines and non-negotiables without the underlying knowledge that they are unconditionally valued learns to comply. They perform the form, but the centre is borrowed from whoever is watching. They look disciplined. They are actually afraid.
Mattering without formation is fragile self-esteem. A child who is relentlessly told they matter, but never walks through the slow work of acquiring a centre, learns to expect affirmation as a default setting. When the affirmation stops, as it often will in a society with 57% youth unemployment, they have nothing underneath it. They look confident. They are actually hollow.
Grade 8 is the precise window where this sequence becomes urgent. A learner arriving in secondary school has just left the relative shelter of primary-school routines and is entering the years where identity genuinely begins to set. If the soil of mattering has not been laid, formation will be resisted as criticism. If the work of formation is not begun, mattering will curdle into entitlement or anxiety. The adolescent brain is asking both questions at once: Am I loved? and Who am I becoming? A youth development programme that answers only one of them has answered none of them.
What Dlamini helps us see
Three things stand out in his argument that Part 1 could not have reached on its own:
- First, “formation” is small. Dlamini insists it is not dramatic. “A weekly practice you keep even when no one is watching. A short list of people whose honest opinion of you matters more than a stranger’s applause. A non-negotiable you will not trade for opportunity.” Formation is less like a summit and more like sweeping the same stoep every morning. It is maintenance. Its significance is cumulative.
- Second, “formation” is protective in a specific way, whereas mattering is not. Mattering protects a child from feeling worthless. Formation protects them from collapsing when the world stops telling them they matter. A young person with a formed centre can lose a job, a relationship, or a scholarship and still know who they are when the applause is gone. Dlamini puts it plainly: “Success cannot carry what identity has not formed.” Imagine success as a tall tree. Its roots represent your identity. If the roots are shallow or weak, the tree may look impressive but will ultimately struggle in strong winds or heavy rain. Only with deep, solid roots can the tree grow tall and withstand the storms of life. In the same way, without a well-formed identity, any success you achieve may be fragile and easily toppled by challenges.
- Third, formation is coherence, not chemistry. Dlamini is careful about medication; he is not anti-treatment, and neither are we. But he names something subtler: a generation reaching for external regulators (a pill, a podcast, a five-step routine) before asking the slower question of who they are becoming. The issue is not that treatment exists. The issue is that “formation” has been outsourced. A well-formed life and good clinical care are not in competition. Most people who flourish have both.
The two questions, held together
So Part 1 and Part 2 are not alternatives. They are a sequence. A Grade 8 learner deserves to know, first, that their worth is not up for negotiation. That is the Rudder4Life answer to contingent mattering. And then, having received that truth in their bones, they deserve the harder, slower gift: the framework that helps them become someone the world has not chosen for them. Mattering is the ground we stand them on. Formation is the frame we help them build on. Neither alone is enough. Together, they are what Rudder4Life means when we say “whole child.”
The question in Part 3 will ask.
Dlamini ends his piece with a sentence we have not yet fully sat with: “A generation cannot rise higher than the adults who are watching them scroll.”
That is a sentence about us. About every adult in the Rudder4Life ecosystem. About every parent, facilitator, funder, principal, board member and CEO, including the one writing this blog. Formation is not a thing we deliver to young people from a safe distance. It is something they catch from the adults around them, or do not catch at all.
That is where Part 3 will go. For now, the task is to hold both questions at once: Does this child matter? And who are they becoming?, and to resist the temptation to answer only the first, because it is the more comforting one. The soil is necessary. The tree still has to grow.
This is Part 2 of a Rudder4Life series. Part 1, “When a Child Knows They Matter,” responded to Dr Mark Potterton’s Daily Maverick op-ed (21 April 2026). Part 2 responds to Themba Dlamini’s Daily Maverick op-ed “Why the promise that you can be anything is quietly failing a generation” (23 April 2026). Part 3 will turn the question toward the adults in the room.
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