What would you say about a community where fewer than half of its children reach adulthood? Clearly, something must be amiss, and you'd recommend a look - at the environment, the cultural practices, the community's attitude about its youth - to find out what created such a troubling situation. You'd want to root out the problem and fix it, so that this community wouldn't founder, but rather thrive and grow.

Senior designers are the professional parents of the next generation of architects. And if we're failing to help that generation into adulthood, it's time to take a closer look at how they are being raised.

Our problem is not infant mortality, a common culprit. We are graduating an increasing number of architecture students (over 7,000 in 2003), including significant proportions of women and minorities. It seems that we have no problem "birthing" potential architects and getting a good number of them through childhood.

But if architecture school is our childhood, then internship is our adolescence - the time where we begin to truly understand the world we'll work in and to test out both the rights and the responsibilities of full-grown professionals. Here is where the difficulty lies; from 2002 to 2004, only 2-3,000 new licenses per year have been granted by NCARB member boards - less than half the rate of new degrees granted. We are experiencing a combination of Peter Pan syndrome, when interns never "grow up" into registered architects, and outright mortality, when potential architects leave the profession for good.

Like adolescence, internship is filled with its particular set of challenges and frustrations. Sometimes we don't understand why we have to do things, or do them a certain way; oftentimes, we think we know architecture much better than our elders, and can't wait for our turn to "do it right." We frequently wish people would trust us more, and eventually, there comes a time when we do have to stand up for our independence and the right to our own identity.

Unfortunately, what interns - like teenagers - often lack are the mentors who will instruct, correct, and encourage them so that their talents and ideas bear fruit. Internship is that formative period where we begin to make choices about the kind of architects we want to be, and where we are most in need of inspiring guidance. When we look back, we'll remember those who took time to nurture us, whether it was pointing us in a new and exciting direction or steering us away from a dangerous one. However, we'll also remember when we were ignored, dismissed, put down or taken advantage of for our youth and inexperience; whether we become successful architects is strongly correlated to how much the positive experience outweighs the negative.

Senior architects need to view mentoring and nurturing not as add-on activities, but as crucial parts of their professional responsibility. As a community, we need to start taking our child-rearing seriously - because any culture that doesn't is bound to die out.