Empower Teens to Make Good Choices

Mark Mero, a former WWE champion turned inspirational school speaker, discusses how parents can help empower teens to make the right choices, prevent bullying, and deal with peer pressure.


In a nation where 1 in 20 students has seen a student with a gun at school, a child is bullied every 7 minutes, and 43 percent of kids have experienced cyberbullying, it’s clear that our children are growing up in a very different world from that of previous generations. From self-harm Instagram sites to revenge porn to Facebook pages celebrating bullying, the onslaught on Generation Y (and Z) is constant. Even tech-savvy, socially aware parents are struggling to maintain family connectivity and control the negative—and pervasive—outside influences on their kids. (After all, one thing each new generation of teens will always have in common is the need to be one step ahead of Mom and Dad.)

How can we as parents advise our teens to make the right choices in a world where not bending to peer pressure can so easily result in their (instant and very public) online humiliation or bullying? Enter former professional wrestler Marc Mero. Through his anti-bullying presentations, this unlikely (and unconventional) messenger has succeeded in giving thousands of teens the courage to open up to adults and walk away from bullying, suicide, and self-harming. Mero’s packed-to-capacity presentations in schools across the country frequently reduce kids, schoolteachers, and parents to blubbering wrecks as he describes how he felt after he lost his own mother, and how that experience made him realize the importance of making the right choices.

How does your own personal history qualify you to reach out to kids and teens who are at risk?

My parents divorced when I was 8 years old. I grew up in a single-parent home in a depressed area of upstate New York, and found my way to becoming a WCW and WWE wrestling champion. But at the pinnacle of my “success,” I was surrounded by friends who made bad choices—and died from those decisions. I have lost more than 30 friends to drugs, alcohol, and poor lifestyle choices. I want to stop the cycle.

What do you feel are the main dangers for this next generation?

Teens today are facing more and more adversity. They’re not only losing respect for authority, now they’re losing respect for life itself. It’s a tragedy that these days it is hard to find a teenager who does not know someone who took his or her own life. High school is supposed to be the happiest time of your life, not the worst! Yet some people are afraid of school—ashamed to go there because they are bullied and made to feel bad about themselves.

Why do you think your message resonates so well with teenagers?

You can reel off statistics until you’re blue in the face, but with most teens that information is in one ear, out the other. They go right back to their video games where they’re blowing people’s brains out. But kids respond to the personal touch. They respond to stories about a mother who died. That’s when they start leaning forward, listening harder, tearing up. Tears can teach people about family, about friendships, and about love.