Football has a problem. The game harms the human brain. The danger is acute at the professional level, where large men smash each other for large sums of money; the hazard is less publicized, but greater still, at the high school and youth level, where an estimated 4.8 million children – sons, nephews and little brothers, most between the ages of 6 and 13 — batter each other’s heads for fun…

Yet despite growing awareness and new regulations and rules for youth football to help protect kids from long-term harm, Hruby wonders aloud, “What if the risk can’t be managed?” What if parents, coaches, and fans continue to not care and not pay attention, for the love of the sport?

The Boston Globe recently reported that emergency room visits for youth sports-related traumatic brain injuries went up 62 percent from 2001 to 2009. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has labeled sports concussions “an epidemic,” reported last year that roughly 122,000 youths between the ages of 10 and 19 went to emergency rooms for nonfatal brain injuries. For boys, the top cause of injury was playing football.

And because many young athletes re-enter play before healing, they are prone to suffer multiple concussions. This puts them at serious risk for further (and more permanent) complications down the road. According to one study, more than 40% of high school athletes return to the field too quickly. And given the average high school lineman receives an estimated 1,000-1,500 hits to the head in a season, the risks add up.

Does the issue come down, as Hruby suggests, to either protecting our national pastime or protecting our children’s brains? What does it say about our culture that a game oriented around intentional attack has such a strong pull that we’d rather continue to embrace it than address very real concerns about its long-term impact on the players?  Or are these questions all part of the movement of overparenting and overprotection?

Here in the off-season, maybe it’s a good time to wonder aloud about some of these questions.  And perhaps to wonder about our adult obsession with youth sports performance in general.  Is it all worth the game?

Related posts:

1. Brain research: what are kids thinking?
2. Parenting the Teen Brain
3. Worth Fighting For

Today is Ash Wednesday, one of my favorite days in the liturgical year.

I know, that sounds kind of strange, even morbid.  Ash Wednesday invites us to look at our finitude, our frailty, our pain and death.  It invites us to a 40-day journey that is in many ways a journey to our own death in the shadow of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

This is, of course, countercultural to us; as a culture we try hard to avoid death, grief, and pain. So in our churches we don’t regularly enter into the kinds of faith practices that help us live with and through our pain.  Ash Wednesday is one small window into this world of worship. Lent gives us an opportunity to practice prayers of lament—bringing our brokenness to God as many of the psalms do with raw honesty.

Lament opens the possibility of facing the doubts and questions we carry and then turning toward the face of the One who can handle them.  The possibility of—as our children’s Bible phrases it—seeing sad things come “untrue” again as the Kingdom breaks in.

As usual, God is springing new life in the midst of our death this Lenten season.  Over the next 40 days, we’re invited to make space to take notice.

Below are a few (updated) links if you need new ideas for Lent resources.  Please share more ideas and links if you have them:

Lent 101, by Kelly Soifer via YMToday

Getting Ready for Lent, lots of links compiled by Christine Sine

Daily Lenten Devotionals from Church Resource Ministries

Significant Sacrifice, a resource by Lifewater International

Encountering God, ideas from Lilly Lewin via YouthWorker Journal

And a prayer for Ash Wednesday, courtesy of Christine Sine:

Jesus come and save us,

We are but dust,
We are like ashes,
but you can touch our unclean souls.

Jesus come and forgive us,

Our hearts are heavy,
Our burdens are great,
Cleanse us with the water of life.

Jesus come and heal us,

Restore our sight,
Teach us truth,
Speak to us words that bring us wholeness.

Jesus touch us with your heart of love,

Cleanse us with the water of life,
Restore our sight that we may see,
Teach us truth that we may lead Godly lives.

No related posts.

The primary insight from the study is that more controlling “authoritarian” parents “are more likely to raise disrespectful, delinquent children who do not see them as legitimate authority figures than authoritative parents who listen to their children and gain their respect and trust.” While other studies have explored parenting styles and various outcomes, this is apparently the first study to look specifically at how parenting style influences the adolescent’s belief about parental authority (Is my parent a legitimate authority figure?) and whether those beliefs are correlated with delinquent behavior. In this case, they were.

Similar to authoritarian parenting, authoritative parenting is fairly high-demand and high-control, giving children clear boundaries and keeping them.  But unlike the emotional coolness of authoritarian parenting, in the authoritative style rule-keeping is coupled with relational warmth and conversation.  Authoritative parents listen to their children’s feedback on rules and explain the rationale for boundaries or discipline.  According to the study’s findings:

“The style that parents used to rear their children had a direct influence on whether those children perceived their parents as legitimate authority figures. Adolescents who perceived parents as legitimate were then less likely to engage in delinquent behavior… Conversely, authoritarian parents have the opposite effect in that they actually reduce the likelihood of their children perceiving their authority as legitimate.”

As a parent, I understand the temptation to go the route of “Because I said so” in response to push-back from kids on boundaries.  And let me tell you, I often don’t have the energy or patience to explain every limit I set or answer every question I get in response. But this research is a good reminder that in more ways than one, parenting with both authority and emotional connection tends to pay off in the long haul.

It’s also a reminder that as parents we need more than research to help us parent well; we need communities around us to support us, remind us, listen to our struggles, and help parent our children alongside us.

Related posts:

1. Helicopter parenting
2. Parenting Myths We Can Do Without
3. Pulling the Plug on Perfect Parenting

Collective eye roll, anyone?

More than just annoying behavior, helicopter parenting can have toxic effects on young people.  It communicates to them that they aren’t competent, skilled, and gifted by God.

I’ve also started to see the opposite in parents:  parents who are so afraid of helicoptering that they don’t support their kids as much as they should.

Somewhere between these two extremes is a helpful middle.  If you’re a youth leader, a big part of our job is to help parents and young people navigate these two extremes by:

1. Talking about them.   Whether one family at a time, through small groups of parents, or through a youth ministry parent training event.
2. Encouraging families to identify which tendency they tend to fall toward.
3. Asking parents to think about what fears and insecurities might be motivating their behavior.  As parents, it’s so easy to parent from fear instead of love.
4. Inviting them to brainstorm how they can make progress to a more balanced relational dynamic –one that is supportive and yet has appropriate boundaries.  For helicopter parents, it means keeping their mouths shut and letting their young people fail.  For unengaged parents, it means stepping into the conversation and the process more.
5. Asking them to re-evaluate in a few months.  We need to keep revisiting these questions and tensions.  We can’t expect to find a balance point that lasts indefinitely.

Related posts:

1. Helicopter parenting
2. Never do for kids…
3. The Cost to Billy Graham as a Dad

According to one study performed by the University of Winnipeg on college students ages 18-22, the answer is perhaps.

“Heavy texters do seem to be a little more materialistic and less concerned about inward growth,” said Paul Trapnell of the University of Winnipeg in Canada.

Frequent texting is “’weakly correlated with traits, goals, and attitudes that indicate low interest and engagement in reflective thought,” he added…

Adolescents who texted more than 100 a day were 30 percent less likely to believe leading an ethical, principled life was important.

Before we rush to throw our teenagers’ cell phones out the window, it must be noted that it’s not clear to me that texting actually does MAKE a person shallow.  It might be that those who text already are less likely to lead an ethical life.  Or it might be that those who are less ethical are more likely to text.  (In research speak, that means we can’t assert a direction of causality from the research.)

But I think this research, along with other studies that have been discussed in previous blogs about some of the negative effects of social networking, should make those of us who care about teenagers wonder:  what can we do to make sure their use of media and technology does more good than harm?

Let’s break that big question into 2 fundamental questions that you can ask as you think about teenagers you know:

1.  In what ways does their use of texting help them?

2.  In what ways does it hurt them?

Now lay these two questions across the various facets of students’ lives – their relationships with friends, their family, their church, and their God.  In other words, ask:  in what ways does their use of texting help their relationships with their friends?  In what ways does it hurt their relationships with their friends?  And so on.

Depending on your relationships with these teenagers, you might even be able to involve them in the discussion.

Based on your reflection, how would you want their use of texting to change?  How can you talk to them about some of your hopes?

OK, now here are a few final questions that you might want to talk about with students also:  Are there parts of your (as an adult) texting and use of technology that are damaging your relationships that you likewise need to change?  What will you do about that?

Related posts:

1. Texting and Adolescent Development
2. Make Mistakes Once
3. Adversity Can Make Us Stronger

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1. A Truly Collaborative Youth Ministry Training Gathering
2. Volume 6, Issue 12
3. Micro-Enterprise with Macro-Results

According to a Wall Street Journal summary of new study of tween dating habits and attitudes, some elements of dating have changed in the last 30 years and some haven’t.  First, let’s talk about what’s changed.

1.  Passing notes in school is now texting and Facebooking.

Social media is the new form of communication, and some (maybe even most) communicate more words by text than face to face.

2.  More openness to oral sex and intercourse.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the research summary was the greater openness to oral sex and intercourse.

More than 1 in 4 tweens say oral sex and intercourse are part of tween relationships, the Liz Claiborne survey found. That doesn’t mean 1 in 4 tweens are engaging in those behaviors, however. Respondents were answering a question about dating behavior in general at that age, rather than their own conduct.

When I was 12, I thought “oral sex” meant talking about sex.  I’m not kidding.  I really did.

What has stayed the same?

Well, tween dating relationships are still awkward, short-lived, and often in the context of larger circles of friendship.  Even more importantly, tween dating relationships still give parents a fantastic chance to go deeper in their life and faith discussions with their students.

A kid’s first crush poses an opportunity to teach values, Ms. Wiseman says. A parent might say, “Tell me what you like about this person,” and explore whether the child knows what distinguishes healthy relationships from harmful ones.

Tweens are interested, at least at some level, in the opposite gender.  Their interest, crushes and awkwardness give us as parents and leaders wonderful conversational doors to ask questions and talk more about healthy relationships.  We can ask:

-What do you like about this person?

-What concerns do you have about this person?

-What advice would you give a friend who was interested in this person?

-How does dating this person fit with what you think God’s picture for your life is?

Related posts:

1. Are they or aren’t they?
2. Christian Boy Meets Christian Girl
3. The Image of Lassiez-Faire Marriage

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”

Related posts:

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

Related posts:

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.

Related posts:

1. Time to Talk About Digital Bullying
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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1. Volume 6, Issue 5
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