Apparently this is the first time studies have actually tracked hospitalizations as a result of child abuse, so these numbers are fresh (though they use 2006 data, given the delay of data release and analysis). According to another study, over 1,700 children die per year in the U.S. due to abuse and maltreatment.  While the youngest kids were at greatest risk for hospitalization, and poverty was identified as a risk factor in abuse that leads to hospitalization, these findings have implications for every youth worker in every kind of ministry.

When it comes to sexual abuse (not a focus of this study), statistics reveal that 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys experience sexual abuse by age 18. Over 70% know their abuser, too often a family member.

How are you talking about abuse in your context? Do kids know who they can talk to and where they can go if they are victims of abuse (of any kind)? What kinds of safe and healing spaces are we fostering in our ministries in order to provide hope for kids who have suffered abuse?

Related posts:

1. The Latest on Gay Teens
2. Are they or aren’t they?
3. Latest Teen Sex Survey

Recently, our study turned to St. Ignatius of Loyola. While attempting an Ignatian prayer practice in class, one of the steps was to let our imagination run wild and insert ourselves into the biblical story we were focusing on.

This moment was one of the most difficult in my graduate studies.

I found a lot of frustration in transitioning my mind from recalling to creating. Afterwards, I thought about how easy this would’ve been before college or seminary had shaped me into a prototypical linear Western thinker.

Like a lot of things I know now, after learning this, I wished I could be a teen again. But my regret was soon refuted by research.

Looking back, I hardly prayed as a teenager. A recent study says that only 37% of teens pray alone daily.¹ I’m now part of the 48% of 18-30 year-old adults who do (or at least try to).² Simply, prayer seems to increase with age.

This leads to a few questions:

1. What’s behind the increase in prayer for young adults, if there is one?
2. What’s holding teens back from praying more (especially when the same study says 84% of teens believe in God)?³
3. How can we stir imagination and greater awareness in young people when it comes to prayer practices?

1. 128, “Growing Up In America: The Power of Race in the Lives of Teens”, Brad Christerson, Korie L. Edwards, & Richar Flory.
2. “Religion Among the Millennials”. http://www.pewforum.org/Age/Religion-Among-the-Millennials.aspx
3. 120, “Growing Up In America: The Power of Race in the Lives of Teens”

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1. A New Kind of Prayer for Kids
2. Good Friday Prayer
3. Proof: Prayer and Scripture Reading Matters

Tuesday Feb. 7, 10:00-10:30 am PST  

To win a free copy of the Parent or Teen curriculum, tweet a question for the webcast (including #stickyfaith) that’s related to helping seniors develop Sticky Faith. We’ll notify the winners after the webcast.

http://www.livestream.com/stickyfaith

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1. Live Webcast Today
2. Join the Sticky Faith Movement Today
3. Today’s E-Journal

My wife shared this article and video with me last week, created by these young dancers seeking change in the midst of oppression:

What’s revolutionary is the courage these dancers are showing by speaking out against what they see as social injustice.  And they aren’t just thinking of themselves.  One of the leaders shares in the article, “We have a dream that one day we will have our own center where we can teach children to break dance and give them a stage to express their feelings.”

You might want to share this video with students in your ministry or your home this week to spark a conversation about what it looks like to act courageously to seek justice in the face of wrongs.

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2. Screen Time and Friends
3. Teaching Moment or Party Time?

But there was one unifying theme in their answers:  humans not making a connection between our current behavior and its consequences.

In his blog, Schwartz quotes one economist from Bangladesh:  ”Leaders don’t have time for the future because they’re too busy with the present.”

Translating this to practical terms, Schwartz gives an example of the power of investing in your employees’ long-term health (folks in ministry can translate this principle to their volunteer teams):

At one point during a Davos session last week, I asked more than a half dozen CEOs at a discussion I was leading, “Do you believe that your employees perform better if they’re happier and healthier? The unsurprising and unanimous answer was “Yes.” Then I asked the CEOs, “If that’s the case, how much time, energy and money do you invest in insuring that your employees are healthier and happier?” Nearly all of them agreed the answer was very little.

The value of investing money and time in taking care of employees, rather than simply trying to get more out of them, can seem hard to measure. Also, because it doesn’t produce instant results, it may seem at odds with the urgent aim of getting more done, faster, right now.

Recently one of my kids remarked that they couldn’t believe we had already completed the first month of 2012.  That’s true, but it’s still a great time for us to ask ourselves as we think about this year:  Are we keeping focused on what we want in the future (whether the future is the end of 2012 or even further out), or are we getting too lost in the present?

If you’re a parent navigating a busy schedule (basically meaning pretty much all parents), have you asked yourself WHY you are driving your kids around to hockey, soccer, and piano?  What’s the end goal?

As a ministry leader, are you thinking about WHY you’re doing the upcoming retreat or mission trip?  Or are you so lost in the details of the videos that you’ve lost sight of what God might intend to do and you haven’t prepared your volunteer leaders as well as you’d like?

I want to learn from the Nobel Prize winners and try to be more aware of the future consequences, both intended and unintended, that emerge from my choices today.  I think we’ll all be better off if we let the future drive the present, instead of the other way around.

Related posts:

1. Advice from a 12-Yr-Old
2. Sticky Faith Summit Day #3
3. Building a Social Imaginary

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

I haven’t read the book, but thanks to a recommendation of an FYI Advisory Council member, I read a recent excerpt in the Wall Street Journal.

Building upon a variety of data sources, Murray looks at the growing divide in America (as indicated in his sub-title, with a special focus on “White America”).  The Wall Street Journal excerpt highlights the growing changes in families between upper and lower class white Americans by describing two fictitious towns:  Belmont (an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb that represents about 20% of the white American population from ages 30-49) and Fishtown (an iconic town populated by the white working class that represents about 30% of the white American population from ages 30-49).

Murray describes:

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor’s degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist…

In Belmont and Fishtown, here’s what happened to America’s common culture between 1960 and 2010.

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage—the percentage of children born to unmarried women—showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents.

 

In the midst of attention that has been rightly given to the divide among races, by examining one ethnic population, Murray has helped us understand an additional divide (that some argue might even be more influential than ethnicity):  socio-economic.

Regardless of your family’s and your ministry’s ethnicity or economic status, I urge you to take seriously one of Murray’s conclusions/pontifications:   “Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting.”

With whom are you personally building a relationship with that has a different ethnicity, religion, or socio-economic status?  What would it take for you to get to the place where you could actually have an honest discussion with them, asking them questions about their background and context, learning more about their struggles and victories?

What opportunities are you providing for the teenagers you know to do the same?  If your school is heavily dominated by a particular class or ethnicity, do the extracurricular activities that your teenager is involved in help give them a more balanced view of the world—both present and future?

Related posts:

1. Growing Up in America: The Power of Race in the Lives of Teens
2. Diverse Schools Create Racial Divide
3. Being White

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2. Volume 8, Issue 2
3. Today’s E-Journal

So often technology feels like something that divides family members.  How can we use it to unite us?

My desire to answer that question is part of why I was so encouraged by this article sent to me by a friend summarizing some new research on “Joint Media Engagement”.   The bottom line:  when teenagers engage in media with each other, or with their parents, it can actually enhance their social relationships and communication.

As one summary of the research described:

Plenty of studies have shown that kids learn more when they’re consuming media alongside their parents — parents typically chime in and explain what’s going on or answer questions or share their opinions about what they’re seeing, hearing, and doing. In turn, parents can have a better understanding of what their kids are doing and learning and what they’re involved with during their kids’ media use.

In addition to the standard “sit with them and watch TV or play video games together, I’ve been especially impressed during our Sticky Faith work with parents who intentionally use the content and choices of what they see with their kids as conversation springboards.  They ask questions during commercials like, “Why do you think he made that choice?  What do you think will happen next?  What advice would you give her if she came to you?”

I also have heard from wise parents that it’s a good dynamic with their kids to let their kids teach THEM about video games.  Let your kids be your experts, coaches, and tutors in areas of technology.  (To be honest, my 9 year-old teaches me features on our computer. It just comes more naturally to my kids than to me.)

Technology and media is here to stay.  And its influence on our kids is growing.  Instead of being afraid of it or demonizing all of it, let’s leverage it to improve our family relationships and discussions.

Related posts:

1. Media – With Your Kids
2. Unplugging Your Family from Technology
3. Stunning Media Use for Kids

This quick review of a phone-poll study, “How Teenagers Communicate: 7 Things You Should Know” offers a great reminder: as much as teenagers love their technology, they still need—and actually want—face time with friends.  When asked what method of communication they’d miss the most if taken away, here were their top rankings:

1. Meet “in person” (58 percent ranked it No. 1)
2. Texting (28 percent)
3. Talk on the mobile phone (5 percent)
4. Facebook (5 percent)
5. Talk on the home phone, email, video chat, chat, Twitter (tie at 1 percent)

Make no mistake, technology is king among teenagers who have access to it.  And a phone call home-to-home doesn’t have near the allure it once held. But today’s adolescents still realize the importance of being together in person (even if it’s being together in person while using their tech devices).

Related posts:

1. Ideas on how to talk to teens and emerging adults
2. I’ll Share Mine if You Share Yours
3. Talking to Children & Teenagers About the Internet

Yet, one of my defining qualities (and possibly spiritual gifts) is looking for the inverse question…

What makes faith disappear?

In similar fashion to developing Sticky Faith, there is no silver bullet for defeating faith. But within The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry, Kenda Creasy Dean offers something close to it with this answer:

The need to connect what adolescents must do developmentally (achieve an enduring sense of identity) with what Jesus does theologically (accomplishes YHWH’s salvation) was chronically overlooked by the church, although not necessarily by adolescents themselves, who “acted out” the human need for salvation, often implicitly or inappropriately.¹

I don’t blame the culture of youth ministry for missing this. Yet it seems that students are acting out the need for salvation everywhere but the place where they might find it.

Churches are doing a great job of the first piece Dean points out, of developing identity. Yet this is all for naught without the theological piece of salvation. Identity simply will not “stick” without purpose.

Perhaps what’s needed is space, not programs. Typically at youth group, silence seems like a four-letter word to be avoided, or enacted.  This is where programming must confer with theology. Salvation needs to be acted out, or discovered, in the context of the church, with the right people and in the right time.

Otherwise, “salvation” could implicitly or improperly be found elsewhere.

1. The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry Kenda Creasy Dean & Andrew Root, 65.

Related posts:

1. Unstructured Space
2. A Word From Below: The Space Between
3. Free Space

Yes, the days of sharing letterman jackets have been replaced by shared Facebook passwords.  According to Pew Internet research, 1 in 3 online teens has shared a password with a friend or significant other. Nearly half of girls ages 14-17 have shared passwords.

Access to online media and texting from a boyfriend or girlfriend’s phone carries potentially hefty implications, adding yet another to the list of concerns parents need to become aware of in order to help their digital-native children manage the new social reality in which they are growing up.

One parent interviewed for the article, child psychologist Winifred Lender, shared that she “had her three sons sign ‘digital contracts’ that outline terms for how much media they will consume, how they will behave online and that they will not share passwords.”  When her son was asked to exchange a password recently, he had a great fall-back: “He blamed it on his parents…He said, ‘If I give you my password, my mom will have a cow.’ ”

This trend opens up a great opportunity to talk about trust with teenagers you know or who live in your home. Ask questions like: Who do you trust with private personal information? What motivates the sharing—is it because you trust them or because you want to be sure they aren’t hiding anything from you? What information should be off-limits or protected more closely? What do you gain by sharing a password with a boyfriend or girlfriend? What might you gain or lose by saying no? What happens if the relationship ends suddenly or that person doesn’t handle your personal information the way you thought they might?

Related posts:

1. Short Sticky Faith Holiday Video That You Can Share
2. Don’t Wait – Share Your Story Over the Holidays
3. The Digital World Becoming Reality

But even I, a rookie Apple user and a non-early adapter, have heard lots of praise for the Apple Genius Bar.

I was intrigued by this Harvard Business Review blog about the branding of the Apple Genius Bar and how it was established more to build relationships than it was to sell product (the former leading to better long-term results).

It made me think about the “brand” of churches across the U.S.  I was intrigued several months ago when a 40 year-old youth leader commented to me that while she grew up in a non-Christian and very dysfunctional family,  as a teenager she “knew that the church was there for her.  If she had a problem, she could go to the church.”

When is the last time you’ve heard someone who wasn’t a Christian (or even a Christian for that matter) say that if they had a problem, they know that a local church would be there for them?

Wouldn’t it be great if the “brand” of churches was that they were there for people – that they would walk with someone in need?  Our churches (and those of us who comprise the church) are so often known for what we are against than what we are for.  While we certainly need to take stands against certain wrongs, I long for the day when the church is known as a place of refuge and support.

Related posts:

1. What the Church is Known For…
2. Tony Jones on Church Leadership
3. Defining Reality at Your Church

A friend of mine had read this book, and she mentioned to me that her favorite part of the book (besides the chapter I co-authored, of course – hear the sarcasm there please) was Marko’s encouragement to parents (and leaders) to normalize their young teen’s experiences.

I’ll let Marko speak for himself:

Every young teen, at one time or another, feels abnormal.  They feel as though they’re physically developing in the wrong way.  Or they feel as though they’re the only ones experiencing emotional swings.  Or they feel as though their spiritual doubts are aberrant and unique.

Don’t trivialize your child’s experience…Instead, help your young teen realize that his or her experience of change is normal – even good.”

And then Marko tells a story about his daughter that any parent of teenagers, or youth leader, can imagine.  While Marko was trying to have a calm conversation with then 13-year-old Liesl, Liesl kept saying that he was “yelling at her”.  When she finally calmed down, she said, “I don’t know why I was yelling at you.”

Marko had the chance to explain that her strong emotions are normal at her age.  Her feelings of sadness, anger, frustration are all part of her growing emotions.

I’ve heard from multiple parents (and experienced myself with my own kids, who are not yet teenagers) that letting kids know they are normal can often be helpful.

So the next time you see an adolescent acting or saying something that seems “so teenager”, let them know in a kind, non-patronizing voice that they are “normal”.

Related posts:

1. One-Word Definition for Young Teens
2. Ideas on how to talk to teens and emerging adults
3. Mark Oestreicher Interview

First we are sharing a “Research Brief and Field Interview” entitled “No Rest for the Weary:  The Stressors of Urban Burnout.”   In this article, we explore some of FYI’s work on urban youth leaders’ stress and burnout, and the surprising lack of attention leaders tend to pay to themselves and their own needs.  I’m thrilled that Angel Ruiz, the Field Ministry Vice President for the Western Division of Young Life, is sharing some of his own ideas and steps to finding rest and balance, many of which relate to our relationships with others.

Second, we are sharing a video that explains our brand new Sticky Faith Parent Curriculum, a 5 session DVD series to help you empower parents to build better relationships with their own kids, which in the end will give you more support in your youth ministry.

So dive in, click around, and forward this blog or either of these resources to another parent or leader.  Hopefully these research-based resources will help you enlarge the web of relationships that supports you and your students.

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2. My Best 3 Conversations This Week

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2. Volume 7, Issue 14
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Understanding Your Young Teen: Practical Wisdom for Parents 

In this and in tomorrow’s blog, I’m going to excerpt and comment on some of my favorite parts of the book – parts that are helpful to me as a parent of a fifth grader, and I hope will be helpful to you as a youth leader or parent of young teens or even older teens.

The first is Marko’s one-word definition for middle schoolers.  According to Marko, when he asks parents and leaders to define young teens in one word, some of the answers he gets back are:  stressed, immature, confused, impossible, fun, potential, emerging, spontaneous, and unpredictable.

None of those are un-true, but Marko’s best one-word definition for the young teen experience is “change”.  I’ll admit I’m biased because that is also my best one-word definition, but nonetheless, as Marko says well, “The life of a middle schooler is all about change.  As previously noticed, it’s the second most significant period of change in the human lifespan.”

If you know a young teen, this isn’t a surprise to you.  You know that they are undergoing monumental internal, developmental changes (e.g., cognitive, physical, relational, spiritual).

Interestingly, one of the things we have learned during our Sticky Faith Cohorts is that change is hard.  Even when it’s a good change, even when it’s a change you (or someone else) wants to make, it’s still hard.  As Dr. Scott Cormode at Fuller regularly reminds our Sticky Faith Churches, “Change involves loss.”

When we look at the 12 or 14 year-olds (and maybe even 16 and 18 year-olds) around us, it can seem like they are gaining so much.  In the case of young teens, they are gaining new freedoms, social skills, intellectual abilities, and even faith experiences.  Yet they are also losing something:  they are losing some of the simplicity of their earlier childhood, some of the lack-of-stress that comes from not paying attention to social dynamics, and even some of the confusion that comes from trying to juggle two or more thoughts simultaneously (especially when those are abstract thoughts).

I see this in my own son.  As he moves into young adolescence, he is gaining so much, and yet with that gain comes additional stress.

As I initially wrote that, I was thinking about his stress.  But adolescence does bring some new stressors into Dave’s and my life.  Don’t get me wrong:  I’m looking forward to being a parent of teenagers. But I know it will be draining.

So maybe my one-word definition for young teens should be expanded to three:  Change.  Gains.  Loss.

Related posts:

1. Ideas on how to talk to teens and emerging adults
2. A Word From Below: The Space Between
3. More Teens Smoke Marijuana Than Cigarettes

Because of what we’ve learned about urban youth leaders, we at the Fuller Youth Institute have new respect for the unique sources of fatigue that they experience.  Given the trauma they are exposed to (both directly as well as indirectly through others in their community), they seem to be particularly prone to stress and burnout.

Sometimes referred to as the “new friars,” urban youth leaders are often dedicated to investing and improving the quality of their entire community. This same dedication is what draws the majority into making deep roots and actually living amongst the people they serve, radically changing the meaning of a full-time job.  While providing a strong and meaningful partnership with their community, they are unfortunately placed at an increased risk for emotional distress and exposure to traumatic life events.

Being surrounded by so much devastating need, it can be hard to see the significance of their own needs. Their problems come last because they seem small in comparison.

Leaders Need Help But Often Don’t Seek It

 In an FYI study done by Dr. Cynthia Eriksson and her research team at Fuller, 284 urban youth workers from faith-based organizations were surveyed to explore the different types of trauma they were exposed to and how they in turn received or sought support, whether physical, mental or spiritual.  It turns out only a quarter of the participants sought therapy for emotional needs and less than half sought spiritual services. The results are surprising considering these are leaders of faith-based organizations, which generally encourage spiritual and emotional well-being.¹

The study found that out of all of the perceived barriers for the use of emotional, physical or spiritual resources, the largest are hardly unpredictable: Money and time. Two resources youth workers don’t tend to have a lot of.  Further, over a quarter of the participants acknowledged a need for psychological or spiritual services but didn’t take them.²

Insights from Urban Leader Angel Ruiz

Angel Ruiz, the Field Ministry Vice President for the Western Division of Young Life, knows about the stress that can build in response to the overwhelming needs of others. According to him, work can quickly take over when he loses sight of God and God’s call. When so many things have the potential to spiral out of control, it is easy to take the reins yourself and react to every situation.

Ruiz shares, “I first have to consciously choose to stop the build-up of stressful ministry circumstances. Then I try to find an outlet to help redirect any negative energy, for example grilling or hanging out with my family. When I am ready to re-engage, I try to assess things and then prioritize. I find that making a checklist and working through it helps me with prioritizing.”

When asked how to best set up boundaries, Ruiz notes that it is not so much about making boundaries, but keeping them. “I have to remain disciplined and vigilant in this area, giving myself permission to say ‘no’ and reminding myself of what’s important.” Ruiz has also learned to include his wife and family in this process to help keep him accountable for his time. The support of family not only provides a boundary but also helps give a “way-out” to an over-committed schedule.

Simply put, the sustainability of an organization is dependent on the well-being of its workers. If they aren’t being adequately cared for physically, mentally and spiritually, then they won’t be able to fully care for the people they serve. Ruiz urges other leaders to “create a legacy that includes intentional leadership development, so that the work will continue building and growing beyond you.”

Recommendations for Urban Ministries

So what can we do to care for ourselves and other leaders? The following list includes suggestions for urban ministries based on the research findings:

1. Remove the barriers – It’s okay to ask for help! There seems to be a general (and unfortunate) understanding among youth leaders that their own needs come last. Organizations and ministries can help change this mindset by providing educational opportunities and training sessions on the priority of their physical, emotional and spiritual well-being.
2. Clearly defined roles/expectations – Some of the leading causes of burnout are inadequate training, vague job descriptions, absence of a support system, and high expectations.³ By clearly defining leaders’ roles, you are giving value and ownership to the work that they do. This can also decrease task confusion and generate more time and space for team members to work within and further develop their role.
3. Counseling Resources – If resources aren’t already being provided, it could be helpful to provide a list of places where they can be accessed. Whether through a partnering church or health center, it is important to make sure that your team is receiving the support they need.
4. Sabbath – Encourage your team to rest. God gives us this mandate for a reason. Not only to rest but to also enjoy and spend time with him. A lot of times we get so caught up in God’s work that we forget to simply rest and trust that God can continue his work without us. See our UrbanYouthMinistrySelf-CareToolkit for three months’ worth of ideas on taking Sabbath and learning to rest!
5. Encouragement – There is always room for more encouragement. Make sure your youth leaders know their value and worth in the work that they are doing. It’s easy to lose focus when you feel like what you are doing isn’t meaningful. Words of encouragement not only build up the person but also provide the fuel to keep the mission and the ministry moving.

Action Steps: 

1. Self-Assess: Set aside some time to sit down and self-assess your need for rest and care and what some perceived barriers might be within your organization. This is a great way to gain perspective and the opportunity for you to ask for help.
2. Set Some Boundaries: Take a look at how much time you and others in your ministry are spending on your work and in your community. Set boundaries between your personal time and work time. You most likely have additional roles and positions that you are serving within the broader community. Give yourself time to do that as well as enough time to spend with your own friends and family.
3. Write a Note: Simple actions can make a world of difference. Whether you are a part of an urban ministry or not, your encouragement is vital. Take some time to write a note to a valued urban youth leader and let them know what a difference their work is making. You can even take it a step further and commit to writing that specific leader a note once a month. 

1. Shin, Hana J., Eriksson, Cynthia B., Walling, Sherry M., Lee, Hanna and Putman, Katherine M. (2011) ‘Race, resource utilization, and perceived need among urban community development workers from faith-based organizations’, Mental Health & Culture, First published on: 23 February 2011. p 7, 10.  This was a further research extrapolation of the study results shared in this article: http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/2007/05/stress-in-the-city/
2. Shin, Eriksson, et al, 9.
3. See http://www.urbanministry.org/wiki/leadership-burnout for a more complete list of the causes of burnout.

Related posts:

1. Sabbath Rest in a 24/7 City
2. Training Urban Leaders
3. Burnout

Humans, that is, here on the earth at the same time.  The hype began to build last year as National Geographic did a series on mapping the characteristics of the world’s “typical” person.  Recently David Livermore pointed out a link to a BBC counter that tells you where you fit into the 7 billion according to UN estimates.

Finding our “place” in the story of humanity is kind of fun (I’m estimated as the 4,158,745,481st person alive when I was born).

As the population continues to rise, part of the question is “What does this mean?”   Here’s the BBC’s take on this:

Is the sky falling?

Could be.  But whatever our current or future reality as a global community, chances are the students in your ministry or home have little awareness of what’s going on with world population growth or why or how it might matter.  They probably have even less awareness of what it might mean to faithfully live as a Christ-follower into our increasingly large–and at the same time increasingly small/flat/connected–world.

With Martin Luther King, Jr. Day approaching this weekend, I can’t help but think that issues like racial/ethnic reconciliation, interfaith dialogue, and deep justice kinds of questions are bound up together in how we look at world population growth.

What do you think we need to be doing to faithfully guide the adolescents among us into adults who notice, care, and respond to these issues with Kingdom perspective?

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1. Typical
2. Census Map Info – Find Your State
3. The Christmas “Jesus from Below”

In a NY Times article called Seeing Social Media More as Portal Than as Pitfall this week, the advent of social media and its culture-shifting implications is compared by some to the introduction of the telephone over a century past. The article (written by a pediatrician) notes that much of the early research and cultural commentary has been based on the “danger paradigm” that social media is the new root of all evil.  Yet some wonder:

Though there are certainly real dangers, and though some adolescents appear to be particularly vulnerable, scientists are now turning to a more nuanced understanding of this new world. Many have started to approach social media as an integral, if risky, part of adolescence, perhaps not unlike driving.

In the 1970s Marshall McLuhan warned us that media forms are never neutral; they always shape us as we use them. In other words, it’s both the medium and the message that matter, and we’re naïve to think otherwise (read an interview I did with Shane Hipps nearly five years ago for a fascinating take on this).  Clay Shirky of New York University is quoted in the article as saying, “Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all harm model, one of the questions parents need to ask is, ‘How is this going to interact with my child’s personality?’ ”

If social media constitute the cultural waters our adolescents now swim in as they work out the big questions of identity, autonomy, and belonging, there’s probably a whole slew of questions parents and youth workers alike should be asking. It’s not all bad, but it’s not all neutral either.

What are the big questions you think we should be asking ourselves and the adolescents around us when it comes to social media as a “portal” for the adolescent journey?

Related posts:

1. New Spins on Social Media Research
2. Doctors Speak Up About Teen Social Media Use
3. Social Media – Another Way For Kids To Feel Rejected

According to new research from the University of Virginia, parent-teen arguments should be seen as a “critical training ground” for how to build skills in handling disagreements throughout life. The study followed teenagers and their parents from age 13-16, looking at the way they handled conflict about common issues (grades, chores, money, friends). The researchers noted:

“The teens who learned to be calm and confident and persuasive with their parents acted the same way when they were with their peers,” [lead researcher Joseph P. Allen] says. They were able to confidently disagree, saying ‘no’ when offered alcohol or drugs. In fact, they were 40 percent more likely to say ‘no’ than kids who didn’t argue with their parents… Kids who felt confident to express themselves to their parents also felt confident being honest with their friends.

This doesn’t mean parents should put on boxing gloves and duke out every argument with their kids, but it also doesn’t mean parents should try to squelch conflict (either through overpowering or conceding). Instead, the researchers recommend that parents learn to listen well.  In fact, they found that when parents listened well, their kids (here’s the big payoff) listened back.

Parents who listen foster teenagers who listen.  Sounds like a revolutionary win-win, doesn’t it?

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