We at FYI are big fans of family dinners. As folks who care about research, we are continually struck by the powerful effects of families having dinners together. According to a 2009 study by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, teens who have infrequent family dinners are twice as likely to use tobacco or marijuana, and more than 1.5 times more likely to use alcohol.
Having said that, it’s not just enough to be sitting around the same table at mealtime. We have to be focused on our families, free from the distractions of technology. Teens who have infrequent family dinners AND whose families dinners are pervaded by cell phones, laptops, and video games have even higher rates of risk behavior. They are three times more likely to use tobacco and marijuana and 2.5 times more likely to use alcohol.
As a mom of three kids (all of whom have soccer practices, two of whom have music lessons, and two of whom are involved in Boy/Girl Scouts), I know it can be very challenging to gather the family for dinner. And sometimes when we sit down, I’m so focused on what our family needs to do after dinner that I’m trying to rush us.
That’s why I was both convicted and encouraged by yesterday’s New York Times Magazine feature on family dinner. In these 16 pictures of families having dinner, we see the wonderful variety of families here in the U.S., and get a taste of the unique flavors that culture, personality, and geography brings to the family dinner ritual.
What are you doing for dinner tonight? How can it be more meaningful for your family? The author of the New York Times feature tries to have dinner with his family one day week. What might your goal be? If you’re a youth leader, how and when can you communicate this research to the parents in your church?
How would folks have answered that question five years ago? Twenty-five years ago?
How do you hope people answer that question a year from now?
Recently Fuller professor Mark Lau Branson spoke with our Sticky Faith Cohort about utilizing the toolkit of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) to help learn life-giving lessons from congregations in order to lead them forward into a new season of life. The basic definition of AI involves the “…discovery of what gives ‘life’ to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable…”
One of the assumptions behind this approach is that there are successes and life-giving narratives in every organization, and listening to those narratives is essential to moving forward in healthy ways into the future. In fact, carrying forward pieces of the past into the future gives people more confidence in where the organization is going.
My favorite part of this is what comes after you listen. You enter a phase of imaging together, or as Branson says, exploring “what might be” by interpreting what you’ve heard, taking the “risk of imagination,” and building toward a social imaginary concerning “what should be.”
I love the image of a social imaginary. Maybe it’s just a fancy word for brainstorming. But maybe it’s something more akin to what true leadership facilitates in a community. Over the next month, listen for what’s giving life to the people around you as they participate in your ministry. Then go build a social imaginary with them as you dream toward the future together.
Youth Specialties (YS) has been part of my life since 1986. As a high school junior, I went to a YS Grow For It event (some of us old-timers will remember those) and met a woman who was actually paid to do youth ministry (the visual aid I needed that added fuel to the fire of my sense that God was calling me to ministry). As a college student, I volunteered to do registration so I could go to the National Youth Workers Convention for free.
I remember the first time I wrote anything for YouthWorker Journal, which was then part of YS. It was a 200 word review of a video and I spent days on it. I remember the first seminar I did at the Convention; Mike Yaconelli stuck his head in the back of the room, which made me so nervous.
The things I have learned and the ways I have been encouraged and stretched by YS are too much content to contain in one blog, or even several blogs. So suffice it to say, I am deeply grateful to YS for their impact on youth leaders, including me.
That’s part of why I was so delighted and humbled when Mark Matlock and I started talking about the possibility of me taking a role as an Advisor to YS. As I spent time with him and Doug Fields, I got even more excited about the vision that is growing in YS — a vision that is as committed to caring for youth leaders as ever, and is also interested in integrating more research into the field of youth ministry. I’m also a cheerleader for a renewed commitment in YS to develop younger leaders and bring fresh blood and fresh ideas into the conversation. I see so many ways that FYI can learn from YS, and vice versa.
So in addition to my speaking roles with NYWC and YSPalooza, I’ll be giving strategic input to big picture issues and questions for YS. These are the sorts of questions we are wrestling with at FYI on a constant basis, and I’m glad to be able to learn from the way YS is responding to these same sorts of questions. I’m as committed to my full-time role as FYI Executive Director as ever, but given that one of FYI’s primary values is partnership, I am thrilled with the way FYI and YS are now in closer partnership.
We at FYI look forward to seeing you at San Diego’s National Youth Workers Convention. Come by our seminars, or check out the Fuller/FYI booth in the exhibit hall. We’d love to meet you face to face!
Her exploration of male friendships takes a perspective unlike most assessments of adolescent boys. Excerpting from the article (emphasis mine):
Despite stereotypes of teenage boys as grunting, emotionally tone-deaf creatures who bond over sports talk and risk-taking, [Way] said, their need for intimate friendship is as potent as it is for girls. Boys in early adolescence would speak candidly about those friendships to Dr. Way and her researchers, acknowledging the importance of having a best friend who was both repository and guard for their most private feelings.
But as the boys grew older, the intensity of those relationships faded. Boys feared being seen as “too girly” or even gay for expressing attachments to one another, even just for feeling them.
She leaned forward with evident urgency: “This is not some academic read I’m doing. The boys are aware of the power of their relationships. They are overtly saying, ‘I want him, I need him, I miss him — no homo!’ And then they grow up and become depressed.”
She added: “Parents reinforce those stereotypes. They’ll tell me, ‘My son is supersensitive but he plays sports!’ ”
I haven’t read Way’s book. But this is a powerful take on what happens to boys across the journey from early to mid-adolescence. Echoing research by sociologist Michael Kimmel (discussed in this article), from about ages 16 to 26 boys live in a sort of “Guyland” ruled by a secret code. The top rule is “boys don’t cry,” followed by the terrifying need to prove to other guys that you aren’t gay. Clearly, saying you need other guy friends for emotional support violates both of those rules pretty heavily.
How can we best support guys’ relationships in ways that offer a countercultural script to the “guy code”? We offered some ideas in this article a couple of years ago. This new research begs the question again. What new thoughts do you have about guys, friendships, and helping them navigate the journey through adolescence?
Is the teen brain a novice, a work-in-progress, or perfectly adapted for the tasks of its age?
Last week “Beautiful Brains,” a National Geographic feature by David Dobbs, perked a few ears toward the latest on this ongoing debate about the teen brain. For a quick review, since the 1990s neuroscientists have been exploring via full-brain scans what’s going on as the adolescent brain grows. In essence, it is doing more maturing than actual “growing”—neurological pruning and shaping leads to something “resembling a network and wiring upgrade.”
A few highlights from this new piece relevant to youth workers:
1. Teens use different parts of their brains to assess risks and act on them.
Compared with adults, teens tended to make less use of brain regions that monitor performance, spot errors, plan, and stay focused—areas the adults seemed to bring online automatically.
So while risk may not necessarily be the same as impulsivity, we need to understand that teens are very literally not thinking the way we do about situations as adults. They may be looking at the same problem, but they are using different parts of their brain to make decisions about it.
2. Thrill-seeking isn’t all bad for teen brains.
Sometimes it’s what gets kids out of the house.
Impulsivity generally drops throughout life, starting at about age 10, but this love of the thrill peaks at around age 15. And although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful.
3. The payoff is what counts
Teens give more weight to reward than adults, so while they don’t weigh the consequences of risk less, they take more risks because of the perceived rewards. Especially social rewards. This helps explain teens’ preference of being with other teens over being with adults. In fact, they (we all) are hard-wired to seek social connection. Dobbs notes:
This supremely human characteristic makes peer relations not a sideshow but the main show. Some brain-scan studies, in fact, suggest that our brains react to peer exclusion much as they respond to threats to physical health or food supply. At a neural level, in other words, we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence. Knowing this might make it easier to abide the hysteria of a 13-year-old deceived by a friend or the gloom of a 15-year-old not invited to a party.
4. Teen brains are well-suited for… teenagers.
Rather than pitching teenager brains as underdeveloped, more recent studies “cast the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.” There’s some good fodder there for discussion.
You might also be interested in the related NPR interview with Dobbs and neuroscientists B.J. Casey and Dr. Jay Giedd.
In last week’s HomeWord Weekly Culture Brief, Jim Burns and his team brought my attention to an interesting study reflecting how we as parents can be a bit out of touch with our kids. What struck me the most about the study was this finding:
Only 10 percent of parents think their own teens drank alcohol within the last year, and 5 percent believe their teens smoked marijuana in the last year, according to the latest poll by the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
These low numbers severely clash with the university’s 2010 Monitoring the Future survey, in which 52 percent of surveyed 10th-graders reported drinking alcohol in the last year and 28 percent reported using marijuana within the last year.
While we as parents tend to view our own kids through rose-colored classes, the opposite is true for our kids’ friends:
While most parents seem to assume their own kids aren’t trying alcohol or drugs, they certainly don’t think their child’s peers are as innocent. In the poll, researchers found that many parents of teens are very likely to believe that within the last year at least 60 percent of 10th-graders drank alcohol and 40 percent of 10th-graders used marijuana.
Note that 60% is higher than 52% (mentioned in the previous block of text) and 40% is also higher than 28%.
As I read this study, I thought of an episode on “The Oprah Show” in which interviewers with cameras went to local parks to talk to parents about the possibility of their children leaving with a stranger. While the parents were on camera saying that their kids would never leave with another adult, you could see in the background that child actually leaving with an adult who was part of Oprah’s team. This happened time after time.
What can we as parents do about our tendency to believe the best about our kids and the worst about others? Besides pray and ask God to help us see reality, we can ask others to help us do so also.
Several years ago, a friend of mine boldly but lovingly mentioned to me that I was treating two of my children differently. I didn’t know I was doing it, but as soon as she said it, I saw immediately what she meant. And it’s made a huge difference in my parenting. She could have remained quiet, but she spoke up. And it made a difference in our family.
Who do you know who you could ask what they are seeing in your family? Who would answer that question honestly? Is there anything going on in another family that perhaps you need to talk to them about?
It’s the power of community. It works because it’s how God has designed us.
This week we’re expanding “Team FYI” from 4 to 6, and we couldn’t be more excited. We are adding two new part-time interns, both of whom are Fuller students and super sharp, to our team.
Haley Smith is a first year student at Fuller Seminary from Dallas, Texas working to earn her Masters in Theology and Ministry. She graduated from Baylor University with a BA in Journalism and has worked the past four years in fundraising for ministries and social justice organizations.
Daniel Kim is getting his M.Div. at Fuller and is a youth ministry volunteer at his church, hoping to one day be a full-time youth pastor. He’s originally from New Jersey and is a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan, so he also had a rough Sunday (as did I as a Chargers fan).
As they join our team, I’m reminded of a few leadership lessons:
1. God intends for us to train up others. Just as Elijah modeled with Elisha and Paul modeled with Timothy, God intends us to pour into others. I am where I am because a few people poured into me.
2. Often training others means more work at first. Just because it’s right doesn’t mean it’s easy. Often equipping others to do ministry, even if it’s eventually going to mean less work for you, starts off by being more work.
3. Inviting new blood into our system shows us our own strengths and its flaws. I am sure that there will be aspects of FYI that Daniel and Haley will applaud, and aspects of FYI that will leave them scratching their head and suggesting better options. We need both affirmation of what we’re doing well and insights as to ways we could improve.
4. This experience is about their growth, not just FYI’s needs. We are doing our best to fit their tasks into the vision God has given them for their futures. So yes, they will end up making copies and shopping for office supplies, but hopefully they’ll also be better thinkers, leaders, and ministers because of our time together.
Today we are excited to invite you to join us for a FREE LIVE WEBCAST at 11:00 AM PST to celebrate the book release of Sticky Faith! All of the Sticky Faith contributors–including myself, Chap Clark, Cheryl Crawford and Brad Griffin will be joining us, as well as local youth worker Jeff Mattesich, who was part of the 2010 Sticky Faith cohort.
We’ve embedded the livestream channel below so you can view it from our site, or go directly to Livestream. Please join us and chat in your questions through the live chat feature. See you at 11:00!
We at FYI are big fans of Dave Livermore and his Cultural Intelligence work. I was especially struck by his blog last week about the differences in leaders across cultures.
Dave opens his blog by talking about how when asked to guess which individuals among a group of Czech leaders were the most influential, he picked two that would have been influential by typical American standards (e.g., they were charismatic). But actually, those charismatic leaders didn’t fit the Czech version of leadership. It was two other leaders who were the most effective-leaders who were more quiet and demure.
Dave makes some great points about leadership outside of the U.S. As I thought about our church’s youth ministry, and trends I see in youth ministries here in the U.S., it’s not unusual to have multiple cultures represented in the same grade of kids, or in the same small group. The obvious ramification is that we need to expand our vision for what makes a “good” small group leader. The different cultures and different personalities represented by the students in our group mean that we need a variety of types of leaders.
In my very early days of youth ministry, I discounted potential volunteers who I viewed as “too quiet” or “not enthusiastic enough”. Over the years, I’ve come to see how wrong that is. Often it’s those quiet volunteers who connect the BEST with students because they are quicker to listen than us more “verbal” folks.
I think immediately of Jan. Jan was one of the quietest college students I had ever met. Guess who loved her? Talkative junior high girls! They knew that Jan would be a great listener, and they were right.
Who in your community might be a great volunteer, if you had new eyes through which to see them?
“If It Feels Right,” A recent Op-Ed New York Times piece by David Brooks, has been raising eyebrows this week. Brooks pulls from the National Study of Youth and Religion’s work by Christian Smith and others, specifically what the team learned about the moral behavior of emerging adults (18-23 yr-olds).
Here was the researchers’ problem:
When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.
One young adult is quoted as saying, “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often.” Doing “what feels right to me” lives in tandem with withholding any judgment for “what seems right to someone else” in the hyperindividualistic milieu emerging adults call home. They’ve received it as an endowment from their parents, teachers, and most other adults in their lives. Indeed, as Brooks writes,
Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.
Here’s the kicker, in my opinion. We’ve long seen moral relativism growing, so this isn’t a huge surprise. But the final statement Brooks makes is this: “Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.” I’d argue that we could substitute “Faith” or “Religious Tradition” in the same sentence and be accurate:
Christian faith was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.
In other words, is what’s happening (happened?) to morality happening at the same rate to faith? In tandem with this NYT piece, USA Today offers the same suggestion this week: “More Americans tailoring religion to fit their needs.” They quote researcher George Barna as saying that America is becoming “310 million people with 310 million religions.” Over the past 20 years, more people say they are Christians, but less people say they are attending any church. Rather than passing along faith from generation to generation, we are encouraging the same kind of individualistic faith as we are a personal morality. Which raises the question, is this all connected with the loss of meaningful community in our culture?
In the midst of this, what do you see happening in your own context? And what thoughts do you have for how the church can be responding in hopeful ways?
Haley Smith is a first year student at Fuller Seminary from Dallas, Texas working to earn her Masters in Theology and Ministry. She graduated from Baylor University with a BA in Journalism and has worked the past four years in fundraising for ministries and social justice organizations.
Daniel Kim is getting his M.Div. at Fuller and is a youth ministry volunteer at his church, hoping to one day be a full-time youth pastor. He’s originally from New Jersey and is a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan, so he also had a rough Sunday (as did I as a Chargers fan).
