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At last week’s World Economic Forum over a private dinner, eight Nobel Prize winners were asked what they perceived as the world’s biggest challenge. According to this Harvard Business Review blog yesterday by Tony Schwartz, who attended the dinner, their answers ranged from overpopulation to the environment.
But there was one unifying theme in their answers: humans not making a connection between our current behavior and its consequences.
In his blog, Schwartz quotes one economist from Bangladesh: ”Leaders don’t have time for the future because they’re too busy with the present.”
Translating this to practical terms, Schwartz gives an example of the power of investing in your employees’ long-term health (folks in ministry can translate this principle to their volunteer teams):
At one point during a Davos session last week, I asked more than a half dozen CEOs at a discussion I was leading, “Do you believe that your employees perform better if they’re happier and healthier? The unsurprising and unanimous answer was “Yes.” Then I asked the CEOs, “If that’s the case, how much time, energy and money do you invest in insuring that your employees are healthier and happier?” Nearly all of them agreed the answer was very little.
The value of investing money and time in taking care of employees, rather than simply trying to get more out of them, can seem hard to measure. Also, because it doesn’t produce instant results, it may seem at odds with the urgent aim of getting more done, faster, right now.
Recently one of my kids remarked that they couldn’t believe we had already completed the first month of 2012. That’s true, but it’s still a great time for us to ask ourselves as we think about this year: Are we keeping focused on what we want in the future (whether the future is the end of 2012 or even further out), or are we getting too lost in the present?
If you’re a parent navigating a busy schedule (basically meaning pretty much all parents), have you asked yourself WHY you are driving your kids around to hockey, soccer, and piano? What’s the end goal?
As a ministry leader, are you thinking about WHY you’re doing the upcoming retreat or mission trip? Or are you so lost in the details of the videos that you’ve lost sight of what God might intend to do and you haven’t prepared your volunteer leaders as well as you’d like?
I want to learn from the Nobel Prize winners and try to be more aware of the future consequences, both intended and unintended, that emerge from my choices today. I think we’ll all be better off if we let the future drive the present, instead of the other way around.
While much of what we analyze here at the FYI blog is directly youth related, every once in a while a broader study or body of research is so interesting that we think it deserves mention here. Such is the case of a book out this week called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
by William Murray, the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
I haven’t read the book, but thanks to a recommendation of an FYI Advisory Council member, I read a recent excerpt in the Wall Street Journal.
Building upon a variety of data sources, Murray looks at the growing divide in America (as indicated in his sub-title, with a special focus on “White America”). The Wall Street Journal excerpt highlights the growing changes in families between upper and lower class white Americans by describing two fictitious towns: Belmont (an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb that represents about 20% of the white American population from ages 30-49) and Fishtown (an iconic town populated by the white working class that represents about 30% of the white American population from ages 30-49).
Murray describes:
To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor’s degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist…
In Belmont and Fishtown, here’s what happened to America’s common culture between 1960 and 2010.
Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.
Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage—the percentage of children born to unmarried women—showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents.
In the midst of attention that has been rightly given to the divide among races, by examining one ethnic population, Murray has helped us understand an additional divide (that some argue might even be more influential than ethnicity): socio-economic.
Regardless of your family’s and your ministry’s ethnicity or economic status, I urge you to take seriously one of Murray’s conclusions/pontifications: “Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting.”
With whom are you personally building a relationship with that has a different ethnicity, religion, or socio-economic status? What would it take for you to get to the place where you could actually have an honest discussion with them, asking them questions about their background and context, learning more about their struggles and victories?
What opportunities are you providing for the teenagers you know to do the same? If your school is heavily dominated by a particular class or ethnicity, do the extracurricular activities that your teenager is involved in help give them a more balanced view of the world—both present and future?
January 31, 2012 |
By FYI |
by Kara Powell and Brad M. Griffin
In this sample session from the Sticky Faith Teen Curriculum, you can engage students around their own doubts and struggles.
by Steven Argue
By seeing faith only as a noun, have we misunderstood it, as well as the faith development process?
Free FYI Webcast Tues Feb 7, 10:00 AM
by Kara Powell and Brad M. Griffin
Join us live for 30 minutes of research-based ideas for equipping your high school seniors.
Tuesday Feb. 7, 10:00-10:30 am PST
I am always saddened when I see families with teenagers waiting in restaurant lobbies for tables, and none of the family members are talking because each member has their own form of technology (iPods and cell phones being the most dominant). Or seeing teenagers and parents in cars next to me, kids with earbuds in their ears, parents on their own cell phones.
So often technology feels like something that divides family members. How can we use it to unite us?
My desire to answer that question is part of why I was so encouraged by this article sent to me by a friend summarizing some new research on “Joint Media Engagement”. The bottom line: when teenagers engage in media with each other, or with their parents, it can actually enhance their social relationships and communication.
As one summary of the research described:
Plenty of studies have shown that kids learn more when they’re consuming media alongside their parents — parents typically chime in and explain what’s going on or answer questions or share their opinions about what they’re seeing, hearing, and doing. In turn, parents can have a better understanding of what their kids are doing and learning and what they’re involved with during their kids’ media use.
In addition to the standard “sit with them and watch TV or play video games together, I’ve been especially impressed during our Sticky Faith work with parents who intentionally use the content and choices of what they see with their kids as conversation springboards. They ask questions during commercials like, “Why do you think he made that choice? What do you think will happen next? What advice would you give her if she came to you?”
I also have heard from wise parents that it’s a good dynamic with their kids to let their kids teach THEM about video games. Let your kids be your experts, coaches, and tutors in areas of technology. (To be honest, my 9 year-old teaches me features on our computer. It just comes more naturally to my kids than to me.)
Technology and media is here to stay. And its influence on our kids is growing. Instead of being afraid of it or demonizing all of it, let’s leverage it to improve our family relationships and discussions.
If you’ve been around teenagers for about five minutes, you know that some of the rules of engagement have changed in their social world, while others have stayed the same.
This quick review of a phone-poll study, “How Teenagers Communicate: 7 Things You Should Know” offers a great reminder: as much as teenagers love their technology, they still need—and actually want—face time with friends. When asked what method of communication they’d miss the most if taken away, here were their top rankings:
1. Meet “in person” (58 percent ranked it No. 1)
2. Texting (28 percent)
3. Talk on the mobile phone (5 percent)
4. Facebook (5 percent)
5. Talk on the home phone, email, video chat, chat, Twitter (tie at 1 percent)
Make no mistake, technology is king among teenagers who have access to it. And a phone call home-to-home doesn’t have near the allure it once held. But today’s adolescents still realize the importance of being together in person (even if it’s being together in person while using their tech devices).
One of the most common questions people ask regarding Sticky Faith is “What helps make adolescents’ faith last into adulthood?” When answering this, I usually respond that I want to know this answer too!
Yet, one of my defining qualities (and possibly spiritual gifts) is looking for the inverse question…
What makes faith disappear?
In similar fashion to developing Sticky Faith, there is no silver bullet for defeating faith. But within The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry
, Kenda Creasy Dean offers something close to it with this answer:
The need to connect what adolescents must do developmentally (achieve an enduring sense of identity) with what Jesus does theologically (accomplishes YHWH’s salvation) was chronically overlooked by the church, although not necessarily by adolescents themselves, who “acted out” the human need for salvation, often implicitly or inappropriately.
I don’t blame the culture of youth ministry for missing this. Yet it seems that students are acting out the need for salvation everywhere but the place where they might find it.
Churches are doing a great job of the first piece Dean points out, of developing identity. Yet this is all for naught without the theological piece of salvation. Identity simply will not “stick” without purpose.
Perhaps what’s needed is space, not programs. Typically at youth group, silence seems like a four-letter word to be avoided, or enacted. This is where programming must confer with theology. Salvation needs to be acted out, or discovered, in the context of the church, with the right people and in the right time.
Otherwise, “salvation” could implicitly or improperly be found elsewhere.
Last week the NY Times shared another “aha” moment for parents of teenagers in the piece, “Young, in Love, and Sharing Everything, Including a Password.” The article highlights the rising trend of adolescents sharing online and phone passwords with a dating partner or best friend.
Yes, the days of sharing letterman jackets have been replaced by shared Facebook passwords. According to Pew Internet research, 1 in 3 online teens has shared a password with a friend or significant other. Nearly half of girls ages 14-17 have shared passwords.
Access to online media and texting from a boyfriend or girlfriend’s phone carries potentially hefty implications, adding yet another to the list of concerns parents need to become aware of in order to help their digital-native children manage the new social reality in which they are growing up.
One parent interviewed for the article, child psychologist Winifred Lender, shared that she “had her three sons sign ‘digital contracts’ that outline terms for how much media they will consume, how they will behave online and that they will not share passwords.” When her son was asked to exchange a password recently, he had a great fall-back: “He blamed it on his parents…He said, ‘If I give you my password, my mom will have a cow.’ ”
This trend opens up a great opportunity to talk about trust with teenagers you know or who live in your home. Ask questions like: Who do you trust with private personal information? What motivates the sharing—is it because you trust them or because you want to be sure they aren’t hiding anything from you? What information should be off-limits or protected more closely? What do you gain by sharing a password with a boyfriend or girlfriend? What might you gain or lose by saying no? What happens if the relationship ends suddenly or that person doesn’t handle your personal information the way you thought they might?
So I am just starting to use more Apple products. I’m not exactly a tech early adapted (as anyone on our FYI team will readily tell you) and I have never visited an Apple Genius Bar.
But even I, a rookie Apple user and a non-early adapter, have heard lots of praise for the Apple Genius Bar.
I was intrigued by this Harvard Business Review blog about the branding of the Apple Genius Bar and how it was established more to build relationships than it was to sell product (the former leading to better long-term results).
It made me think about the “brand” of churches across the U.S. I was intrigued several months ago when a 40 year-old youth leader commented to me that while she grew up in a non-Christian and very dysfunctional family, as a teenager she “knew that the church was there for her. If she had a problem, she could go to the church.”
When is the last time you’ve heard someone who wasn’t a Christian (or even a Christian for that matter) say that if they had a problem, they know that a local church would be there for them?
Wouldn’t it be great if the “brand” of churches was that they were there for people – that they would walk with someone in need? Our churches (and those of us who comprise the church) are so often known for what we are against than what we are for. While we certainly need to take stands against certain wrongs, I long for the day when the church is known as a place of refuge and support.
As I mentioned, I am a fan of Mark Oestreicher’s new book, Understanding Your Young Teen: Practical Wisdom for Parents. Brad Griffin and I were so pleased to be able to contribute a bonus chapter called “See Jane Face New Issues”.
A friend of mine had read this book, and she mentioned to me that her favorite part of the book (besides the chapter I co-authored, of course – hear the sarcasm there please) was Marko’s encouragement to parents (and leaders) to normalize their young teen’s experiences.
I’ll let Marko speak for himself:
Every young teen, at one time or another, feels abnormal. They feel as though they’re physically developing in the wrong way. Or they feel as though they’re the only ones experiencing emotional swings. Or they feel as though their spiritual doubts are aberrant and unique.
Don’t trivialize your child’s experience…Instead, help your young teen realize that his or her experience of change is normal – even good.”
And then Marko tells a story about his daughter that any parent of teenagers, or youth leader, can imagine. While Marko was trying to have a calm conversation with then 13-year-old Liesl, Liesl kept saying that he was “yelling at her”. When she finally calmed down, she said, “I don’t know why I was yelling at you.”
Marko had the chance to explain that her strong emotions are normal at her age. Her feelings of sadness, anger, frustration are all part of her growing emotions.
I’ve heard from multiple parents (and experienced myself with my own kids, who are not yet teenagers) that letting kids know they are normal can often be helpful.
So the next time you see an adolescent acting or saying something that seems “so teenager”, let them know in a kind, non-patronizing voice that they are “normal”.
I feel like every year, my understanding of my need for community grows. From the carpool that is getting my son to church tonight to the walk I took with a friend this morning, I would be lost without others. In some ways, that theme is exactly what we’re showcasing in the E-Journal we are releasing today.
First we are sharing a “Research Brief and Field Interview” entitled “No Rest for the Weary: The Stressors of Urban Burnout.” In this article, we explore some of FYI’s work on urban youth leaders’ stress and burnout, and the surprising lack of attention leaders tend to pay to themselves and their own needs. I’m thrilled that Angel Ruiz, the Field Ministry Vice President for the Western Division of Young Life, is sharing some of his own ideas and steps to finding rest and balance, many of which relate to our relationships with others.
Second, we are sharing a video that explains our brand new Sticky Faith Parent Curriculum, a 5 session DVD series to help you empower parents to build better relationships with their own kids, which in the end will give you more support in your youth ministry.
So dive in, click around, and forward this blog or either of these resources to another parent or leader. Hopefully these research-based resources will help you enlarge the web of relationships that supports you and your students.
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