I’m guessing all of us have said that to a teenager or emerging adult we know.  An article two days ago in the Wall Street Journal suggests that might not be the best approach to take these days.

Here are some excerpts from the article I found particularly interesting:

“Eighty-two percent of those ages 18 to 29 (and 79% of those 30 to 74) believe there is ‘a generation gap’ in America, according to a Pew Research Center poll last year. The gap was defined as ‘a major difference in the point of view of younger and older people today.’ That’s up from 60% of Americans in a similar poll in 1979, and it’s even higher than the 74% registered in a 1969 poll, taken at the height of the youth-rebellion movement. Back then, political and social issues created the gap between baby boomers and their parents.

Today’s youth cite generational differences in ‘perspective,’ ‘work ethic’ and ‘technology’—which helps explain their reservations about their elders’ input.”

Here are some practical tips from teens and young adults on how to talk with them:

Related posts:

1. Ideas to Action
2. Biggest Generation Gap Ever
3. I Don’t Trust the Way You Talk

Here’s an excerpt from the article summarizing the research:

“In what was described as the first detailed portrait of its kind, researchers reported that one in nine infants in poverty had a mother with severe depression and that such mothers typically breastfed their children for shorter periods than other mothers who were poor.

‘A mom who is too sad to get up in the morning won’t be able to take care of all of her child’s practical needs,’ said researcher Olivia Golden, who co-authored the paper with two colleagues at the District-based Urban Institute. ‘If she is not able to take joy in her child, talk baby talk, play with the child – those are features of parenting that brain development research has told us contribute to babies’ and toddlers’ successful development.’”

That just makes me so very sad – as a mom and as a follower of Christ.  Kids from backgrounds of poverty have so many disadvantages and this research highlights yet another one.  I’m so glad that so many of you are involved in Deep Justice work both locally and globally.  One person at a time, we can make a difference.

Related posts:

1. Measured-Risk Parenting
2. Texting and Adolescent Development
3. Parents Out of Control

To be honest, I’m a bit surprised it’s not higher.

But it does make me wonder about adult etiquette on teenagers’ Facebook. I tend to be more on the conservative side, not posting very often on kids’ pages and letting kids take initiative in friending me. I know it’s a great way to build relationships with kids, but I want to be sensitive to kids’ boundaries and needs for privacy. I’m 40 and I don’t need anything else that makes me a “weird adult”.

How about you? What is your Facebook etiquette with teenagers – your own or others?

Related posts:

1. Breaking Down Duality on Facebook
2. The Happiest Place to Text
3. Facebook Talk About Deep Justice Journeys

I thought this statement in the article was especially interesting:  “No matter their background, Dean says committed Christian teens share four traits: They have a personal story about God they can share, a deep connection to a faith community, a sense of purpose and a sense of hope about their future.”

This research echoes many of the themes in our FYI College Transition Project, namely the importance of connection to the faith community (aka church) as well as parents’ modeling AND parents’ self-descriptions of their faith and the impact their faith has had on their life.

Related posts:

1. Shift of Christian Gravity
2. Gratitude: The Heart of the Christian Life
3. Family Baptism

No related posts.

The author tells stories that feel all-too-close-to-home for many of us, about short-term teams attempting to do things they aren’t equipped to do, often with great intentions but misplaced effort and money.  Quoting the post directly:

Since coming to Gulu, I’ve had the chance to meet hundreds of foreign visitors, many of whom saw their time in Uganda as a chance to do something, to achieve something.  I’ve met short-term missionaries who paid $4,000 US each to spend 10 days in an internally displaced peoples camp.  Every morning they evangelized to camp residents; every afternoon they cleaned wounds and put Band-Aids on people.  When I asked if any trained medical staff were among the group—mostly teenagers—the group leader, a first-time visitor to Uganda, shook her head.

I’m still all for short-term missions.  But as we navigate the waters of respectfully coming alongside locals in our preparation and action, let’s keep in mind that Band-Aids really aren’t always the best answer to systemic problems…

Related posts:

1. Poor for a Weekend
2. World AIDS Day 2009
3. World AIDS Day

Youth Specialties’ Adam McLane posts a hilarious commentary today on “3 Types of Freshmen Parents” (thanks Adam!), recalling his own freshman move-in day with a classic story.

On the other end of the college spectrum, thanks to Chris Schaffner who pointed out the NYT special on “What is it about 20-Somethings?” that ran last week.  This is a lengthy, but interesting, feature on emerging adulthood (or lengthening adolescence, depending on how you look at it).  I’ve only skimmed it so far, but the extensive interview with Jeffrey Arnett, who coined the term “emerging adult”, is worth the read and dialogue for anyone working with adolescents.   I suspect folks will have more to say about this one.

This week as you think about students and parents you know on both ends of that spectrum — those heading to college for the first time and those who won’t be returning to college but are ambiguous about the future — remember to lift them to Jesus and drop them a line to remind them that you’re doing so.

Related posts:

1. Parents Out of Control
2. Gender-Blind Dorms
3. Touching Base

I haven’t read the book, but the interview itself is worth checking out. To fuel the dialogue around overparenting, check out this quote from Nelson:

[P]arents learn and practice child rearing styles within social groups, as ideas circulate in the media and among cliques of young mothers gathering on the playground. The practices that get established — the degree to which parents begin to use a language of “choice,” for example — may have less to do with what can be afforded than with what other people within a circle of friends and relatives find appropriate. Both parenting out of control and parenting with limits are thus reinforced by observation, discussion, and competition within the groupings of a highly stratified society.

In other words, there’s something to what Nelson calls “professional middle class” American culture that breeds helicoptering.  Many parents don’t see other options, especially when they compare to others.  This plays out in the comments section of the interview, where folks confess to being out of control with their own college-age kids.

In a month when many of us are supporting families whose kids are heading off to college, how can we best help parents (and kids) balance support with autonomy during this important life change?

Related posts:

1. I Was One of “Those” Parents
2. Parents – What NOT To Do
3. Reggie Joiner – Parents’ Baby Steps

I’m a practical theologian so I tend to look to theological roots behind behaviors.   When it comes to my own tendencies to overwork, I’ve been greatly influenced by Louie Giglio who says that if God is the great “I am,” that makes us the great “I am not.”

God is the shepherd.  I am not.

God is the worker.  I am not.

I am not.  I am not.  I am not.

It’s so much easier for me to take a day off, unplug from e.mail, and truly enjoy the Lord and my dear friends and family when I realize that God is God.  And I am not.

Related posts:

1. Burnout
2. Why is Networking Not Working for You?
3. Why is Networking Not Working for You?

Parenting Beyond Your Capacity

I love the way Reggie and Carey address the debate regarding whether parents should invest quantity or quality time with their kids.  They write, “It’s not quantity or quality time you need as a family – it’s the quantity of quality times”.

Beautiful.

As with so many so-called “debates,” the best answer is a creative both/and combination.  Parents need as much quality time as possible with their kids.

So the next time you wonder that yourself as a parent, or you’re having a discussion with a parent about time with their kids, feel free to share the importance of great quantity of great quality times.

Related posts:

1. Reggie Joiner – Parents’ Baby Steps
2. Your View of Parents
3. My Initial Concern about Reggie Joiner’s Orange

With Reggie’s team, we had a great discussion about how to best engage with parents.  The reality is that parents are the primary influence on their kids – far more influential than church leaders.  And yet the last thing parents need is to be motivated by a sense of guilt or a long “to do” list of all the behaviors they should be doing that feels overwhelming.  It feels overwhelming because it is overwhelming.

Reggie gave me the new book he co-authored with Carey Nieuwhof called Parenting Beyond Your Capacity.  I love their definition of  spiritual leadership for parents:  “Spiritual leadership means parents assume the primary responsibility to help their kids take the next step in their pursuit of a relationship with God.”

It’s one step forward.

That reminds me of an invitation at our church that we’ve extended – help one person who doesn’t know Jesus yet take one step closer to Him.

I love that focus on “one step forward”.  It’s so do-able and motivating, while not being overwhelming.

Related posts:

1. My Initial Concern about Reggie Joiner’s Orange
2. Your View of Parents
3. Great connection with parents

Please show this to teenage girls.  No wonder they don’t feel like they can look like the models.  By the time pictures are air-brushed, even the models don’t look like the images that we eventually see.

Related posts:

1. The Right Kind of Peer Pressure for Girls
2. Unattainable Beauty
3. Girls Puberty Age Drops?

I’m all for parents’ involvement in their kids’ lives.  I try to be involved in my own kids’ lives and I appreciate parents at our church who track with what we’re doing in youth ministry and support it.

But one of my life mantras is that balance is something we swing through on our way to the other extreme.  And that seems to be what’s happening with parenting.  Involvement has become over-involvement.  Support has become smothering.

I’m no psychologist, but I’m  guessing that fear and guilt are two of the major motivations behind helicopter parenting.  How can we parent based on love and God’s grace instead?

Related posts:

1. Measured-Risk Parenting
2. Pulling the Plug on Perfect Parenting
3. Parents Out of Control

Inside Out Families: Living the Faith Together

Interestingly, many of these folks are already serving, and maybe already serving together as families.  But as Garland reports, “…they want somehow to ground what they are doing in their lives of faith. They want their service to make sense as Christians.”¹

That’s where you come in.  As those who lead congregations (in whatever role you might be leading), families in the congregation are looking to you to help them not only serve the poor and outcast, but to connect the dots between feeding the hungry and loving Jesus more deeply.  They need help framing hurricane relief work with Luke 4 and Jesus’ manifesto to bring “good news to the poor” (v 18).  They need help connecting ministry to a local women’s shelter with Isaiah’s call to “Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:17).

So how are we framing service and justice in our congregations? Because if we’re not, we’re failing to meet families’ greatest felt need.  And if we connect this back to the research shared in this post, that means we’re also failing to nurture one of the greatest opportunities for faith-building that we can give families.

1. Diana Garland, Inside Out Families: Living the Faith Together (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 25.

Related posts:

1. Turning Families Inside Out
2. The Kind of Service Matters
3. Family of Families

Through her research summarized in Inside Out Families: Living the Faith Together, Diana Garland relays that certain factors stood out as contributing to greater growth in faith—both of families and individuals.  Here are a few of those factors:¹

1. Serving among those who are different from us in culture and life experience.  This stretches our understanding, empathy, and compassion. In other words, get beyond your church walls!

2. One-time service impacts faith way less than building long-term relationships as we serve.

3. Serving that places us into situations that are beyond us, where we have to depend on God’s help and provision.

4. And, not surprisingly in light of our Deep Justice Journeys research, both preparing beforehand and taking time to debrief and reflect on experiences afterward as a family are important to faith growth.

As you consider opportunities for families of students in your ministry (or your own family) to serve and seek justice, this short list can be a helpful evaluative tool.

1. Summarizing from Diana Garland, Inside Out Families: Living the Faith Together (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 43ff and 125ff.

Related posts:

1. Families Want Your Help Turning Inside Out
2. Turning Families Inside Out
3. A New Kind of Prayer for Kids

Inside Out Families: Living the Faith Together

And it’s not just about someone within the family serving.  It’s about the family serving others together, as a family.  Garland plays with what a “family faith” might look like—something that feels quite in opposition to our Western ideal of highly-individualized and privatized faith. The more she explored what was going on in families, the more evidence surfaced that the way we live out family faith is a powerful predictor of individual faith.  As she shares,

I came to understand faith as the melody of our lives.  The songs we sing are far more than the written words and notes on a page. …We do not communicate faith just by spouting what we believe to be the central truths.  We live it; it has to be illustrated.  Like a song has to be sung to be music, so faith has to take shape in action, in doing.  Family stories are like words sung to the melody of faith. ¹

As it turns out, surveys from 7,300 church members showed that those who were already involved in service to those in need also prayed, read their Bibles, attended worship services, shared their faith with others (evangelism), promoted justice, and gave more financially than those not serving.  Serving, as it turns out, “is the most significant and powerful contributor to faith for teenage and adult Christians.” (p. 42). More tomorrow from this interesting book…

1. Diana Garland, Inside Out Families: Living the Faith Together (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 19.

Related posts:

1. Families Want Your Help Turning Inside Out
2. The Kind of Service Matters
3. Family of Families

Girls today may start developing breasts by age 7 or 8, the New York Times reported yesterday from a new study released in the journal Pediatrics. While the average age of first menstruation—typically the mark of girls’ entrance into puberty—remains between ages 12 and 13, recent research argues that other signs of puberty may be dropping.

The debate over earlier puberty in girls has been going for more than a decade, and while the jury seems to still be out, many studies have linked obesity with earlier onset of puberty. That’s also true in this study. So if the age is indeed dropping, it’s primarily doing so among overweight girls.

Nevertheless, it raises all sorts of questions for us as youth workers and for parents of teenagers (or soon to be teenagers).  In the midst of a culture that increasingly pushes sexualized messages on younger girls, how do we also talk about the potential reality of earlier sexual maturity? What kinds of conversations do we need to have with younger girls about their bodies?

I don’t think we need to sound any alarms over this report, but I do think we need to keep talking.

Related posts:

1. The Right Kind of Peer Pressure for Girls
2. Mean Girls?
3. The News About Girls?

(click on the image to see a larger version)

Related posts:

1. Best Buy/Search Institute – Teen Research
2. Evolving Online Communication
3. Ideas on how to talk to teens and emerging adults

As a kid I was told—ALL THE TIME—to lower my voice.  To be quiet(er).  To shut up.  I was really loud, pretty much wherever I went.  Some would say I still am, but I do have a little more self-awareness than I used too.  Not surprisingly, my kids have volume-control issues of their own and we’re finding ourselves saying things like “Please don’t shout across the table at me to tell your story” (on our good parenting days).

Recent research lets us in on another secret about voices: we don’t trust people who don’t sound like us. Yes, that means accents different from our own—especially “foreign” voice inflections—spur feelings of mistrust just by the very nature of their difference.

According to research from the University of Chicago reported in this Futurity article, “Because an accent makes a person harder to understand, listeners are less likely to find what the person says as truthful, researchers found. The problem of credibility increases with the severity of the accent.” As researcher Boaz Keysar explains, we “misattribute the difficulty of understanding the speech to the truthfulness of the statements.” This may be an unconscious misattribution, but it happens.

How often is that true of me?  Of you?  What happened on your last interaction with a phone service representative when you were having tech problems? How does this influence our views on immigration, our relationships in cross-cultural mission work, our respect for parents of kids in our ministries whose native tongue is not English? There are tons of implications here for issues of injustice in our communities and across the globe.

Or maybe I should just be quiet.

Related posts:

1. Can I Trust You?
2. Ideas on how to talk to teens and emerging adults
3. Let’s Talk

Especially when the church (frequently and with much pleasure) feeds into the stereotypes that excuse dads from fathering.  I bristle because it’s an affront to men (Oh, I see you’re babysitting, eh?), an affront to women (changing diapers and cuddling babies is women’s business), and an affront to God (who nurtures us as the perfect parent encompassing attributes of both mother AND father).

Boston College’s recent research report, “The New Dad: Exploring Fatherhood within an Career Context,” explores from a cultural perspective what it’s like to be a dad in America today, seeking to become a “whole person” both at work and at home.  Many dads struggle to balance both “breadwinning” and co-parenting.  For the first time in our country’s history, over half of college graduates are women, half of the workforce are women, and 70% of two-parent families are dual income-earners.  Obviously there are a lot of cultural and personal issues at play here, a number of which are beyond the scope of this blog.

What I find refreshing in the report is the lack of jokes and assumptions about what working dads are supposed to be doing—watching TV, playing video games, golfing, or engaging in other entertainment distractions.  Overwhelmingly, dads in the study talked about providing emotional support and “being there” as being as important as financial support. Fathers’ engagement and nurturing were the big themes of the interviews. The authors sum up their discussion with this statement:

“We would not accept disparaging comments about women’s abilities in the workplace. Why do we think it is acceptable to make similarly disparaging comments regarding the incompetence of men as care takers and parents, when for so many men this is becoming one of the central roles of their lives?”

There are plenty of dads who need to step up—many of whom are being excused from active fatherhood by our churches.  But there are so, so many other dads who need us to cheer them on, expect great things of them, and affirm their importance in the nurturing of their own—and our communities’—kids.

Related posts:

1. Sticky Faith Summit Day #1
2. Family Dinner Day
3. Biggest Generation Gap Ever