Research into Resources
My husband thought I might be interested in this example of an Ann Taylor model’s picture both before and after it’s been touched-up. He’s right. I am interested. And frustrated. She’s thin enough in the first picture, isn’t she?
Please show this to teenage girls. No wonder they don’t feel like they can look like the models. By the time pictures are air-brushed, even the models don’t look like the images that we eventually see.
A friend of mine sent me a Forbes article about how being a helicopter parent is viewed as being a “good” parent when it comes to divorce and custody settlements.
I’m all for parents’ involvement in their kids’ lives. I try to be involved in my own kids’ lives and I appreciate parents at our church who track with what we’re doing in youth ministry and support it.
But one of my life mantras is that balance is something we swing through on our way to the other extreme. And that seems to be what’s happening with parenting. Involvement has become over-involvement. Support has become smothering.
I’m no psychologist, but I’m guessing that fear and guilt are two of the major motivations behind helicopter parenting. How can we parent based on love and God’s grace instead?
This week I’ve been blogging about Diana Garland’s new research-based book, Inside Out Families: Living the Faith Together
Interestingly, many of these folks are already serving, and maybe already serving together as families. But as Garland reports, “…they want somehow to ground what they are doing in their lives of faith. They want their service to make sense as Christians.”1
That’s where you come in. As those who lead congregations (in whatever role you might be leading), families in the congregation are looking to you to help them not only serve the poor and outcast, but to connect the dots between feeding the hungry and loving Jesus more deeply. They need help framing hurricane relief work with Luke 4 and Jesus’ manifesto to bring “good news to the poor” (v 18). They need help connecting ministry to a local women’s shelter with Isaiah’s call to “Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:17).
So how are we framing service and justice in our congregations? Because if we’re not, we’re failing to meet families’ greatest felt need. And if we connect this back to the research shared in this post, that means we’re also failing to nurture one of the greatest opportunities for faith-building that we can give families.
When it comes to families serving together, some service is better than others.
Through her research summarized in Inside Out Families: Living the Faith Together
1. Serving among those who are different from us in culture and life experience. This stretches our understanding, empathy, and compassion. In other words, get beyond your church walls!
2. One-time service impacts faith way less than building long-term relationships as we serve.
3. Serving that places us into situations that are beyond us, where we have to depend on God’s help and provision.
4. And, not surprisingly in light of our Deep Justice Journeys research, both preparing beforehand and taking time to debrief and reflect on experiences afterward as a family are important to faith growth.
As you consider opportunities for families of students in your ministry (or your own family) to serve and seek justice, this short list can be a helpful evaluative tool.
Last week I read sociologist and family ministry guru Diana Garland’s new book, Inside Out Families: Living the Faith Together
And it’s not just about someone within the family serving. It’s about the family serving others together, as a family. Garland plays with what a “family faith” might look like—something that feels quite in opposition to our Western ideal of highly-individualized and privatized faith. The more she explored what was going on in families, the more evidence surfaced that the way we live out family faith is a powerful predictor of individual faith. As she shares,
I came to understand faith as the melody of our lives. The songs we sing are far more than the written words and notes on a page. …We do not communicate faith just by spouting what we believe to be the central truths. We live it; it has to be illustrated. Like a song has to be sung to be music, so faith has to take shape in action, in doing. Family stories are like words sung to the melody of faith. 1
As it turns out, surveys from 7,300 church members showed that those who were already involved in service to those in need also prayed, read their Bibles, attended worship services, shared their faith with others (evangelism), promoted justice, and gave more financially than those not serving. Serving, as it turns out, “is the most significant and powerful contributor to faith for teenage and adult Christians.” (p. 42). More tomorrow from this interesting book…
As the parent of an 8-year-old girl, this one was unsettling.
Girls today may start developing breasts by age 7 or 8, the New York Times reported yesterday from a new study released in the journal Pediatrics. While the average age of first menstruation—typically the mark of girls’ entrance into puberty—remains between ages 12 and 13, recent research argues that other signs of puberty may be dropping.
The debate over earlier puberty in girls has been going for more than a decade, and while the jury seems to still be out, many studies have linked obesity with earlier onset of puberty. That’s also true in this study. So if the age is indeed dropping, it’s primarily doing so among overweight girls.
Nevertheless, it raises all sorts of questions for us as youth workers and for parents of teenagers (or soon to be teenagers). In the midst of a culture that increasingly pushes sexualized messages on younger girls, how do we also talk about the potential reality of earlier sexual maturity? What kinds of conversations do we need to have with younger girls about their bodies?
I don’t think we need to sound any alarms over this report, but I do think we need to keep talking.
When 15-year-olds were asked what adults who really “get” them (understand them) do to show it, here’s what they said, as reported in the Search Institute 2010 Teen Voice Report:
(click on the image to see a larger version)
It’s funny about voices. They matter a lot. Newborn infants are known to respond to their parents’ voices over a stranger’s. Hearing the right voice on the phone makes us tear up, get angry, or feel our stomach sink.
As a kid I was told—ALL THE TIME—to lower my voice. To be quiet(er). To shut up. I was really loud, pretty much wherever I went. Some would say I still am, but I do have a little more self-awareness than I used too. Not surprisingly, my kids have volume-control issues of their own and we’re finding ourselves saying things like “Please don’t shout across the table at me to tell your story” (on our good parenting days).
Recent research lets us in on another secret about voices: we don’t trust people who don’t sound like us. Yes, that means accents different from our own—especially “foreign” voice inflections—spur feelings of mistrust just by the very nature of their difference.
According to research from the University of Chicago reported in this Futurity article, “Because an accent makes a person harder to understand, listeners are less likely to find what the person says as truthful, researchers found. The problem of credibility increases with the severity of the accent.” As researcher Boaz Keysar explains, we “misattribute the difficulty of understanding the speech to the truthfulness of the statements.” This may be an unconscious misattribution, but it happens.
How often is that true of me? Of you? What happened on your last interaction with a phone service representative when you were having tech problems? How does this influence our views on immigration, our relationships in cross-cultural mission work, our respect for parents of kids in our ministries whose native tongue is not English? There are tons of implications here for issues of injustice in our communities and across the globe.
Or maybe I should just be quiet.
I bristle when dads—as a people group—get knocked as inept and bumbling parental counterparts to all-capable and ever-nurturing moms.
Especially when the church (frequently and with much pleasure) feeds into the stereotypes that excuse dads from fathering. I bristle because it’s an affront to men (Oh, I see you’re babysitting, eh?), an affront to women (changing diapers and cuddling babies is women’s business), and an affront to God (who nurtures us as the perfect parent encompassing attributes of both mother AND father).
Boston College’s recent research report, “The New Dad: Exploring Fatherhood within an Career Context,” explores from a cultural perspective what it’s like to be a dad in America today, seeking to become a “whole person” both at work and at home. Many dads struggle to balance both “breadwinning” and co-parenting. For the first time in our country’s history, over half of college graduates are women, half of the workforce are women, and 70% of two-parent families are dual income-earners. Obviously there are a lot of cultural and personal issues at play here, a number of which are beyond the scope of this blog.
What I find refreshing in the report is the lack of jokes and assumptions about what working dads are supposed to be doing—watching TV, playing video games, golfing, or engaging in other entertainment distractions. Overwhelmingly, dads in the study talked about providing emotional support and “being there” as being as important as financial support. Fathers’ engagement and nurturing were the big themes of the interviews. The authors sum up their discussion with this statement:
“We would not accept disparaging comments about women’s abilities in the workplace. Why do we think it is acceptable to make similarly disparaging comments regarding the incompetence of men as care takers and parents, when for so many men this is becoming one of the central roles of their lives?”
There are plenty of dads who need to step up—many of whom are being excused from active fatherhood by our churches. But there are so, so many other dads who need us to cheer them on, expect great things of them, and affirm their importance in the nurturing of their own—and our communities’—kids.
This week’s E-Journal includes a feature from Kara that puts in writing some concepts we’ve been including in our FYI speaking and consulting for a couple of years now, in particular the metaphor of the “Kid Table” and the “5:1 Ratio”.
A few years ago we wrote this article as we were beginning to explore a theology, or more specifically an ecclesiology, of intergenerational youth ministry. In it we included the following list to help describe what we mean when we talk about “intergenerational”. What would you add/change/delete?
