Teens Destroy iPad

Have you seen this YouTube video that’s making it’s way around the Internet? It shows a group of teen guys outside of a Best Buy intentionally destroying a brand new iPad with a baseball bat after one of them paid for it with his own money.

So is this is a youthful rebellion against the idols of their parent’s generation? Is it a bold statement about rejecting the technological materialism that is endemic in our society?

I kind of wish it was, but it turns out that the 19-year-old who posted the clip actually loves Apple and bought two other iPads to keep and use. He just knew that someone would be the first to repeat with an iPad the Internet meme of destroying an eagerly awaited object of desire, and he wanted to be the first.

His name is Justin Kockott, 19, and he’s taken a lot of heat for the act of violence in the comments to the video on YouTube. I thought this brief Q-and-A with the LA Times was revealing, as he seems to be trying to answer objections about his management of resources and the wisdom of spending $500 in this way.

For instance:

Some people are saying I should’ve donated the money instead of wasting it. But my family donates money all the time. Last year we gave $10-15,000 to the Make a Wish Foundation (my little sister is sick).  It’s not like we’re greedy, it’s not like we did it to rub it in and say, “We have the money, oh look at us.”

You’ll hear some off-camera strong language in the clip, but it might make an interesting conversation-starter with your child about the value of objects, use of money, and what wisdom has to say about managing resources—or you could talk about what it looks like to smash our idols. Or the long-term consequences of Internet foolishness and instant celebrity. Or what they (or you) would like to smash with a baseball bat on YouTube.

Whichever way you go, there’s some kind of powerful object lesson in this somewhere.

Debbie Chavez Interview with Mark Matlock

On Thursday, April 1st, Mark Matlock, founder of Real World Parents, was interviewed by Debbie Chavez. Mark talked about how to parent proactively and truly prepare your kids to make their own great choices. You can listen to the interview online.

Teaching Kids Money Wisdom

During the recent recession, many families could relate to the wisdom of Proverbs 23:5: “Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone, for they will surely sprout wings and fly off to the sky like an eagle.”

That’s a pretty good description of what the last year or two felt like for a lot of us. We learned again how unreliable money is in an up and down economy. Several news reports showed that kids and teens felt the impact, as well, slowing their spending and helping the family to conserve.

A report in Sunday’s LA Times titled “Free-spending teens return to malls” suggests that trend is starting to reverse itself.

But now teen shoppers are making a comeback. For two months in a row, teen retailers have soared past sales expectations. Notably, Abercrombie & Fitch Co., known for its sexy advertising and casual-but-pricey fashions, snapped its 20-month streak of negative sales with an 8% increase in January.

The story quotes one 14 year old shopper as saying, “Last year I didn’t shop as much,” but now, “the urge has come.”

Is that a good thing? Retailers may say yes, but parents who want their kids to grow wise need to ask if their teens are learning to manage resources well, no matter what the economy is doing. That’s one of the “Seven Marks of Wise Person,” according to Mark Matlock. (You could read more about the “Seven Marks” at TheWisdomDeck.com.)

And our kids aren’t likely to learn good money habits without us. A new survey by TheMint.org reported on Credit.com reveals that 68 percent of teens polled said their parents had the most influence on their spending and saving habits. The bad news is that 70 percent say also say their parents “sometimes spent on silly purchases and rarely met with them over money management.”

That might explain why that LA Times story quotes that 14 year old as saying, “I don’t really set a budget for myself. I just buy what I love.”

Obviously, our role as parents is to model good money choices, as well as to teach them. And it’s never too late to start doing either. Even when we make poor choices or suffer the consequences of past money missteps, our children benefit from our willingness to let them listen in as we talk about money strategies and own the outcomes of our choices.

In addition, we can let them see us turning to wise counselors—including God’s Word—for help to do better. That could involve something as quick and easy as talking about a proverb that teaches wisdom in managing resources.

You’ll find lots of those on TheWisdomDeck.com, sorted according to category, but here’s a good one to start with about controlling our consumption: “In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has.” (Proverbs 21:20) Why not bring it up with your kids some time this week?

 

Father/Daughter Reading Record

Do you read with your kids? I bet you’ll want to do it more after you read this great piece in the New York Times about how Jim Brozina read to his daughter Kristen for thousands of nights in a row.

For 3,218 nights (and some mornings, if Mr. Brozina was coming home too late to read), The Streak went on. It progressed from James Marshall’s picture books about George and Martha (two close friends who happen to be hippos) to middle-school classics like “When Zachary Beaver Came to Town” to the 14 Oz books (which they read four times each), to Harry Potter, Agatha Christie, Dickens and Shakespeare, continuing on, until Kristen’s first day of college.

It’s a touching story, and it seems to have helped set the course for this girl’s life. It made me wonder both about the power of reading with our kids, about what content is worth reading with our kids, and about what other things besides reading we can do on a daily basis with our kids that will help shape the course of their lives. Do you have any daily practices that you hope to see—or have already seen—bearing fruit in your child’s life? Do you do anything intentionally on a daily basis to build wisdom into the mind of your child?

Before They Drift Away

If you’ve read Real World Parents or have attended one of the seminars, you’ve heard us talk about the research of sociologist Christian Smith. His 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers provided key and practical insights for parents, youth workers, and educators.

Equally revealing and useful for parents is his newer work exploring the inner lives of 18-23-year-olds. In Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Smith uncovers a generation even more disconnected than has been the norm for this stage of life in recent history. That disconnect extends especially to the willingness of young adults to continue in the traditional faith doctrines and practices of their upbringing.

For a thumbnail, you might want to check out The Lukewarm Generation, an excellent summary from W. Bradford Wilcox over on FirstThings.com. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but I liked his encapsulation of what Smith suggests we might be able to do to help keep our kids from simply drifting away from Christianity and into isolation in their college-age years.

According to Smith’s analyses, children are more likely to end up as committed and consistent young-adult believers if their parents integrate religious faith into daily family life; if children are exposed to engaging adult believers in their churches; if they have good religious friends; if they live chaste lives; and, interestingly, if they have to suffer for their faith.

This says to me, for starters, that our influence as parents in the lives of our young adult children starts when they’re much younger as we fully engage our families in the life of a healthy community of believers where joyful discipleship is taught and modeled.

What to Do about Cheating

Why do so many students cheat in school—and what can we do about it? That’s the question motivating Jay Mathews column yesterday in The Washington Post. His suggestions run along the line of encouraging teachers to be smarter.

There are dozens of smart ways to give a test, starting with staying in the room and paying attention to what is going on. You can change the order of questions for test papers of students sitting near each other. You can look for obvious similarities in answers. You can have a probing conversation on the lesson after class with a student whose work suddenly and mysteriously improves.

But teachers can only be so smart when it comes to preventing cheating. The real first line of defense is to capture the heart of students, to convince them not only that it is wrong to cheat, but that it matters if they do wrong. Unless students are committed to refusing to cheat under any circumstances, cheating will continue.

If you ever want to have a great conversation about the nature of truth and situational morality, ask a roomful of teenagers if it is ever okay to cheat. Even many Christian students who openly swear allegiance to God’s Word will often make a tortured case for the “okay-ness sometimes” of cheating. They’d rather you not try to equate cheating in school with lying or stealing and apply passages like Proverbs 20:23: ““The LORD detests differing weights, and dishonest scales do not please him.”

Seemingly in answer to those students, the About.com Teen Advice page put together this uncompromising list of “Ten Things You Need to Know About Cheating.”

As parents, we have two roles to play. One involves teaching the morality (and wisdom!) of truth-telling and courageous peer-resisting to our kids from the time they are quite young. The other is harder: Being willing to accept the fact that yes, Virginia, my kid might be cheating, too. As parents, we’re often the last ones to believe.

That was demonstrated last year in the results of a coordinated survey of parents and teens about cheating with cell phones as reported in U.S. News:

More than 75 percent of parents responding to the survey say that cellphone cheating happens at their children’s school, but only 3 percent believe their own teen is using a cellphone to cheat.

How about you? What’s your approach to knowing if your kids are cheating—or responding when they admit it or get caught? Do you have a strategy to intentionally address the issue before it becomes an issue with your son or daughter?

Mom Doesn’t Want Kids to be Happy

Someone just directed me to this great post by a mom on a blog called It’s Almost Naptime. Her kids are still little, but the point she’s making applies to kids of all ages. Here’s a taste, but I’d encourage you to read the whole thing. It’s written to her young daughters.

I know you’re going to think I am going off topic (I do that a lot) but several years I saw a story on a TV show about how the latest trend was for parents to give their daughters boob jobs for high school graduation (I don’t know what they gave their sons.) When interviewing one of the moms, she said, “I just want my daughter to be happy.” And as I tossed a throw pillow at the television, this really huge thought occurred to me: I don’t want my children to be happy.

My goal as your mom is not your happiness, sugars. In fact, I spend at least half my day making you unhappy. If I had a nickle for every tear that falls in this home on a daily basis, we wouldn’t need to worry about college tuition at all.

Happiness is fleeting, sweet babies. That means it doesn’t last. It’s a quick feeling that comes from a funny movie or a heart shaped lollipop or a really good birthday present. It’s great. I love to be happy. But happiness is a reaction that is based on our surroundings. And our surroundings are so very rarely under our control. Even when - especially when - we think they are. So no, I absolutely don’t want you to spend your life chasing something that has so little to do with your own abilities. You’ll just be constantly frustrated.

Read on to find out what she wants them to chase instead.

 

The Wisdom of Sleep

Journalists must be tired, because there seem to be a million stories about sleep deficits and napping and optimal sleep patterns, lately. One primary focus is on teens and sleep.

You’ve probably heard it before: Teens don’t get enough sleep. The reported collection of reasons include a) hormones keep teens from feeling sleepy until later in the evening; (combined with) b) early school start times; c) overcrowded schedules; d) constant stimulus from electronics and new media; and even e) lack of exposure to sunlight in the morning.

Our conventional wisdom says, “They’re young; they can take it.” But newish studies suggest that lack of sleep in teens can lead to moodiness, depression, underperforming in academics and athletics, and even more dire health concerns. Here’s a collection of articles on the subject:

Teen sleep: Why is your teen so tired?

Teens struggle to get enough shut-eye

Hey, sleepyhead, get some shuteye

Health Matters: Is sleep that important for teenagers?

Obviously, enforcing healthy sleep patterns with teens can be an uphill battle. As with all areas of life, they will notice whether we practice what we preach about sleep—as well as our attitudes about bed times and waking times.

Many of us carry around the cultural notion that to skip sleep for the sake of work or other important efforts is a sign of character. To sacrifice sleep for the sake of healthy ambition should be encouraged. It’s tough-minded and wise.

I held that position for much of my life, but a chapter in C.J. Mahaney’s little book Humility recently helped me to rethink it. He suggested that to dismiss my need for sleep is prideful, a desire to be like God, who never needs sleep. (See Psalm 121:4.) To deny that I need the 6 to 8 hours a night required by the rest of humanity is to deny that I am a limited human being who needs this particular gift from God.

Instead of resisting or resenting sleep—and then living in the added stress and joylessness that come from being sleep deprived—we and our kids need wisdom to see sleep as God’s way of providing for our minds, bodies, and souls.

Does Screen Time Make Teens Pull Away?

According to a story on CNET, one study says, yes, teens with more TV and computer time become more detached from their parents:

The researchers, who examined a 2004 study of more 3,000 youths aged 14 and 15, found that those who spent more time in front of television or computer screens also had more difficulty engaging in a rewarding relationship with parents. In fact, the possibility of low attachment between the teens and their parents increased by 4 percent for every hour of TV screen time, which could include gaming. That figure jumped to 5 percent for every hour spent on a computer.

Meanwhile, the author points out that a more recent study of adults suggests that Web users tend to be more socially engaged (though no mention is made of their parents):

Web users are “45 percent more likely to visit a cafe, 52 percent more likely to visit a library, 34 percent more likely to visit a fast-food restaurant, 69 percent more likely to visit other restaurants, and 42 percent more likely to visit a public park.”

In the end, as always, the stats are less important than what’s going on with the heart and mind of your own child. Instead of wallowing in anxiety and fear about the impact of hours in front of the TV and Internet, hopefully we’re noticing our kids’ level of engagement with us and the world around them and stepping in to intervene if needed.

And hopefully we’re continuing to ask God for wisdom for us and them about where the reasonable boundaries are for the new normal of 24/7 connection to the data stream.

(article via Mark Matlock’s always engaging and distracting Twitter stream)

Real World Parents, the Book

We’re really excited to announce that Mark Matlock’s latest book—which builds on and expands all the big ideas covered in the Real World Parents seminars—is now available for purchase and, you know, reading.

If you’d like to get your very own copy, click on over to WisdomWorks.com to order today.

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter that reveals the heart of the book:

All four of my dad’s sons grew into men with a real passion and appreciation for God’s Word—even though he couldn’t get us to sit still and take the reading of the Word seriously during repeated failed attempts at family devotions.

Why? It’s because we knew that he had a real passion and appreciation for God’s Word. We saw him reading it. We saw him struggling with how to apply it to his life. We saw him and mom basing nearly every decision on their understanding of what the Bible teaches.

Ultimately, we were convinced of the biblical worldview contained in the pages of Scripture because we saw our parents openly endorsing it, talking about it, learning from it, and living it out day after day, year after year.

How can we help our kids to catch our own neediness for and reliance on Christ to live as He has called us to do in the real world? That’s what the book—and the seminars and this site—are all about. Thanks for joining us in the effort to be Real World Parents.

Olympic Purpose

I always forget how emotional the Olympics can be until they come around again with all those stories of personal commitment, hard work, and overcoming to get to the games and compete well. And parents often play a major role in those stories.

I don’t know about you, but those P&G commercials really nailed me as a parent (even though I’m not a mom). Part of the reason they’re so effective is that they have everything to do with that idea of purpose—fulfilling our purpose as parents and giving our kids big goals to aspire to.

Representing the God of purpose on earth, Jesus was a great leader, in part, because He helped His followers to see the vital role they could play as people of God. Remember this from Matthew 5:13-16?

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

Jesus paints both the joy of victoriously fulfilling our purpose as God’s salt and light on earth—and the agony of realizing we’ve squandered our potential to point people to the Father.

Part of our job as parents is to help our kids find and fulfill their talents and abilities—like figure skating, say—but also to find their ultimate purpose as followers of Christ. As they begin to walk after Him for God’s glory, we can truly tell them that they’ll never walk alone.

 

What’s Their Purpose?

A recent parenting class encouraged us to help ground our kids with a sense of purpose, an understanding of what their life is about beyond just making themselves happy.

That led to a good discussion about different practical ways we can help our kids to understand and explore their purpose in life, the job they are convinced they must participate in to be who they are.

So I was happy to run across an article about exactly that from Mark Gregston, the director of Heartlight, a residential program in East Texas for struggling adolescents. The article, “Teenagers Seeking Purpose,” is up on Crosswalk.com’s parenting channel, and the whole thing is worth a read.

This exercise, though, is what jumped out to me. It seems it would be a good way to at least begin the conversation with a student about what they see as their purpose in life.

For teens (or parents) who have already had many experiences in life, and are still confused about their purpose, here’s a good exercise. Take out a blank sheet of paper and write at the top, “What is My Life Purpose?” Then, have them begin writing answers. They should write any answer that pops into their head. It could be a word or two, or a sentence. Repeat until they write the answer that makes them cry - obviously not a sad cry, but a joyful one. Yup, if it makes a tear come to their eye, then it’s a sure bet that this is their purpose, or at least associated with their purpose. They should do it in private and without any accompanying music or other distractions. It may take 100 or even 200 lines of potential “purposes” to hit the one that makes a tear come to their eye, but encourage them to keep at it until they do.

Check out the whole article and be sure to share your own ideas here about ways you have found to help your kids understand the significant purposes God has given to them.

How to Talk to Kids about Sex and Marriage

Blogger Tim Challies recommends a series of six posts by Jay Younts at the Shepherd Press blog on the topic of Talking with Your Children about Marriage & Sex. Younts encourages parents to A) enter into that conversation and B) to be careful not to separate the mechanics of sex from its place in marriage as secular sex ed is likely to do. 

Sexual activity is designed for a man and a woman who are obeying God in marriage in order to bring honor to his name. The idea that sexual pleasure is designed merely for self-interest is pagan at its core. It is dishonoring to God to talk about sex in abstraction from marriage. Sex is specifically designed for marriage and for nothing else. This principle means that you want to lay the proper foundation for talking about marriage and sex with your children. This will provide a more natural transition when you talk with your children about the specifics.

All six posts are helpful, covering everything from when to talk about sex with your kids to what and how to talk about it.

Study: Abstinence Education Works

We linked to a story recently reporting that teen pregnancies in the U.S. had reached their highest point since the 80s—the highest rate of all developed countries. Some experts are suggesting that abstinence-only education is part of the problem.

However, the Washington Post reports the results of a major, long-term study that challenges the common notion that abstinence education is a failed experiment.

Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active.

If you’re a parent, though, you’re likely to be troubled by even the good news in that study. A third of students having sex within two years of completing an abstinence program in sixth and seventh grade? That’s hard to reconcile as a big win.

More than anything, it’s clear that parents are needed to provide wisdom to their children about sex, love, dating, and God’s standards in those areas.

Another story reporting on the study included this quote from a group called Abstinence America: “The majority of young people (88%) say it would be much easier for teens to postpone sexual activity and avoid teen pregnancy if they were able to have more open, honest conversations about these topics with parents.”

You already knew that, but it helps to keep hearing it. At least, it helps us.

Teens Thrive with Limits

It’s another one of those news stories that reports the findings of studies that reinforce what we already pretty much knew in the first place. Still, it’s encouraging to see it in print.

The USA Today story sites results from three studies, actually, in which it was found that teens did better when their parents set limits on their behavior. The studies include one on media consumption limits, one on bedtimes, and a third on teen driving rules.

Teen drivers whose parents set and enforced rules were more likely to wear seat belts and less likely to speed, get in crashes, drink and drive, or use cellphones while driving. (That study was in Pediatrics in September.)

The author of the study on teen driving, Kenneth Ginsburg, explains: “The reality is that teenagers care deeply what their parents think. The challenge for parents is to get across rules and boundaries in a way that doesn’t feel controlling.”

How does that work? The story describes an approach that will sound familiar to Real World Parents.

In the driving study, as in many other studies, the most effective parents were those researchers call “authoritative.” They set firm rules but explain and enforce them in a warm, supportive way. Parents who set no rules, fail to enforce them or rule with a “because I said so” iron grip are less effective.

Speaking of Real World Parents, look for Mark Matlock’s book of the same name will be available to order right here on the site in the next few weeks.

Building on Strengths

Should we spend the bulk of our time as educators and parents helping kids to shore up their weaknesses to expand on their strengths? Matt Perman over at the What’s Best Next blog files his vote for helping kids strengthen their strengths.

One reason focusing on strengths results in the greatest growth is because it is motivating. People like to do what makes them feel strong (the definition of a strength — note, a strength is not merely what you are good at), and so they are intrinsically motivated to do it more. Thus, they get better at it, and the cycle continues. Further, this cycle has “spillover effects.” By getting better at something, your general sense of self-efficacy improves (note: that is very different from self-esteem), and you become better at other things as well.

Focusing on weaknesses, on the other hand, is demotivating. As someone has very rightly said, “if you focus on someone’s weaknesses, they lose confidence.” This can backfire entirely, such that the student not only fails to grow significantly in their weak areas, but also ends up being frustrated with their educational growth all together.

Mr. Perman recommends a book for parents and educators called Your Child’s Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them by Jenifer Fox, M. Ed.

Girls Just Wanna . . . Look Different

It’s not just this young Chinese woman planing to undergo extensive surgery to look like Jessica Alba in an effort to win back her ex-boyfriend. Most teen girls/young women feel the pressure to measure up to the media-driven standard for female beauty—and the constant realization that perhaps they don’t.

This is confirmed again in a big way by a National Post report on a recent Girl Scouts survey of 1,000 13-to-17-year-old girls.

Almost nine in 10 American teenage girls say they feel pressured by the fashion and media industries to be skinny and that an unrealistic, unattainable image of beauty has been created, a poll showed on Monday.

Sadder still is this report from PRLog that 41 percent of 13-16 year-old girls in the U.K. would like to have cosmetic surgery.

When asked the multi-answer question “What concerns are making you want to have surgery?”, 62% of the female teens who wanted surgery said they wanted bigger breasts, whilst 55% wanted to change their teeth and 49% wanted to have surgery for weight loss. 1 in 3 said that they wanted to change the appearance of their nose.

Parents of girls need wisdom to help their daughters navigate the inevitably choppy waters of body image in today’s culture. A great start is helping kids to feel fully accepted and loved at home—but that is just a start. As always, we think it’s worth talking about these issues with your kids even if you don’t think it’s something they’re struggling with (and especially if you know it’s something they are).

First Rise in Teen Pregnancy Since ‘80s

One of the points made in the Real World Parents seminars and upcoming new book from Mark Matlock is that many of us carry around the false notion that everything is always getting worse for us culturally, especially where teens are concerned. But the stats have not backed that feeling up. In many categories, including stats related to divorce, drug use, and teen sex, the worst numbers peaked back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

In fact, a new study reported in the LA Times shows teen pregnancy rates are up for the first time since the late ‘80s—and the study’s authors are crediting that increase on abstinence-only education.

Data released this week from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that conducts research on sexual and reproductive health, shows that the teen pregnancy rate rose 3% in 2006, the first increase since the late ‘80s. The institute, a pro-choice organization, says that abstinence-only sex education programs that took root during the Bush administration are to blame for the increase.

I haven’t read all of the data, but it seems like a sizable leap between correlation and causation in that conclusion. I wonder, too, how the data on abortions plays into those numbers. In any case, it doesn’t change our mission as Real World Parents to help our kids to learn to value purity, wisdom, and the life of the unborn as they navigate their hyper-sexualized culture.

Kids Consuming Media 7.5 Hours a Day

You may have already heard the ubiquitous findings of a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Here’s the nutshell:

Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7

The Avatar Opportunity

One of the central themes of Real World Parents is that we look for real world opportunities to talk to our kids about truth and wisdom. We’re big believers that our inescapable popular culture gives us those opportunities in abundance—if we’re willing to overcome the inertia of the “it’s just a movie” cop-out.

Case in point: James Cameron’s megahit “Avatar” has become almost universally embraced as far more than “just a movie.” While it’s true that some people love or hate it as cinema, far more people seem to be impassioned by it’s messages, though not all agree on what those are.

Those praising the film’s big ideas include the president of Bolivia, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, any number of media reviewers, and some Chinese freedom bloggers. Those against the film’s teaching include the Vatican, Ross Douthat of the New York Times, the Chinese government, and any number of Christian and conservative reviewers.

Meanwhile, CNN reports some huge fans of the film are experiencing suicidal thoughts because they will never live on Pandora while others are just depressed because the film’s overwhelming success means we’re now doomed to wear those clunky 3D glasses forever.

Here’s the bottom-line question, though: What do your kids think of the film—and what messages did they hear coming from the story (or whatever story is enthralling them at the moment)? What do they see as true and false in those messages? How do those messages fit into the story of God’s Word—or stand against it?

And how can we teach them the wisdom skill of evaluating the stories that fascinate them in light of the greatest story of all time?

UPDATE: Saw this on Adam McClane’s links page (via the Youth Specialties Update) after I posted: Avatar Promotes/Doesn’t Promote Smoking. (Notice especially the quote from Cameron.)

Haiti and Your Kids

Depending on the age of your kids, it might be tempting to steer them away from the overwhelming tragedy unfolding in Haiti right now. Or we might be tempted to avoid it ourselves. To weep with those weeping there feels as if it might drown us. But this is an opportunity to lead your family to stand with you both in helping the survivors of the Haiti earthquake and developing a Christlike heart of compassion for those who suffer.

Here are three ideas:

1) Talk about Haiti and the earthquake together. Your kids will need to process what they’re feeling about what they see on TV and hear from the corners of their world. Make sure your home is a safe place to do that. Don’t be afraid to let them ask the hard questions about God’s love, power, and goodness—and don’t be afraid to say when you don’t know the answers.

2) Pray together for the people of Haiti and for the Christians working together there to bring relief. Ask God to spare lives, to save souls, and to be glorified. Ask for comfort, hope, and healing. Ask for needed money, shelter, medical supplies, manpower, and rest. Thank God that He is already answering some of those prayers. Thank Him that He is in control and active there.

3) Make a plan to give together as a family. Put a little thought into this. Consider giving through a missionary or mission agency your church supports, though Compassion International (who works with 6,500 kids in Haiti), or through some other qualified agency. Talk about how you expect your family’s giving to be used to help.

For more ideas on how to talk to teen about Haiti, check out this post for youth leaders over on the Youth Specialties site.

Are the Inked and Pierced More “Deviant”?

According to a new survey of over 1,700 college students, a correlation exists between those with multiple tattoos and piercings and what the Texas Tech researchers identified as deviant behavior like promiscuity, drug use, binge drinking, arrests, and academic cheating.

But the new data also suggest parents needn’t freak about a lone dolphin (14 percent of surveyed students had a tattoo) or a belly-button ring (37 percent had a body piercing). “For low-level body art, these kids are not any different from anybody else.”

The correlation with deviant behavior came among the 4 percent of students who had four or more tattoos, seven or more piercings, or one “intimate piercing.”

I haven’t met many parents enthused about their kids getting tattoos or the more extreme piercings, but as with so many other areas of life it’s the spirit of the heart that determines our deviance.

I remember once interviewing the hard-rocking daughter of a well known Christian minister, well “adorned” herself. Her advice to kids might not have been what parents would want to hear, but I always admired the spirit behind it.

She told them something like, “You’ll be out on our own in just a few years. If your parents won’t let you get a tattoo or piercing now, why not just wait? Plan what you want and then see if you still want it when you can get it with a clean conscience.”

Some kids will. Others won’t. But it’s a good thought experiment to help a wisdom-seeking student discover how much of their motive might have to do with rebellion.

Sex Doesn’t Sell at the Movies?

This recent article on CNN reports the findings of a study of more than 900 films released between 2001 and 2005.

The study found that, contrary to popular belief, sex and nudity failed to positively affect a film’s popularity among viewers or critics and did not guarantee big box office receipts.

One of the study’s co-authors, Dean Keith Simonton, said theirs was the largest sample of its kind used for film research. The results surprised him, he said.

“Sex did not sell, whether in the domestic or international box office, and even after controlling for MPAA rating,” said Simonton, who is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. “In other words, even among R movies, less graphic sex is better.”

Some, like Craig Detweiler of the Center for Entertainment, Media and Culture, suggest this is evidence that our “post-sexual revolution” culture has grown bored with the shock value of sex on screen. And while that might be true, to a point, we’d guess it also has something to do with the fact that porn has become so readily available and anonymously consumed outside of mainstream cinema that there’s little reason for those interested to see a movie just for the sex.

The upside for parents and families is that film studios have less reason to include significant sexual content for the sake of marketing alone. In fact, they may have good reason to avoid it.

Still, as parents, our challenge is to help our children learn to think wisely and biblically about what movies and other entertainment say about sex, not just how much sex and nudity they might glimpse on screen.

News: Teens Get the Recession

Although the tone of this recent New York Times story seems a little insulting to students—“Even teens understand the economy is bad!”—I think it reveals some encouraging fallout from the ongoing recession/recovery.

Reporting on a John D. Morris roundtable with teenagers for the purpose of gathering intel for the teen retail business, the story quotes several teens who say they’ve lowered their expectations for clothes and gadgets from their parents—and have altered their own buying habits.

 

Learning Religion at the Movies

We have not lately been doing movie reviews on the site, but part of the point of those reviews was to help parents talk with their kids about the big worldview ideas packaged with popular entertainment.

In that vein, I found these two recent stories extremely helpful—and fascinating.

John Granger has written several books about the Harry Potter stories. This longish article over on the Touchstone Magazine site breaks down the Twilight series of books, showing in detail how Stephenie Meyer’s Mormon beliefs have shaped that entire saga in some ways that may be surprising to Evangelicals.

I especially like these early paragraphs:

I suggest that the Twilight series is something for thoughtful people to be aware of and to think seriously about, first, because of its remarkable hold on the imagination of American readers and movie-goers, but second, and more important, because of the reason these books are so popular: They meet a spiritual need. Mircea Eliade, in his book The Sacred and the Profane, suggests that popular entertainment, especially imaginative literature and film, serves a religious or mythic function in a secular culture. When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the

One Way to Discourage Teen Sexting

You may have seen the recent stats from The Pew Internet & American Life Project on teens and sexting showing that 30% of 17 year olds have received nude or nearly nude images on their phones while only 8% of the same age group have admitted to sending them.

As reported by WalletPop.com, one way to make sure your teen is more likely to steer clear of sexting is to pay their phone bill. Some parents use their student’s phone bill as a way to teach them to begin to take responsibility for their own expenses. But if you’re concerned about what your student may do with that phone, you might want to find something else for them to pay for.

The study also found that teens feel less comfortable sending or receiving sexually suggestive images if they’re not footing the bill. Teens whose parents pay for their cell phone were five times less likely to send sexts (3%) than teens who pay their own bill (17%.) That’s good and bad news for parents, but since about 70% of teens’ cell phones are paid by someone else, it’s probably the most effective deterrent.

Of course, the most effective deterrent of all is for teens to gain the wisdom to understand that their actions have consequences—often unintended or undreamed of—and that those consequences can be amplified when cell phones and the Internet are involved. There’s a growing catalog of tragic stories about teens caught in the fallout of sexting scandals, often betrayed by disgruntled former girl/boyfriends or stung by a malicious prank.

While we’re still teaching that wisdom, though, we can help to protect our teens by staying involved for accountability on some level in their cell phone and Internet use—even if it means paying the bill for a while.

Students Growing More Stressed and Depressed Over Time

A new study looking at psychological surveys of over 63,000 high school and college students over time—from 1938 to 2007—shows a remarkable increase in the amount of mental illness and lack of emotional well-being.

Eight-five percent of college students today fall above the average mental illness “score” of students in the 1930s and 1940s. Students today report they feel significantly more isolated, misunderstood, and emotionally sensitive or unstable than in decades past. Teens were also more likely to be narcissistic, have low self-control, and express feelings of worry, sadness, and dissatisfaction with life.

The abcnews.com story quotes the researchers and a smattering of experts guessing at a variety of reasons for this phenomenon, but leveling their harshest criticism at our consumerist culture.

“These results suggest that as American culture has increasingly valued extrinsic and self-centered goals such as money and status, while increasingly devaluing community, affiliation, and finding meaning in life, the mental health of American youth has suffered,” the authors write.

Parents also get a passing swipe in the article for passing on the idea to kids that what matters most in life is work and money, not family and community.

We won’t add our own guesses to the pile, but we do believe that as Christian parents we have an opportunity to counter the culture by pointing our children to the ultimate source of hope—by demonstrating hopeful living right in front of them.

We believe that Christ in us is the hope of glory (Colossians 1:17) and that walking in the power of God’s Spirit produces love, joy, peace, and other positive emotions (Galatians 5:22-23). It’s not that we should ignore or deny real sadness and despair, only that we refuse to let those keep us from truest joy, contentment, and satisfaction in Christ.

One of the key components of being Real World Parents is to help build our kids into the people we want them to be by being the people we want them to be in front of them—by the power on the Holy Spirit. Our burden as parents is to find a way to let the power of God help us to express our everyday joy and reject our everyday anxiety. Your home can truly be an embassy of hopefulness in a foreign land where the norm is for kids to be depressed and discouraged.

Here is our prayer for you—and for your kids—this Christmas season and into the new year:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13)

Parents Waiting Too Long to Talk about Sex?

Here’s a topic we all want to think about around Christmastime. In fact, we’d rather never think about it, which might be part of the reason for this startling statistic reported in the Baltimore Sun.

More than 40 percent of adolescents have already had sex by the time their parent had talked to them about sexually transmitted diseases and birth control, according to a new study appearing today in the journal Pediatrics.

As the author points out, the sample size for this study is quite small. It’s hard to say how reliable the numbers are, but it’s not hard to believe that many teens are having sexual experiences long before their parents have opened a dialogue with them about some of the most uncomfortable sexual issues.

Part of the problem is that none of us want to introduce sexual ideas to our kids too soon—and we are likely to be the last to imagine the extent of our children’s sexual curiosity, knowledge, or experience. But it’s becoming more and more difficult to know exactly when “too soon” could be. Kids (and/or their friends) can Google just as well as we can. They’re bound to know something before we’d guess they do. What they’re unlikely to have access to apart from us is the wisdom to know what to do with their half-knowledge about sex and sexual experience in world saturated with sexual talk, images, and lies.

We do not want to respond to stats like these out of fear of failure as a parent or fear of our kids making poor sexual choices. But we do want to respond. From a positive perspective, it’s helpful to remember that—even if it’s the last thing they’ve ever ask us for—we have the opportunity to give our kids the great gift of a biblical understanding of sex, relationships, self-control, forgiveness, and starting over. And that’s way better than an Xbox.

What Gladwell’s Parents Gave Him

If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating book Outliers, you know it’s about the often surprising factors that contribute to success. It’s also a great book for parents to consider reading, since we can contribute so significantly to the kinds of success-building opportunities our kids might encounter and how diligently they take advantage of those opportunities.

Gladwell himself has become a huge success story in the publishing world. Every one of the four books he has written so far—starting with 2000’s The Tipping Point—is still currently on the New York Times bestseller list.

We’ve started looking for the kinds of things successful people say about their parents for this blog and Gladwell’s comments in the acknowledgements for Outliers are particularly insightful.

I owe thanks most of all, though, to my parents, Graham and Joyce. This is a book about the meaning of work, and I learned that work can be meaningful from my father. Everything he does—from his most complex academic mathematics to digging in the garden—he tackles with joy and resolve and enthusiasm. My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.

My mother, for her part, taught me how to express myself; she taught me that there is beauty in saying something clearly and simply. She read every word of this book and tried to hold me to that standard. My grandmother Daisy, to whom Outliers is dedicated, gave my mother the gift of opportunity. My mother has done the same for me.

 

Teens Pick Unhealthy Songs

We were struck by this Chicago Tribune story of teens working with the Boston Health Commission to analyze popular music for ingredients that are unhealthy for relationships.

The “Sound Relationships Nutrition Label” was developed by 14 teens after they attended a commission-sponsored institute on healthy relationship promotion and teen dating violence prevention. During the seven-week program, teens were also taught to evaluate music based on themes of power, control, equality and gender roles.

The PR-friendly result was a top ten list of the most unhealthy songs in the view of the students. You can click through all ten songs and the reasons for their inclusion at the link. The list includes familiar names like Jamie Foxx, Lady Gaga, 50 Cent, and others.

It might make a great conversation starter with your own kids about what unhealthy songs, TV shows, games, or movies they might put in a top ten list. You could also ask about any popular media they think might really promote healthy relationships.

On a larger scale, one mission for Real World Parents is to do exactly what the Boston Health Commission set out to do—“teach teens how to evaluate popular media.”

Christian students, especially, need to learn the life skill of being able to consume media with their brain turned on and wisdom engine engaged. Having regular conversations with—and in front of—your kids about how the messages in the media your family takes in compare to a biblical worldview will help kids to begin to internalize that healthy habit.

Is Everyone Else Really Doing It?

It’s not just a bargaining chip for teens, many really do believe that most everyone else their age is drinking, drugging, smoking, and/or having sex. But they’re wrong about the numbers. This fascinating Newsweek article reports that students are very bad at estimating what percentage of their peers are engaging in risky behavior.

The extent of this misperception

Are Teens Smart or Stable Enough?

This revealing article over at ScienceDaily.com about a report in American Psychologist shows how some adolescent psychologists are using the results of recent studies about teen cognitive and emotional maturity. The study seems to show that while teens possess sound cognitive skills by the age of 16, they don’t necessarily have the emotional maturity to make good decisions alone and under intense pressure until their early 20s.

While many parents might agree with those findings based on their own observations of teens, the American Psychological Association is bringing them to bear on upcoming Supreme Court cases involving the appropriate rights and responsibilities of adolescents. Specifically, should teens be given the right to make their own informed choice about abortion and/or be tried and sentenced as a responsible adult in criminal cases involving violent crimes.

When viewed through the lens of a biblical worldview, this quote makes my head hurt:

“Adolescents likely possess the necessary intellectual skills to make informed choices about terminating a pregnancy but may lack the social and emotional maturity to control impulses, resist peer pressure and fully appreciate the riskiness of dangerous decisions,” said Laurence Steinberg, PhD, a professor of developmental psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study. “This immaturity mitigates their criminal responsibility.”

In other words, teens have the stuff to make a cool, logical choice about aborting a baby while lacking the maturity to be held responsible for heat-of-the-moment choices about rape and murder.

“It is very difficult for a 16-year-old to resist peer pressure in a heated, volatile situation,” Steinberg said. “Most times, there is no time to talk to an adult to inject some reason and reality to the situation. Many crimes committed by adolescents are done in groups with other teens and are not premeditated.”

I understand that Dr. Steinberg and I may have radically differing perspectives on whether the choice for a otherwise healthy mom to abort a healthy baby is ever a rational one, but even from the worldview of pro-choice position hasn’t he just made the case that adolescents are not emotionally mature? He seems to be advocating that they are clear-headed enough to make the call, but what about the well-documented emotional fallout that often follows that decision? How are teens not emotionally stable enough to be held responsible for high-pressure choices to commit crimes but still stable enough to live with the aftermath of having made the choice to abort?

For all of the legally wrangling, it doesn’t make sense to me that you can have it both ways.

Still, the results of the study are helpful. It reinforces two things for me as a parent. One, no matter how intelligent and clear-thinking my son becomes as an adolescent, he will still need his parents to provide wisdom and biblical perspective when making crucial decisions—even if he vehemently and articulately disagrees.

Second, he also needs to be increasingly developing wisdom to make those crucial decisions on his own. As defined by the Bible, wisdom is the ability to take the cognitive facts as we understand them and make the best decisions with them, even in the heat of the moment. And true wisdom comes from only one source: the mind of the creator.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. (Proverbs 9:10)

The Gift of Being Interested

I just came across this post on the site for the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation, but it’s not a post about counseling. It’s just a letter from a grown man named Ed Welch to his colleagues shortly after the death of his 84-year-old mother.

What struck me as a parent was his reporting of one thing his mom did for him as a child that still stuck with and astounded him all these years later. He clearly holds it as evidence of her love for him. And it’s something any of us can do for our kids.

Imagine this if you can. She asked me personal questions about my life everyday from the moment I can first remember until the day I graduated from high school. Everyday. And she was always interested in what I had to say. Everyday. Everyday. That still amazes me. And I am sure she did that with my sisters, my father, and many others.

Most parents will long be one of the experts in our kids’ lives. We have answers, opinions, perspective, advice. We have wisdom they need. (Really!)

But sometimes the most honoring thing we can do is to take off our expert hat and become the journalist for a while, looking to get to the bottom of our kids’ passionate stories about whatever is fascinating them at the moment—not to grill them for incriminating information or to correct their ideas, but just to follow along, empathize, and “get it.”

It takes Christlike sacrifice sometimes, but who doesn’t feel loved and respected after being listened to by someone with no other agenda but to understand?

Do You Want a Gifted or Hard-working Child?

I found some wisdom in this article on Psychology Today from performance psychologist Jim Taylor to parents. He tackles the often destructive label of “gifted” placed on children and teens who seem to have some natural ability at academics, sports, or the arts. He points out that the greatest single predictor of success is hard work, not innate potential (another unhelpful word from his perspective).

Erase the word gifted from your vocabulary. Instead of emphasizing your children’s giftedness, you should talk to them about the attitudes and skills-which are under their control-that they will need to fully realize their talents. Gifted children will only achieve true success if they enjoy the area of their natural talent, choose to pursue their talent, develop the skills necessary to maximize their gifts, and make every effort to fully realize their abilities. If your children aren’t gifted, that’s fine too, because they may have talents that haven’t yet been discovered and they can still do their best and become successful.

From a Christian perspective, I’ve also noticed that sometimes kids tagged with the “gifted” label not only put a lot of pressure on themselves to succeed—but they may have less motivation to really trust in God to provide what they need to do the best they can in any given situation. The emphasis on their talents leads naturally to an emphasis on their own glory, not necessarily the glory of the God who gives good gifts to us all. Each of us need to know we need God more, including gifted kids with a lot of potential.

Free Parenting E-Book: Ten Ways to Turn Around Your Teen

We recently linked to an article by Mark Gregston called, “Never Give Up Parenting a Difficult Teen.” Mark is the founder of Heartlight, a “residential counseling opportunity for struggling adolescents.” We just learned from Mark Matlock’s always informative Twitter page that Mark Gregston is giving away his brand new book, Ten Ways to Turn Around Your Teen, as a free e-Book download. Find out more here.

Endless Adolescence?

The Globe and Mail has a great Q&A with Dr. Joseph Allen, the author of a new book called Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old. (You can also find a good synopsis of the book at Newsweek.com.)

The premise of the book is that, as a society, overly attentive parents are stretching out adolescence by doing too many things for their teens and young twenty-somethings, not letting them experience the risks of real adult life by themselves.

Why is 25 the new 15?

Increasingly, young people are not making it out on their own in the way they used to in generations past. Here is a simple statistic: The average [U.S.] college senior is in touch with their parents more than 13 times a week. And it’s not because they have such close relationships. It’s because they’re getting help - from picking courses to editing papers to parents reminding them of deadlines.

Aren’t you talking extreme helicopter parents here?

No, this is the norm. We also find that 60 per cent of young people are receiving financial support from their parents at age 23, even after the college years.

The whole thing is worth reading, including the suggestions at the end about “how to grow an adult.”

From a Christian perspective, one of the things some Christian parents and churches have done well, I think—within the context of Allen’s advice to give teens meaningful responsibilities—is to communicate to students their responsibility to know God personally through His Word, to represent Christ to their peers, even to get involved in service at church using their particular spiritual gifts. When we say and they believe that their choices to walk in Jesus’ steps have the potential to impact their world, we help them to grow in Him apart from us.

It’s never too soon to start teaching spiritual maturity to kids by giving them spiritual responsibility. Hopefully, that helps them grow wise even as they’re figuring out how to grow up.

Teaching Wisdom: How to Live with Tech

The conversation has changed. Our kids will have cell phones sooner than later, and the question will increasingly become whether parents are harming their kids by depriving them of a cell phone instead of by allowing them to have one.

A recent article by Kit Eaton on Fast Company discussing a Nielsen survey about kids and cell phones is titled, “If Your 9-Year-Old Doesn’t Have a Cell Phone, He’s Not Socializing Enough.”

The survey shows that average age of kids having their own cell phone is dropping quarter by quarter, down from 10.1 years of age in Q2 of ‘08 to 9.7 years of age in Q1 of 2009. Half of all 10 year olds now have their own phone, as do 75 percent of 12 year olds.

The article empathizes with parents concerned about the implications of this trend, but suggests that we “just accept it.”

To a generation of parents who were raised on brick phones, these figures may seem surprising. They really shouldn’t be though—the mobile phone is such a fantastically useful tool that it is bound to be used by everyone, no matter what their age. In fact, you can argue it’s changing how our society works.

Many parents I talk to are less cavalier, concerned about more than just the cost and safety of this radical cultural shift. They’re worried about the impact on kids’ ability to process information and make wise judgements about information given and received.

Whether we let our kids have a cell phone when their 6 or 26, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we must also teach them—our ourselves—wisdom in how to live with their cell phones in everyday life.

An article on Fredricksburg.com offers a few practical suggestions about helping kids by implementing intentional breaks from technology.

Battlefront: Your Teen’s Messy Room

This Globe and Mail article doesn’t deliver the definitive solution to get your student to pick up his or her room—in fact, it questions the value of entering too deeply into the fray in the first place—but it does offer one realistic-sounding suggestion:

There’s one strategy that can be useful as a limited solution. Designate one day a week when both of you are going to be home - Sunday, for example - as room cleanup day. They are not allowed to do anything else until their room is picked up. But in order for this to be effective, you need to participate. Picking up a room of accumulated mess is not an easy task. Most teens don’t know how or where to begin. You have to help them figure out what needs to go where and what needs to be thrown out.

(HT: Mark Matlock on Twitter. You can follow Mark at twitter.com/markmatlock.)

 

The Normalization of the 3-Way

Students are always under pressure to expand their understanding of what is normal and acceptable in terms of sex. (I guess all of us are.) But there’s a sense this season of a cultural push to normalize the idea of the m

His Favorite Part of the Day

Carlos Whittaker is a worship pastor and the Director of Service Programming at Buckhead Church, one of the three North Point Community Church campuses near Atlanta. He posted this video on his blog, RagamuffinSoul.com, with the inscription, “May the love of my God so overwhelm my children that my feeble attempts are only their glimpse into His… Los.” Thought you might like it, too.

Never Give Up Parenting a Difficult Teen

That’s the title of an encouraging article on ChristianPost by Mark Gregston. He offers several suggestions to parents in the midst of the battle with rebelling students, including this:

Teen problems usually have to do with hormones, immaturity, and brain development. They are fueled by struggles for independence, identity, and the testing of beliefs. But all of this is just a phase!  That’s why, in the midst of the turmoil, you still need to stick with them, even if you don’t feel your teen deserves it. The goal during the battle is to keep your relationship with your teen alive. God doesn’t give up on us when we fail. He gives grace. Are you willing to give your teen the same grace?

Of course, figuring out how to give grace and provide discipline to a child who is rejecting you is the hard part, but I appreciated Gregston’s encouragement to keep at it. The whole piece is worth checking out for parents in that struggle right now.

Media Multitaskers: “Suckers for Irrelevancy”

One of the great wisdom struggles for all of us—but maybe especially for our kids—is to learn how best to pull worthwhile information from the avalanche of data constantly sweeping over and around us. As adults, some of us have assumed that our kids are just better than we are at simultaneously managing multiple streams of data—homework, music, TV, Twitter, texting, IM, etc. We shake our heads and wonder how they can keep up with it all and still make any valuable sense of it.

A new study out of Standford, however, suggests that they’re not doing as well as we thought. In fact, they (and we) may be doing some real damage to their ability to think clearly.

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found. . . . after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.

“They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Everything distracts them.”

The story is worth reading. Does wisdom demand that we start helping our kids (and each other) to focus on one thing at a time? The data is still coming in, but it’s a conversation worth having.

Study: Kids + Daily Candy = Adult Violence

Because parents don’t have enough to keep them up at night, there’s this:

An unusual study released in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggests that there is a link between childhood candy consumption and adulthood violence. Simon Moore and others from the University of Cardiff followed 17,000 children for the past 40 year and discovered that those that ate candy daily as 10-year-olds were significantly more likely to be arrested for violent crimes as adults.  In fact, 69 percent of the daily sugar eaters had been booked for violence by age 34!  Even after accounting for sociological differences, there was still a significant link between candy and violence.

Yikes! That shocking result almost feels fictional, doesn’t it? But it confirms our suspicions that our kids’ criminal tendencies are our parents’ faults, handing out candy all willy-nilly just to make the children love them. We knew no good could come of that.

Seriously, though, it’s actually a pretty interesting article, pointing out that researchers suppose some of this effect is the result of using candy with kids as a kind of instant-gratification reward: Do the chore, get some candy. Eat the veggies, get some candy. Be quiet in church, get some candy. They theorize that teaches kids to expect an immediate pleasure payoff for every bit of effort. Other recent studies seem to suggest a similar instant-gratification issue with TV watching.

So what does the Real World Parent do with this information, besides limiting your kids’ exposure to grandma’s gummies stash? It’s probably not enough to just force-feed them broccoli and board games. Wisdom compels us to go about the difficult task of teaching our kids to embrace delayed gratification, to eventually learn the value of doing what’s good and right even if its not clear what the payoff will be for them, personally. Essentially, we hope to teach them three, big biblical ideas: moderation (see Proverbs 25:27), supernatural self-control (see Galatians 5:22-23), and Christlike servanthood (see Philippians 2) that lives for the good of God and others before my sweet-toothed self.

But it probably wouldn’t hurt to print the article out and put it up on your parents’ refrigerator, while you’re at it.

Study: Personal Devotions Grow Teens’ Future Faith

From Kara Powell’s blog at the Fuller Youth Institute, here’s another finding from Christian Smith’s fascinating book Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults:

Teenagers who prayed and read Scripture had a more robust faith as emerging adults. That

New Study: Christian College Students and Social Networking

I’m not sure I completely understand the motivation for this large-scale study of evangelical Christian college students by two Gordon College faculty members. They went to great lengths to gather evidence about the social networking habits of the demo—as well as the perceived upsides and downsides of those habits. Are Christian students significantly different from others in the age group in their use of social networking? I wouldn’t guess so, and the report on the study doesn’t offer a comparison to college students in the general population.

Still, the results are interesting, and it is valuable to be able to put a reliable number to what we already kind of know:

Over half (54 percent) reported that they were “neglecting important areas of their life” due to spending too much time on these sites. And when asked if one were to define addiction as “any behavior you cannot stop, regardless of the consequences,” 12.7 percent affirmed that they believe they are addicted to some form of electronic activity. Another 8.7 percent report that they are unsure. For small campuses, that translates into large numbers. And 21 percent felt that their level of engagement with electronic activities at times caused a conflict with their Christian values.

The news wasn’t all bad. Students also reported some positive benefits from their extensive integration of social networking experiences like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and texting. The bottom line for all of us, though—and maybe especially for parents of Christian students not yet in college—is that we need to find ways to apply wisdom to the use of these relationship technologies. Students, especially, seem to be in need of guided help in this area that goes beyond expressions of concern and/or stricter control. How can they (and we) develop the skills to regulate our own involvement? What does wisdom say to them (and us) about texting and Facebook?

Socially Illiterate Kids?

This blog post from writer/speaker Keith Ferrazzi comes from a secular perspective but includes six helpful suggestions for raising relationship-savvy kids. He is responding to recent stats and books complaining that digital kids are falling behind in the social graces of f2f (face-to-face) communication.

Your teenage child sends and receives 2,272 texts a month and spends 9 hours a week absorbed in social networking sites. According to this Wall Street Journal Online op-ed by an English professor at Emory, there

Teen Drinking Follows Parents’ Habits

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University has just released their annual back-to-school survey. Here’s the eye-opening stat from their press release:

Compared to teens who have not seen their parent(s) drunk, those who have are more than twice as likely to get drunk in a typical month, and three times likelier to use marijuana and smoke cigarettes.

That’s a terrible and wonderful stat—terrible, of course, because it means that teens with parents who regularly get drunk in front of them are much more likely to start practicing addictive and self-destructive habits sooner. It’s encouraging, though, because it also tells us that it really matters what our teen kids see us doing, how they see us living, what they see us valuing. We know from experience that kids often follow us in positive directions, as well, including our choices to walk in the path of Jesus.

Two other sobering statistics from the survey:

Are Teens Too Sleepy?

Mark tweeted on this fascinating article by Maria Christensen in Seattle about teens, sleep, and school start times suggesting students would do better in school and life if we’d just let them stay in the sack until, oh, 9 a.m. or so. Here’s the key quote:

What this means for teens in terms of school is that teenagers are getting up earlier than biology would dictate in order to get to school on time, and that is having a major affect on their lives. Mary Carskadon, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University and director of chronobiology and sleep research at E.P. Bradley Hospital in Providence, R.I., notes in an interview with Frontline that “teenagers are really put in a kind of a gray cloud when they aren’t having enough sleep. It affects both their mood and their ability to think and their ability to perform and react appropriately. So we have kids out there who struggle to stay awake while driving, who could do better at sports if they could react more quickly, who are feeling blue and having trouble getting along with the adults in their environment, and also who are struggling to learn in the classroom.”

This stands in stark contrast to the conventional wisdom most parents of teens would like to apply to their kids from Proverbs 6:9: “How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep?”

But maybe we need to give a little more grace about the classic late night/early morning power struggle. Personally, my small Christian high school didn’t start classes until 8:45 a.m. back in the day—and that was enough to convince me of the value of staying away from the public school option that started classes before 7:30 a.m. (I’m sure my parents based their decision on more profound considerations.)

What’s your approach to getting them up in the morning? Does your school day start too early? Too late? Too groggy? What does wisdom have to say to your student about going to bed and getting up “in the way they should go”?

Tony Dungy, Michael Vick, and the Grace of God

It’s hard not to like Tony Dungy. Maybe your student attended one of the satellite “Tony Dungy’s Red Zone” high school football kickoff events this last week. The former Indianapolis Colts coach continues to be both a likable, highly respected guy—and an unashamedly outspoken witness for Jesus.

He’s taken a little heat, maybe, in the last few weeks for publicly supporting Michael Vick in his NFL comeback, which has included lots of talk about the NFL quarterback’s supposedly changed character and faith in Jesus a few years after being convicted of running a dog fighting ring.

But Dungy’s willingness to represent both Jesus and Vick in the media could be a challenging encouragement to us as parents. It’s too easy for us to dismiss Vick and other fallen celebrities and athletes to our kids, to warn them away from such failures of character. But Dungy is apparently encouraging Vick—and us—to ask “where was the Lord in all of this?”

This article from Opposing Views tells the story of Dungy’s meeting with Vick in prison at the request of Vick’s attorney:

Dungy said Vick told him about going to church almost every week with his mother in Virginia and knowing there was a God. He said Vick talked to God while growing up and continued to pray during college at Virginia Tech.

But when he finally made it to the NFL with the Atlanta Falcons, his faith and his life took a turn for the worse.

“Michael said he felt God had answered his prayers by getting into the NFL and maybe he didn’t really need Him anymore.”

During his two years in prison for his role in operating a dog fighting ring, Vick had a chance to rediscover his prayers and his faith in God, Dungy said.

“Now he knows he does need God and that’s going to help him make right decisions.”

Who knows if Vick will get on the straight and narrow and become a powerful testimony of God’s grace, as Dungy hopes. The question for us is, do we hope so? Do our kids hear us hoping that God’s grace and mercy will show up in unexpected ways in the national news stories we follow?

When Kids Commit

A new book from respected youth and religion researcher Christian Smith called Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults adds weight to a statistic that Christian leaders have been tossing around for years. As Kara Powelll reports on the Fuller Youth Institute blog: of 18 to 23 year olds who have ever made a “commitment to God,” 85 percent did so before the age of 14.

The implications are as they have always been: It is essential for churches—and parents—to maximize their influence on kids with the hope of leading them into a personal and meaningful relationship with Christ. From our perspective, that includes keeping open a running and honest conversation about what we believe, why we believe it, and how we act on those beliefs.

Of course, many kids come to Christ after the age of 14, as well—just not as many. But our current cultural climate is open to talking about religion and belief. A 2006 Gallup survey (as reported in this story) shows that 50 percent of students reported attending a religious service in the previous week and 75 percent said they pray. It’s never too late to get intentional about exercising our influence with our kids in regards to modeling and encouraging Jesus-following, and encouraging them to do the same with their peers.

What You Don’t Know

Feeling overconfident about how well we know our teen kids and what they’re up to is normal for parents, especially parents of younger teens. Still, it’s surprising to see black-and-white evidence that we’re not as clued in as we think we are. These collected stats come from a brief column titled, “So you think you know your teen?”

Can You Tell When They’re Lying?

No parent wants their relationship with their child—or their child’s friends—to reach a place where they start wondering what’s true and what’s not. Still, many of us can spend a difficult season (or longer) in exactly that spot. It can be tough to know when to trust for the sake of building trust and when to dig for the truth. If it’s time to dig, I dug this little story on NPR about techniques for sussing out the truth without a bare light bulb and sleep deprivation—just by asking effective questions and really listening to the answers.

Especially interesting is this proven technique:

Then comes the harder question, which Hiscock-Anisman says often separates the liars from the truth-tellers. “I say, now what I want you to do is I want you to go back to that time and I want you to describe every single thing that happened but this time I want you to tell me what happened last and work all the way backwards,” she said.

Okay, yes, it’s a story about researchers training police in interrogation techniques, but who better to learn from? Check out “Spotting Lies: Listen, Don’t Look” for more clues.

No Texting. Period.

I enjoyed this first-person story in the New York Times from a mom whose husband laid down the law with his kids and removed the texting option from their phones. The writer is an avid texter herself and sympathetic for her daughter, especially, but she does a good job of covering the pro’s and cons of teens and texting. She also takes part of the blame.

Then the school called. She was caught texting in class. Trouble was, it was with me. I had texted her to let her know I needed her to babysit after school. But she was given in-school suspension anyway. As it turned out, she had been texting more than just me, but I still feel partly responsible for putting her in that position.

“When Dad Banned Text Messaging” is a quick read and might give you an idea or two of your own for talking about texting with your kids—or texting with them about talking. Could they live without texting? Could you?

Drinking in Harry Potter

Christian parents are used to weighing the relative benefits and dangers of all things Potter from a spiritual perspective. Will it pique kids’ interest in the occult? Is all that magic simply an imaginative playing field on which to work out the classic battles of good v. evil and adolescence?

But this New York Times story challenges the latest Harry Potter film on more traditional parental grounds: What’s with all the drinking? Harry and pals appear to throw a few back with what struck me as a distinctly European nonchalance.

But as the article points out, my perception may be exactly backwards. American movies may influence teen drinking in Europe far more than mere differences in cultural attitudes toward alcohol.

A 2007 study of nearly 5,600 German teenagers looked at the relationship between drinking activity and exposure to American movies. Even accounting for variables like friends

What’s Your Gut Telling You?

Okay, so this New York Times story is not strictly about parents. It’s about hunches. It describes stories of the bomb-detecting efforts of American soldiers in Iraq and new brain research indicating why some of us are better than others at, first, sensing danger or something out of place and, second, acting on that sense quickly enough to make a difference.

What jumped out to me as a parent was this paragraph.

Still Talking About Sex

We’ve been talking a lot about teens and sex this week, both here and with students over on PlanetWisdom.com. Our daily devotional there has been focused on Paul’s sex talk with the Corinthians, the same passage we used to generate our weekly list of Conversation Starters on this site.

Talk of sex, teens, and pregnancy has also been in the news. Reuters reported yesterday the results of a CDC report. One of the findings is that only half of girls and 35 percent of boys had ever talked about methods of birth control with a parent. More had received that information eslewhere.

One other interesting stat: While “just” 30 percent of girls 15-17 report having had sex, that number jumps to 70 percent for girls 18-19. (For boys: 31 percent jumps to 65 percent for the same age groupings.) Sounds like 18 is a critical year.

An understatement:

“The data presented in this report indicate that many young persons in the United States engage in sexual risk behavior and experience negative reproductive health outcomes,” the CDC wrote in its weekly report on death and disease.

The tone of the Reuters story is that more government sex-ed is needed, though the story of an expensive British government sex-ed program actually increasing the number of teen pregnancies (as compared to a control group) isn’t comforting. Nor is the report of a U.K. National Health Service pamphlet for teens called “Pleasure” and encouraging sex to teens as good, healthy fun.

It’s never been easy for parents to talk to their kids about sex, but it’s always been essential. Yours will—or won’t—be one of the many voices your kids will sort through when making sexual choices on this side of marriage. Friends, schools, churches, and media (like last week’s “I Love You, Beth Cooper”) will all attempt to add to their perspective.

We’ll keep praying with you that your teens will listen first and most closely to the voice of God’s Word, that they’ll run away from sexual immorality, and that they’ll be a wise influence in a sexually foolish culture.

More Sit Down Meals = Better Behaved Kids?

Here’s one of those “no duh, but wait a minute” reports (from scotsman.com(!)) about the results of a major study on kids who do and do not get into trouble as older teens. Conducted over a decade by researchers at the University of Alabama, the study of nearly 10,000 kids found a statistically significant decrease of getting into trouble (“drinking or smoking, taking drugs, getting into fights, running away from home and other ‘problem behaviour’ “) among those who had more sit-down meals with the family. And it doesn’t have to happen every night of the week:

Even increasing the number of family mealtimes by one day a week can lead to a 5 per cent improvement.

The study doesn’t say whether kids who have to be strapped down to a dining room chair to eat with the family show the same improvement. We’d guess not.

Why are Kids So Rude?

I can’t decide if this earnest article on msnbc.com is comical or tragic. A number of experts weigh in on why “kids these days” are seemingly so rude. The story offers very little actual evidence of the alleged increase in rudeness as compared with other generations of preschoolers, but the alarm must be sounded, none the less.

Here’s my favorite quote, which drags in the reportedly poor work habits of Generation Y to spell out exactly how dire things will be for their younger, ruder kin:

What does this mean for their future as adults? We may be starting to see some of the effects in Generation Y, those born between 1980 and 1996, whose self-centered

Summer Brain Drain?

There’s a helpful article from Al Mohler over at ChristianPost.com called “Avoid Summer Brain Drain.” He points to new research suggesting that nearly all students lose up to 2.5 months of math and computational skills over the summer. Reading is another essential ability challenged by a summer spent in brain-neutral.

The data on reading ability are particularly interesting. Children who read over the summer grow in reading knowledge and comprehension. No surprise there. The really interesting part of this research is the suggestion that a wide variety of summer experiences can provide background knowledge that turns out to be indispensable to growth in the understanding of what is read. “Life experiences other than reading can lead to advantages in reading comprehension,” advised Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “If you don’t have a reading problem or a problem with decoding . . . your ability to read a passage is dependent on having some relevant background knowledge.”

The brief column encourages parents not just to keep their kids reading, but also to add to their understanding of the world during the summer with a variety of “out there” experiences. If you’ve been looking for one more nudge to pull together some kind of productive family adventure this summer, maybe this will do it.

Dads Makes a Measurable Difference

Here’s a late entry for your Father’s Day musing. It’s a fascinating, encouraging article from Reader’s Digest on why dads involved in raising their kids make such a big impact on their development.

“Children’s social, physical, and intellectual development benefit greatly from the involvement of fathers,” says Kyle Pruett, MD, professor of child psychiatry at Yale and author of Fatherneed. The intellectual gains are measurable as early as the first year of life, and they continue to show up through high school, especially when dads, together with moms, are actively involved in school and learning. According to the experts, fathers create this intelligence advantage, as well as many others, in three important ways: in how they play, interact in everyday situations, and teach.

Read the whole thing, if you get a minute. And let’s keep praying that God will turn the hearts of dads toward their kids—and toward the Father in heaven who still loves them so deeply.

Teens and Hugging

I can’t imagine what the gatekeepers of our parents’ generation—the ones who blackballed dancing because of all that close physical contact—would have thought about “the hug.” As this New York Times story describes, students hug all. the. time. No excuse is too small for another embrace. It’s a custom custom-built to alienate baffled parents.

As Beth J. Harpaz, a parenting columnist for The Associated Press and author of the book

Friending Your Kids on Facebook

Here’s a good news article suggesting that parents with kids online should find ways to be a apart of their online world—without stalking them in a sneaky way that blows their trust in you.

“I think parents do have an obligation to find out what their kids are doing online. If they are minors, that is part of being a parent,” said [Julianne] Doctor, who is chairwoman-elect of the Vancouver district parent advisory council. “My daughter is on Facebook, so I joined Facebook so I could see what she is doing. If I see any behaviour that I think is inappropriate or suspect, I’ll tell her.”

Merlyn Horton, executive director of Safe Online Outreach Society, sees an opportunity in “friending” your teen: “As adults we have never had the opportunity to observe youth being youth as we do now when we observe them as friends on Facebook.”

If you’ve been looking for a good reason to start “wasting your time” with Facebook and Twitter, this is as good of one as any. You might never catch up to your kids in terms of social networking savvy, but all of us desperately need wisdom to know how best to participate in these online worlds—especially as followers of Jesus. Even if you don’t “friend” your kids, becoming part of these worlds will help you know what wisdom issues they’re facing every day and in an ever-greater number of relationships.

 

Does the Internet Inhibit Wisdom?

You’ll find a great little interview with Shane Hipps at ChristianityToday.com on how technology impacts who we are, even as Christians. After a career in advertising, Hipps is now a Mennonite pastor. His new book is Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith.

From the interview:

[The Internet] creates a permanent puberty of the mind. We get locked in so much information, and the inability to sort that information meaningfully limits our capacity to understand. The last stage of knowledge is wisdom. But we are miles from wisdom because the Internet encourages the opposite of what creates wisdom

Going Analog at Camp?

Here’s a great little story on the anxiety some kids feel when forced to unplug from all their digital social networking at summer camp. I don’t blame them! Could you do it? Of course, the very fact that the thought of being disconnected scares them probably suggests it’s not a bad idea. (For the kids, I mean.)

Still, it’s got to be strange. One recent survey puts the average number of texts per teen per month in the neighborhood of 2,300. That’s almost 80 messages a day! The first question must be, “What will I do with my thumbs all day?”

According to one expert:

When camp starts, plugged-in children may feel a little disoriented, like a part of them is missing, said Michael Assel, associate professor of pediatric psychiatry at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Those feelings should subside as children get involved in camp activities, he said.

And camp counselors will tell you that kids and teens do adjust over the first few days of the camp. The Christian ones will also tell you that the following days are like a golden window in a young person’s life to fill the void left by all that absent digital noise and electronic voices with the words of God. You almost couldn’t design a better environment in which to get a student’s full attention focused on his or her relationship with God.

If your kids are thinking about going to a sleepaway Christian camp with a no-tech policy, be sure to reassure them that they’ll get through it. And then pray that God will use the silence to remind them of who He is, how much He loves them, and that He is fully able to meet all of their needs.

Prepping Kids for College Stress

Taking a survey of college students about stress and depression a few weeks before finals seems like a good way to come up with some shocking results. And that’s exactly what is described in this story detailing a poll conducted at 40 U.S. colleges between April 22 and May 4.

And while we might not be surprised to hear that 85 percent of those responding felt “stressed in their daily lives,” a significant number also described feeling “down, depressed or helpless.”

One stat showed a definite connection between emotional well-being and the financial well-being of a student’s parents:

Almost a quarter of those with a parent who had lost a job during the school year showed signs of at least mild depression, more than twice the percentage of those who hadn’t had a parent lose a job. More than twice as many students whose parents had lost a job said they had seriously considered ending their own life, 13 percent to 5 percent.

None of these numbers are off the charts, but they should remind us of a couple of things. One, we can’t see our job as parents to eliminate stress in our kids’ lives. For one thing, it’s impossible. For another, when they leave home they’ll find the same world of stress we have experienced. Instead, we need to teach—and show in our own lives—biblical skills for managing stress and surrendering anxiety to God. (Finding ways to implement Philippians 4:4-8 is a good place to start.)

The other lesson I think these numbers hold for us is that it’s important to our kids to hear from us that we are choosing to find ways to trust God, even when our personal financial numbers aren’t looking so good. Demonstrating stubborn faith in hard times in front of our kids is often healthier for them in the long run than trying to keep tough situations hidden from their view.

Graduation and Student Prayers

A story today over at ChristianPost.com describes the removal of two students as speakers at their Florida high school graduation. Some in the school believe the students were removed because school officials—fresh off a federal court decision over the issue of “promoting personal religious beliefs” in their public schools—were nervous the students would mention their Christian beliefs in the speeches.

The story includes a concise couple of paragraphs detailing what the federal government does and does not allow in terms of student prayers or student religious speech at public high school events.

Kids and Self-Control

Photo by John-Morgan

This recent story from the New Yorker is lengthy, but fascinating. It details a long-running psychology study at Stanford run by Walter Mischel. Forty or so years ago, he started testing 4-year-old subjects to see if they would resist the opportunity for a single marshmallow for a period of time in order to receive two marshmallows—or if they would ring a bell to request the lone marshmallow more quickly. It was a way of quantifying self-control. The amazing thing about the little experiment is the startlingly predictive aspects of the test results.

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

Again, it’s worth reading the whole thing. One bottom line, though, is that this ability to delay reward can be taught to some degree even if it didn’t exist in a child naturally as a four year old. We can all learn—and teach our kids—how to better practice self-control and self-discipline to a point. And the payoff to that training will be long lasting.

More exciting to me from a Christian perspective is that self-control is one aspect of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23. Believers in Jesus are not merely commanded to discipline ourselves, we are empowered to do so. And the positive results of accessing that power for God’s glory will be long lasting, as well.

More Dad Time, Less Sex Risk

A U.S. News story reports the findings of study by Boston College researchers:

“Youth who engaged more regularly in activities with their families and had fathers who were more knowledgeable about their friends and activities thereafter reported lower average levels of sexual risk behaviors in comparison to their peers with less engaged parents.”

The study also points to measurable differences in sexual risk factors among kids in families that participate in activities and have dinner together. Girls, even more than boys, are responsive to the involvement of dads and participation in family activities.

TV and Fear-based Parenting

Lenore Skenazy is the author of the secular book, “Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry,” which makes the case that the everyday threats to our kids’ safety “these days” are way overblown. Making a similar point to something emphasized in the Real World Parent seminars, Skenazy points to stats which reveal kids are as safe or safer now (in all kinds of ways) as they were when most of us were kids. And, yet, many of us parent as if the dangers are worse than they’ve ever been.

In a recent Salon.com interview, she pointed to the kinds of media parents consume as one reason for our perception about the threats to children.

When I was growing up, my parents were not watching those horrific television shows that are on now like “CSI” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” They were watching “Dallas,” “Dynasty,” stuff with maybe big hair, but that was the biggest crime. It wasn’t all these shows with really graphic, horrifying consequences for kids.

And then, you didn’t have cable, and cable has to fill 24 hours with the worst possible stories, because if they filled it with stories about kids getting home safely, you wouldn’t watch. What’s the most compelling story that anyone has come up with so far? It’s something terrible happening to a child.

There’s no doubt that the kinds of stories we consume and ponder can contribute to the level of our parental fear. Paul’s teaching in Philippians 4 for walking with peace—even in parenting—was to focus our minds on things that are true and positive. If our news and entertainment makes that especially difficult, how are they really helping us?

Christians and Swine Flu

Photo by Ү

It looks like the panic over pandemic is passing this week, but I found this Mark Galli article on Christianity Today‘s site challenging. How should the church respond to a crisis of the magnitude that the media so badly wanted us to fear last week? What role should Christians—and Christian families—play in a global pandemic?

In The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark describes those dark times in Roman history when city-wide epidemics wiped out whole sections of a population. The empire would do its best to quarantine sections of cities, and those remaining were abandoned to a slow and painful death. The only people willing to risk life to care for these suffering souls were Christians. Many of them flocked to the areas most infected and literally gave their lives to care for the dead and dying.  This heroic example was one reason the empire took a second look at this outlandish sect.

As parents, our understandable instinct is to protect our families from harm at all cost. But as Christians teaching our teens to demonstrate Christ’s self-sacrificing love to their hurting world, how can we demonstrate that trusting God and serving others matters more than saving ourselves?

Why Media Choices Matter

A recent Chuck Colson column on ChristianPost.com shared these disturbing findings about kids, music, and sex:

According to published reports, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh evaluated the sexual aggressiveness of popular song lyrics from least degrading to most degrading. And then they asked 771 teenagers about both their taste in music and their sexual behavior. It turned out that 44.6 percent of the teens who listened to the most degrading music had engaged in sex. But of those who had not listened to sexually-degrading music, only 20.6 percent had sex.

It’s an old debate—and you can always argue about studies like this one—but the cultural and statistical evidence is mounting that what kids (and the rest of us, for that matter) feed into their minds and hearts comes out in their lives. As parents, it’s worth talking to our kids about why choices in movies, music, and books matter to us. It’s not just because some things are “bad.” We actually believe that media choices can alter how we think about the world, about right and wrong, and about truth. As Colson mentions, it’s become nearly impossible to control a willful child’s media consumption. That’s why it’s more essential than ever to teach and model wisdom, discernment, and understanding of secular media.

The Bible in 90 Days?

Photo by LabyrinthX

Many of us have tried and faltered and maybe even eventually succeeded at reading through the Bible on a plan over the course of a year (or so). Ted Cooper thinks we can do better. His ministry has launched a summer reading challenge, encouraging Christians to read The Bible in 90 Days.

From The Christian Post:

“Just 12 pages a day is all it takes to read the Bible in ninety days,

Does Twitter Kill Compassion?

Photo by jmilles

A recent story in the UK’s Mail Online repeats the bold claims of USC brain scientists that social networking sites may actually blunt our ability to empathize with other people’s emotional distress.

New evidence shows the digital torrent of information from networking sites could have long-term damaging effects on the emotional development of young people’s brains.

A study suggests rapid-fire news updates and instant social interaction are too fast for the ‘moral compass’ of the brain to process.

The danger is that heavy Twitters and Facebook users could become ‘indifferent to human suffering’ because they never get time to reflect and fully experience emotions about other people’s feelings.

The findings deal with the brain’s ability to process empathy for physical versus emotional pain. One expert is quoted as saying, “Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention.” Very few of us expect to give that kind of required attention to a Facebook status update or, certainly, a passing Twitter post. But do we really expect that level of empathy from those receiving our tweets?

The bottom line is nuanced, but the article is worth checking out as you continue to weigh the pro’s and cons of your kids’ involvement in the world of social networking.

Most Highschoolers Do/Don’t Have Sex

In a great post on the Freakonomics blog, Ian Ayres makes an old argument about teen sex on TV (in this case, Friday Night Lights) with the use of some persuasive new data from a book called Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by Robert Cialdini.

His example from Cialdini’s book has to do with the social fact that people like to conform their behavior to the norm. Shows like FNL present a norm that is different from reality (because more than half of high-schoolers are virgins) and thus may very well persuade teens to change their behavior to fit a false norm.

His suggestion based on the data: To ditch public service announcements that emphasize how many people are doing the harmful thing and instead point to those who aren’t.

I

Celebrating the Passover

Photo by EchotheStory.com

The Jewish passover celebration is not only intended as a way of remembering the night the angel passed over all the homes marked with the blood of the sacrifice, saving every firstborn son, but also to look forward to the coming Messiah. Christians believe Jesus is that Messiah, and many Christian families have begun to celebrate that event with a traditional Seder, the special meal at the heart of the Passover season.

The folks over at EchotheStory.com have developed a special Haggadah, or Seder booklet, to guide Christian groups through all the parts of a Seder meal to help in hosting a Seder in your home or with a small group. You can download the booklet for free or purchase it in packs of 6. Learn more here.

Teaching Wisdom On Purpose

Photo by Rule #71

Are you teaching your sons and daughters wisdom? And if so, what wisdom are you teaching them? We just came late to a great blog called 1001 rules for my unborn son. According to a quote from the Daily Telegraph on the blog’s Facebook page, it is “one man’s attempt to update the advice he received from his father for the benefit of his own children.” We’re digging the mix of practical wisdom and bold fatherly assertion. What son would not eventually want to have had a dad like this?

Made us wonder if the author has read Proverbs 4, which begins:

Listen, my sons, to a father’s instruction; pay attention and gain understanding. I give you sound learning, so do not forsake my teaching. When I was a boy in my father’s house, still tender, and an only child of my mother, he taught me and said, “Lay hold of my words with all your heart; keep my commands and you will live.”

It’s not a Christian blog, but many of the young man’s rules are decidedly old fashioned while others are very much of their generation. The writer is making an heroic effort to teach his son how to be a man. How are we doing at taking responsibility for intentionally teaching our kids biblical wisdom in ways that are creative, honest, and fresh?

Secularism: Fastest Growing Religion?

Are secularist’s evangelizing your kids?

Breakpoint’s The Point blog notes the growing number of religion-free secularists among us and then recommends Herbert London’s book America’s Secular Challenge. They quote London’s description of secularism’s fundamental set of beliefs:

1. Truth is subjective, relative, or contextual
2. Rationality can solve moral and ontological questions about man

Does Your Teen Have a Biblical Worldview?

Photo by AH!Photography

A newly released Barna survey shows the stats mostly unchanged for more than ten years now: Just 9 percent of Americans and 19 percent of “born again Christians” hold a biblical worldview. What is a biblical worldview?

For the purposes of the survey, a

USA Today: Economy Driving Modest Clothing for Teen Girls

Photo by Franco Folini

This longish story on USA Today’s site offers some hope for concerned parents and frustrated girls.

The trend is forcing a shift in the way retailers do business. Just as teen retailers have come to target the gothic girl, the diva and the street-wear aficionado, they now must recognize that skin is simply not always in. For every girl who embraces strapless tops and micro-mini dresses, there might be one who is trying to abide by either a school or moral dress code. Modest fashion typically calls for covered shoulders, thighs and cleavage but is hardly the definition of frumpy that the term often calls to mind.

The article includes several quotes from Brenda Sharman, the founder of teen girl group Pure Fashion. (Her site includes some suggested “modesty guidelines.”) Those in her movement are attempting, among other things, to use the buying power of teen girls to lure fashion makers and sellers to see modest buyers as a significant source of revenue when modest options are included on their racks. A similar group started by Dannah Gresh for tween girls is called Secret Keeper Girl.

Make Lots of Pots

We haven’t read the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, so we can’t really recommend it. But I was fascinated by this case study cited in the book in terms of it’s implications for training our kids in the arts and in life.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the

Teen Girls in a Triple Bind?

Photo by Esther Gibbons

In an article on msnbc.com, Dr. Stephen Hinshaw says teen girls are under more pressure than ever to meet contradictory expectations from parents, peers, academia, and the media culture. His book is called “The Triple Bind,” and he points to this set of mounting pressures as the reason for this statistic:

At least one-fourth of all U.S. teenage girls are suffering from self-mutilation, eating disorders, significant depression, or serious consideration of suicide

Cell Phones for Kids?

Photo by Daniel Hsu

In a post titled “

Facebook Turns Five

Al Mohler ruminates on his blog about where the explosion of social networking has taken us since the launch of Facebook, Myspace, and their competitors. He offers 8 suggestions for “safeguarding the social networking experience,” including these two for parents:

4. Never allow children and teenagers to have independent social networking access (or Internet access, for that matter).  Parents should monitor, manage, supervise, and control the Internet access of their children and teens.  Watch what your child posts and what their friends post.

5. Do not allow children and teens to accept any “friend” unknown to you.  The social networking world can be a dangerous place, and parental protection here is vital.

Read the whole thing for ideas on how to make the most of social networking as a Christian.

Church Kids Wait Longer

Photo by Esther Gibbons

A new study published last month in Pediatrics reveals that one of the biggest determining factors in how long unmarried students wait to start having sex is their “religious” practice.

Overall, religious students, regardless of whether they take virginity pledges, are more conservative than their non-religious peers. When compared against national averages, “they are having sex an average of about three years later than the average American.”

The study’s author noted that unmarried students with “strong religious backgrounds” waited, on average, until age 21 to start having sex. The study also showed little significant difference in sexual activity between students who took abstinence pledges and those who did not. (Many students in the longitudinal study didn’t even remember taking the pledge.)

Although not mentioned specifically in this story, parents have an enormous amount to do with whether students have “strong religious backgrounds” or not. As a parent, your choices to emphasize and participate in a personal walk with God as part of a local church—especially one that urges teens to follow the Bible’s teaching about saving sex for marriage—could have a significant impact on your student’s sexual choices.

1700 Texts Every Month

Photo by Daniel Hsu

1,742: The number of texts the average teen sends and receives every month

32,063: The number of texts 15-year-old Rachel Schwartzbard sends and receives each month (while staying involved in 16 extracurricular activities at school)

357: The average number of texts sent/received by people of all ages

How do you and your student stack up to the national averages? Do you put limits on your student’s texting? Why or why not?

Develop Mature Competence in Youth

An article on providing adult interaction to develop mature competence in youth by Ron Flickinger for the News-Sentinel.com.

For almost all of recorded human history, the young person, beginning at a very young age, had a regular series of adults influencing his/her life with peers being insignificant because they, too, were being influenced by adults. Then in early 20th century America, we decided that we should separate kids from adults, put them all in one place for an extended period of time (schools), and thus do a better job than those of the past 5,000 years.

Read Full Article. Worth reading!

 

• 
•