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Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ...28 29 30 NextMy friend, Brian Raison from Ohio State, sent me the press release below by the Drug-Free Action Alliance about how teenagers responded to the Super Bowl. During the Super Bowl, the friends that we had over all agreed how pervasive alcohol ads were. Note below that students didn’t vote those their favorites. I like the encouragement below to TALK to kids about tough subjects, including alcohol. Parents and youth workers can use ads as a springboard for deeper conversation…
Now here’s the press release:
According to the more than 30,000 middle and high school students nationwide, who participated in the Drug-Free Action Alliance Super Bowl Survey; while alcohol ads were widely remembered, they did not place in the top three favorites among youth, as in past surveys.
Doritos stole the show, with kids voting three different Doritos commercials as their top picks.
NATIONAL Middle School High School
#1 Doritos: Hands Off Doritos: Hands Off
#2 Doritos: Shock Collar Doritos: Shock Collar
#3 Doritos: Stole Tim’s Doritos Doritos: Stole Tim’s Doritos
#4 Bud Light: Stranded Budweiser: Human Bridge
#5 Bud Light: Clydesdale Snickers: Betty White
(Results based on over 30,000 middle and high school students within 38 states.)
“It is refreshing to see youth choosing commercials promoting a snack product for their top three favorites, however, there were plenty of alcohol ads, and based on the survey, kids definitely took note of it,” said Patricia Harmon, executive director for Drug-Free Action Alliance.
Not only did alcohol ads show up in the top five favorites, but when middle and high school students were asked about the products they remembered being advertised, alcohol was the second highest item recalled by both age groups (following closely behind food items).
“The concern is the influence of alcohol advertising on young minds,” said Harmon. “Considering youth, under the age of 21, make up about 18% of the Super Bowl viewing audience, we know there are a lot of underage people being exposed to alcohol advertising.”
Research shows that the more youth are exposed to alcohol advertising, the more likely they are to drink, drink more often and drink to excess. The effects of alcohol on developing adolescent minds and bodies can be devastating and long lasting.
Each day, 8,000 kids (between the ages of 12-17) take their first drink of alcohol. Those who begin drinking before age 15 are five times more likely to develop alcohol problems later in life. Alcohol is associated with a variety of risky behaviors including teen violence, car crashes and sexual assaults (among many others) and can cause permanent damage to the still developing adolescent brain.
Though it is unrealistic to think parents could possibly shield their children from all alcohol advertising, there is something parents can do; talk to their children. Research reveals that kids whose parents talk to them often about the dangers of alcohol and other drugs are 50% less likely to use.
“The next time your children are watching TV, we encourage you (parents) to sit down with them, making it a teachable moment. Use the commercials as an opportunity to teach your children to read between the lines of advertisements, building their media literacy skills,” said Harmon. “It’s an easy way to bring up the topic of underage drinking and to encourage your children to make healthy choices and avoid risky behaviors.”
A couple of weeks ago I was at a middle school retreat where a discussion arose among leaders about kids’ inability to articulate what they believe.
According to the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) team led by Christian Smith, “the vast majority of [U.S. teenagers are] incredibly inarticulate about their faith, their religious beliefs and practices, and its meaning or place in their lives.” One of the team’s conclusions from this is that faith communities are giving kids very little help in knowing how to express their faith, why it’s important to them, or how it connects with the rest of their lives. In general, this trend seems to have been true in the second wave of NSYR research five years later, reported in Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults
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The leaders at the retreat were talking about how difficult it is to help students make those connections and actually articulate what it is they believe. What I appreciate about Mark Oestreicher, who was the speaker for the weekend, was the way he was working to help leaders help their students articulate their own faith. He used his platform time to help weave together the Grand Story of what God has been up to throughout history, the centerpiece being Jesus as the Rescuer, and encouraged cabin discussion time as the time to begin fleshing it out.
I like that language of rescue, and I think it’s something teenagers can grab on to. In fact, our cabin discussions led to some kids working through what it may mean to be rescued, to live as rescued ones, and to participate in the Kingdom of the Rescued every day at home and at school. But more than that, I like that youth workers are wrestling with this important gap in the faith development of our students…
FYI blogger and Fuller grad Lars Rood, along with our friends Jeremy Zach (also a Fuller grad), Mark Oestreicher, Adam McLane from Youth Specialties, and several other ministry bloggers are heading to Haiti tomorrow. Follow them on Facebook or their blogs for regular updates if you’re not already doing it. They have a challenging task ahead of them: to tell the stories of what’s happening on the ground in Haiti (perhaps especially what they learn from the Haitian church), to inspire/challenge the youth ministry world with ideas about ways to respond (and not respond) in the coming year, all while trying hard not to exploit the very real people they encounter or make a spectacle of what’s already quite a spectacle.
They need our prayers.
Lars has committed to blog at FYI this year about his own youth ministry’s changing approach to short-term missions (based on utilizing our Deep Justice Journeys approach), and I’m excited to see how this trip will also impact his perspective and their changing practices. But more than that, I’m excited about how God can use the voices in this team to spread the word about what God is up to in Haiti.
How many times have you — like me — been in the van on the way back from a mission trip and said, felt, or heard from someone else, “We’ve got to do something more at home like this?” Many of us know the importance of connecting work away from home with missional living in our communities, but we aren’t sure how to bridge the gap.
A few posts last week from YouthWorks’ Eric Iverson point toward that connection. Today check out this Deep Justice Story about a youth group who never came back to do another YouthWorks trip. Why? Because they went home and developed Imagine Ministries.
How have you helped connect the dots in tangible ways between mission “out there” and missional living “right here”?
Here’s one to pass on to parents of teenagers.
In this 2-part article, Psychologist Alan Kazdin (Yale) with writer Carlo Rotella analyze research on the adolescent brain in an attempt to bust the myth that teenagers are worse than adults at assessing risks and making rational decisions. It’s an interesting read, inviting us to revisit how we try to prepare teens for decision-making in the face of high-risk options (I’ve shared other thoughts on this in a previous post on teen brain research). The authors contend that there are a lot of common interventions and prevention measures that simply don’t work.
What research does support in terms of parenting strategies that work to counteract high-risk behaviors among teens (according to the authors) is a set of fairly unsophisticated responses. The primary practice for parents to prevent bad choices? Monitoring. Keeping track of where kids are and—especially—who they are with. Peer influences are incredibly important because the teen brain is most rewarded by the presence and approval of peers. Hanging out with other kids doing high-risk behaviors is one of the strongest predictors of substance use and abuse. (One interesting note on gender here: parents tend to monitor teen girls more than boys, which some have suggested may be a reason teen boys participate in more high-risk behaviors—simply because they have less supervision.)
Monitoring sounds like policing or high-intensity surveillance, but it doesn’t mean the same thing as hovering. Here’s a quote from the authors about what kind of monitoring they’re talking about:
The members of families in which parents monitor have stronger ties, are more involved with one another, have warmer relationships, and are more cohesive and communicate better. A more askable, approachable parent with a warm relationship to a child will have more success in monitoring without turning into a warden. To that end, it helps to make monitoring normal and mutual in your household—which you can model by talking to your children about your day at the dinner table or during rides in the car—and to begin early.
The other suggested strategies include: building and modeling values for family, school, and society; developing competencies in kids (1 or 2 is plenty; no need for extra-curricular overkill); and nurturing the parent-child relationship. The last one seems like a no-brainer, but during adolescence can feel like incredibly hard work, especially when kids push away. Yet, “When there’s more parent connectedness—a child feeling close, loved, wanted, listened to, and satisfied with the relationship—a child is at much less risk for engaging in dangerous behaviors.”
Worth thinking about this week.
“Parents who complain of feeling burned out at work are more likely to have kids who are burned out at school.”
Last month I posted research about stress becoming a top health concern for teens in the U.S. Last week NY Times reporter Tara Parker-Pope shared about a study in Finland that revealed that burnout tends to run in families. This is particularly true between mothers burnt out at work and their teen daughters burnt out at school.
On some level this seems intuitive, but for us who are parents, how much do we pretend or hope that our stress and even burnout won’t impact our kids? Perhaps we’re fooling ourselves to think that’s possible. And on the flip side, how could our own self-care practices prevent burnout—both for us and for our kids?
For more on stress and burnout, check out this resource we put together last year for urban youth workers with the help of Dr. Jude Tiersma Watson and Kimberly Williams.
The research team over at the Pew Internet and American Life Project just released their latest report on social media and young adults, which includes teenagers. It’s worth at least a quick read for anyone working with or parenting youth.
Over at Ypulse, Anastasia Goodstein has a helpful post in response, discussing alternative ways to interpret what’s going on in shifting communication patterns. In particular, teens’ shift from the traditional blog to the microblog or “status update”. While less teens consider themselves bloggers, 73% of wired American teens use social networking sites that function as mini-blogs (82% if you isolate out 14-17 year-olds).
One huge (but not surprising) shift to note: In 2004 18% of 12-year olds owned a cell phone. That number is now up to 58%. Also interesting, fully half of teens now make online purchases.
One of the things we’ve been challenged to do more of here at FYI is tell the stories — the stories of transformation in the lives of youth workers and the students they serve every day. The stories of how our resources and training have made a difference. My hunch is that we could all stand to “tell the stories” more often, and more poignantly, to those who support and encourage us. The better we become at storytelling, the more others can catch the vision and invest their prayers and other resources toward our ministries.
I appreciate Eric Iverson, an FYI research partner and author of this week’s E-Journal article on short-term missions, for the way he tells stories of transformation. In fact, we’re posting two Deep Justice Stories based on case studies Eric has shared about churches who take missions far beyond the “mission trip.” Check out the first one today about First Baptist Church of Keene.
How do you tell your stories?
I spent last weekend with some of the junior highers from our church at Forest Home’s winter camp. And yes, I got to drive a van.
I was reminded on our way there of the importance of capturing open spaces like van time to hear what matters to kids. Of course, you also hear a lot of random things (“Did you know that light waves and sound waves are the same thing?” “I can’t believe you took away our cell phones!”), but in the midst of the chaos we nearly always have the opportunity to learn something new.
At one point during the drive I overheard one student say something like, “Most of the other kids at my school will be out drinking tonight.” He didn’t say anything more about it, but it gave me a new window into some of the social pain and pressure he experiences at school. And it opened the door for a follow-up conversation we had the next afternoon during free time.
Open space matters. Even in the van.
Newsweek has put together a photo gallery of “The decade’s most egregious retouching scandals,” complete with detail notes. The short summary on the title page should be enough to cause us to catch our breath and remember who we are – the people who create and sustain this phenomenon of “valuing the physically unattainable.” Be sure to make it all the way to the “plus-size” (a mere size 12!) model who notes that extra is often airbrushed on to her body (to make normal women feel even worse about themselves when buying these clothes?).
In a related survey reported by Reuters this week about Girl Scouts of the USA, 80% of teen girls say they’d rather see real images of models than airbrushed ones, and 9 out of 10 say they feel pressured to be skinny (no surprise there) and that there’s an unattainable image of beauty that has been created by the fashion and media industries.
Every youth worker and every parent of teenagers can use these pictures and findings to talk with kids about beauty, image, and what’s real. Let’s take advantage of what these journalists have put together in our small groups and conversations with kids this week. This is a story that needs to be told.
And we’d love to hear your ideas – how do you teach kids to live in and accept their bodies in the face of industry-standard processed beauty?
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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 131. [