Continuing our series on intergenerational ministry, Fraze explores Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton’s work in their Soul Searching research as it relates to the roles parents and other adults play in adolescent faith formation.
My kids are 8, 6, and 2 so I am FAR from a veteran of the parent schedule juggling act. But already, especially with my two oldest kids, it’s getting harder and harder to balance their schedules, which now include …
While we often call kids with abundant financial resources “privileged”, there can be a dark underside to growing up with affluence. Recent research on adolescents from wealthy homes uncovers some disturbing trends among these kids. If you work with students and families who have significant means, this article offers several ways to engage affluent culture and help families guard against its dangers.
No matter where you do youth ministry, you know kids whose parents fight, and kids whose parents fight a lot. While youth workers can’t fix all of the problems in kids’ lives, we do have a responsibility to become more aware of ways that issues like high-conflict marriages impact the daily lives of our students. This article shares insights from research and starting points for ways we can respond.
In light of recent research and our commitment to the importance of parents in youth ministry, FYI invited a handful of youth pastors and short-term missions experts to help us better understand how to invite parents to walk with their students in the justice journey.
When faced with the question, “How do you minister to families?” many of us balk, stutter, or change the subject. While we care deeply about the families of our youth ministries, we cannot always articulate or strategically plan for the ways we care for, equip, and encourage them. This article will help put some language around three of the most common approaches to family ministry, in addition to giving you some tools you can use right now to assess your approach to families.
Chap and Dee Clark recently co-authored Disconnected: Parenting Teens in a MySpace World. This brief excerpt from Disconnected highlights the emerging reality of midadolescence, along with offering faith-building strategies that can help parents move kids toward a growing faith in the midst of the midadolescent reality.
While it may seem to some that adolescence hasn’t changed much for girls in recent years, research and media trends indicate at least three areas we’ve identified as needing our renewed attention as youth workers. In this article we share ideas for responding to three “mores” that bring new twists to some perhaps-familiar issues: more sexy, more pressure, and more violence.
Few of us actually think suburban kids live risk-free lives, but most of what we hear about “at-risk” relates to kids who live in urban areas, in deep poverty, or in obviously harsh family environments. This article looks deeper into the oppressive forces impacting the lives of suburban kids—no less real or oppressive, but perhaps less obvious.
