Links to Learn From

- VA Schools Teach 'Net Safety Lessons
http://ap.google.com/article/

- Study Ties Bedroom TV to Unhealthy Habits in Teens
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN0439129420080407

- Family as Solution to Underage Drinking
http://www.moberlymonitor.com/articles/2008/04/08/news/news1.txt

- Panel Allows Parents Glimpse of Teenage Minds
http://www.thestamfordtimes.com/stamford_templates/stamford_story/

Professor: Profit Motives Behind Sexualization of 'Tween Girls

Writing, Technology and Teens

Former beauty queen speaks about acceptance and purpose at ENC

Educating Parents Nationwide About Choosing Appropriate Video Games For Their Children and Families

Teens Turn Deaf Ear To Risk of MP3 Players

Biblical appeal: Palmer Lake company flaunts Christian themes on clothing

Students of Virginity

Trusting Teenage Girls: What Americans Can Learn From HBO's Dr. Paul Weston

Learn Student Lingo

...Some slang and texting lingo for you to speak (or at least understand)

- Mack = 1. v. To steal or take advantage of. "Yo... free pizza? I'm going to mack on some of that!" 2. To make a pass at someone or try to get sexual favor. Male flirting. "Quit mackin' on them bootsie-lookin hoochies over there!" 3. n. Someone who "macks." See "playa." "Check out Jesse over there with them chassies... he thinks he's the mack!"

- IHU = I Hear You (An acronym or text message used in online chat, IM, e-mail, blogs, or newsgroup postings.)

INSIDE YOUR TEEN'S WORLD

INSIDE YOUR TEEN'S WORLD
...Random things you may not have heard about...

Seventeen Magazine's "Jess's Body Peace Blog" answers teen questions about their bodies
http://www.seventeen.com/health-sex-fitness/body-types/body-peace-blog/

• At this link there are many questions that students have asked Seventeen Magazine "Body Peace Expert". This is a look into the culture of our students.
  

Latest Teen Hangout: The Nearest Gym
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/yourmoney/chi-gym-hangout-bd23mar23,1,342659

Links To Learn From

- Are Your Teens Happy?
http://ypulse.com/archives/2008/03/happy_teens_buy.php

- Talk to Teens
http://www.familytlc.net/talk_to_teens.html

- Teach Your Child How to Handle Money
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4521961&page=1

- Teens Face Tough Market for Summer Jobs
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23694320/

Links To Learn From

- Backseat Writer: A blog from a Christian writer and counselor who is in touch with the culture and media teens are living in
http://www.backseatwriter.com/

- Ten Things We Should Never Say to Kids [download this free book from Jim Hancock, co-author of The Parent's Guide to Helping Teenagers in Crisis]
http://thetinycompanycalledme.com/1573/25301.html

- Love is Respect [check out this video a teen girl made to raise awareness about dating abuse...the other videos on this page may be an interesting peek into your teen's culture, too.]
http://www.seventeen.com/fun-stuff/video-hub/

- Spring Break--Should You Let Your Teen Go?
http://www.daily-journal.com/archives/dj/display.php?id=416588

Learn Their Lingo

...Some slang and texting lingo for you to understand

- lick = 1. To fire up or fire shots; to commence. "Da boi was charged up wit adrenalin'--licked 3 shots in the head and did him in..." 2. drunk or high "I'm licked Dogg."

- lock up = To fight. "You keep talkin' smack and we're gonna have to lock up."

- HAK = Hugs And Kisses (An acronym or text message used in online chat, IM, e-mail, blogs, or newsgroup postings.)

Random things you may not have heard about

- Online Games by the Hundreds, with Tie-Ins
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/business/media/

- STDs Still a Threat to Many Teens
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bal-to.reimer18mar18,0,4134718.column

- High School Confidential [a new documentary TV show]
http://highschool.wetv.com/show.html

Learn Their Lingo

...Some slang and texting lingo for you to speak (or at least understand)

- I'm straight = To declare that you are all right in your current state of being, as if to say, "I'm cool," or "I'm good already."

- DWB = Don't Write Back [An acronym or text message used in online chat, IM, e-mail, blogs, or newsgroup postings.]

Teen Violence: perception vs. reality

Fewer Youths Jump Behind The Wheel @ 16

Sneaky gadget reads deleted text messages

Teen Trend Prediction for 2008

Texting and Slang Lingo

This link will allow you to download a Word document with a few texting and slang lingo that i have researched and heard students using. Some of them are offensive. Please understand that my intent in making you aware is so that in the off chance you see or hear the lingo you can decipher the true meaning.

Teen Girls Confess Their Worst Deeds

Generation Google: A Talk With Todays Teens

3 Things Parents Need To Tell Their Blogging Teens

Two Million Minutes Until High School Graduation

Spitzer Scandal Tricky For Parents

Passion of the Christ

Sr. High Students will be remembering what Jesus has done for us and preparing our hearts for Easter by watching The Passion. This Saturday eve, 7:30 – 10:30, Stockberger’s

Teen Relationships

Parents Urged To Go Beyond "Big Talk" About Sex

Text Generation Gap: UR 2 Old

Links To Learn From

1. LINKS TO LEARN FROM

- Meals Matter: March is National Nutrition Month. Find out how you can help your teen eat healthier foods
http://www.mealsmatter.org/CookingForFamily/Planning/article.aspx?articleId=41

- Inside the Teenage Brain: How Science May Help Explain the Mysteries of the Teen Years
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/



2. INSIDE YOUR TEEN'S WORLD
...Random things you may not have heard about...

- Watch Your Mouth! Teens Casually Cuss a Bluer Streak Than Ever. Can They Stop Themselves?
http://www.sacbee.com/107/story/727392.html

- Peeking Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/weekinreview/24parker.html?_r=2



3. LEARN THEIR LINGO
...Some slang and texting lingo for you to speak (or at least understand)

- five on it = Term used to imply that the person either has a nickel bag of weed to contribute, or is willing to pitch in five dollars toward the purchase of marijuana.

- givin' up the gold = When a female gives up her virginity before the right time, usually before marriage. "Girl, why you given up the gold... you gonna be bankrupt later!"

- HHOK = Ha Ha, Only Kidding (An acronym or text message used in online chat, IM, e-mail, blogs, or newsgroup postings.)




5. A LITTLE ENCOURAGEMENT...AND HUMOR

"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."
~ Mark Twain

Learn Student Lingo

...Some slang and texting lingo for you to speak (or at least understand)

SLANG:

- Rides = sneakers, as in, "Don't step on my rides," or "Check out my new rides."

- All up in the kool-aid = in someone's business, as in, "That's between me and Brian--don't be all up in the kool-aid!"

TEXTING LINGO:

- POS = Parent Over Shoulder

- NALOPKT = Not a lot of People Know

Inside Your Teenagers World

...Random things you may not have heard about...

- The movie, Juno, turns the Hamburger Phone into the latest trend
http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/product_design/

- The Honey Project: A youth-based enterprise that focuses on educating American youth about social entrepreneurship
http://www.honeyproject.com/index.php?loc=home

A Parents Guide To Helping Teenagers In Crisis

A PARENT'S GUIDE TO HELPING TEENAGERS IN CRISIS

This book will give parents practical responses to some of the biggest crises in a teen's life, like suicidal thoughts or behavior, divorce, eating disorders, substance abuse, trouble with the law, and more.

Learn more and purchase "A Parent's Guide to Helping Teenagers in Crisis" here.
https://shop.youthspecialties.com/store/product.php?productid=568

Also available in your local Christian bookstore.

Find a Christian bookstore near you:
http://www.youthspecialties.com/store/dealers/

=================================

1. TOOLS FOR PARENTING TEENS

This is an excerpt from the new book, "A Parent's Guide To Helping Teenagers in Crisis", by Rich Van Pelt and Jim Hancock. It helps us all take a different look at crisis in the lives of teens.

DANGEROUS OPPORTUNITY

RVP: I once heard a youth worker say, "I love crisis!" I remember wondering if maybe he could use some counseling or at the least some comp time because clearly the man had lost perspective.

JH: But really, who doesn't enjoy a good crisis from time to time? Well...me for one. A while back I was invited to sit on the sound mix platform at a U2 show. The concert was on youth group night at the church where I worked so I planned to have someone cover for me (knowing no kid would begrudge me the chance to be at the show, right?). But I decided not to tell anyone about my good fortune--I figured it would make a better story if I hadn't made a big deal about it beforehand.

A couple of days before the concert, one of our peer leaders got caught in a lie that led to a terrific blowup in the youth group. I defused the immediate crisis and, in a fit of remorse, the boy said he wanted to come clean and make amends to his fellow leaders at the next meeting. "Okay," I said, swallowing hard. "I'll help you do that." I called the friend who invited me to the concert and said, "Thanks but something's come up in my group, and I think I'd better stay home. My loss."

Well that was an understatement. Not only did the kid not come clean; he didn't even come to the meeting. I could have been sitting on the mix deck at a U2 show! And what could I say? Nothing! I couldn't even bring it up. But I do want to thank you for listening all these years later. It feels good to finally share this indignity with my peers... Okay, it actually feels whiney and I'm sorry I brought it up. All I'm saying is I don't love a crisis.

We're all busy people. Juggling work and family and trying to serve multiple masters and figure out who we're going to disappoint when there's not enough of us to go around. There's just no good time for a crisis. We couldn't possibly fit one in this week or next. Get back to us early next month; we'll see what we can do...

A lot of parents don't have nearly enough personal margin to truly be there for their teenagers' small crises. And if we don't show up--emotionally as well as physically--we can't help. Only a fullblown, all-bets-are-off potboiler of a crisis can break into the packed calendar of way too many parents who would say for the record that nothing is more important than their children's well-being. You can probably take it from there.

Crises don't respect the clock or calendar. For what it's worth, the two of us have concluded the Good Samaritan of biblical fame hadn't really scheduled the rescue mission that made him famous. That's part of what made him a Good Samaritan. He was on a business trip when he dropped what he was doing to look after a man left for dead. If that's how we're supposed to treat our neighbors (and the neighbor in the story was a complete stranger), doesn't that sort of raise the bar for how we're supposed to treat our own kids?

WHO'S "QUALIFIED" TO HANDLE CRISIS?

Some of us dread--even avoid--facing our teenagers' crises because we're afraid we don't know enough to be effective helpers. We're just parents, right? It's not like anyone gave us any training; they just handed us a baby on the way out the hospital and wished us luck. Sure, lots of us have college degrees (and there's nothing like a specialized diploma to give the impression we know what we're doing), but that doesn't necessarily translate into feeling anything but ill-equipped to help a child in an actual crisis. Qualified? Who are we kidding?

But then there's this. The great Madeleine L'Engle wrote:
In a very real sense, not one of us is qualified but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do His work, to bear His glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own or God's glory with our own.

When one of our friends was tasked with helping his town's high school community respond to the unspeakable loss of three students in a car crash, he wondered, "How do you prepare for this?

What qualifies a person to enter into this kind of pain with kids and families?" If it's daunting for a well-trained youth worker, then why wouldn't it be daunting for the average parent?

RVP: I don't know anyone who's prepared for everything. For more than a decade, I served as a chaplain with the Division of Youth Services for the Colorado Department of Corrections. My youth group was adolescents locked up for every crime imaginable--and a few I found unimaginable. At one point I was asked to conduct a memorial service for one of those young offenders who died after escaping from the lockup. The day before the service I was saying goodnight to a staff member who was particularly close to the boy: "See you at the service tomorrow," I said.

His immediate response was to blurt, "Oh no you won't!"

His reaction took me by surprise and when I asked what he meant he surprised me even more. He told me he couldn't handle the boy's death. Here was an experienced guy who was extremely competent at his job, but his personal fears and inability to cope crippled his capacity to help in that instance.

Plenty of parents understand this dilemma. Death, sickness, depression, substance abuse, and sexual identity are no-go zones for some people--especially sexual identity. A lot of parents resist the very notion of helping their young folks work through gender identity issues. It becomes clear in a thousand ways that they're not available for that particular duty. Pity. These parents pass by on the other side, leaving their children battered and broken because they haven't resolved their own sexual identities enough to answer difficult questions. Under these restrictive rules of engagement, how will those parents respond if a young person turns up HIV positive (whether the infection was sexually borne or not)? Can parenting be so easily neutralized by immaturity and fear of vulnerability? It can.

Parenting the young and vulnerable can make parents feel vulnerable too. Parenting through a crisis is a contact sport that takes us places we never thought we'd go to address problems we never thought we'd face.

RVP: I've traveled the globe training youth workers, pastors, therapists, school administrators, counselors, teachers, peer counselors, parents--and anyone else who will listen--in crisis prevention and intervention. I typically begin by asking workshop participants to say the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the word crisis.

In my third decade on the road, I can almost predict the responses: emergency, help, disaster, fear, police, danger, predicament, and terrorism. Everyone agrees that crisis evokes images of physical, spiritual, emotional, and relational harm. Few, if any, immediately associate crisis with the word opportunity.

But they could. I haven't had the chance to teach in China yet, but I've learned that the Simplified Chinese characters for crisis combine characters that signify danger and opportunity.

Have the Chinese seen something the rest of the world needs to learn? Do opportunity and danger come wrapped together in the form of crisis? We think they do.

COMING ALONGSIDE

There is a biblical tradition that God comforts the afflicted (and occasionally afflicts the comfortable). God is known as, "the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God."

It's a nice picture...The Father of compassion and the God of all comfort. The writer Earl Palmer says the word comfort might be better translated as coming alongside, in which case it would read: "The Father of compassion and the God of all coming alongside, who comes alongside us in our troubles, so that we can come alongside those in any trouble with the coming alongside we ourselves receive from God." It's a little clunky to read in English but wow! The Father of compassion and the God of all coming alongside...Beautiful.

That's what parents imagine when our children are infants: That we'll be filled with compassion and always there for our children--coming alongside to help, no matter what. That's what we ask God to make a reality for us; that somehow, in a miracle of presence when we come alongside our children in crisis, God will show up bringing new hope and life from the ashes.

Decades of coming alongside kids and families slogging through life's most difficult terrain transformed crisis intervention into so much more than a duty or interruption in our schedules (and that goes double for our own children). Certainly crisis is permeated with danger--we've always known that. Over time we came to see that crisis is also infused with opportunities for growth.

We don't say that lightly. Growth doesn't mean middle-class American fulfillment to us. It means wholeness; gradually becoming everything it means to be fully human. We don't know anyone who gets there without considerable pain and more than a few scars from the struggle to truly grow up.

Like the crisis-loving (or at least crisis-welcoming) youth worker whose stability Van Pelt once questioned, the two of us learned to embrace crisis as a means through which grace operates on this broken planet. Please don't misunderstand. We don't take morbid delight in watching kids suffer. On the contrary, truly coming alongside teenagers requires a willingness to suffer with them as they suffer (that's what compassion means), bringing with us the comfort we receive. We're just doing for kids what we'd want them to do for us if the situation were reversed. We believe we're only giving as good as we already got from the God of all coming alongside.

**

Excerpt from "A Parent's Guide to Helping Teenagers in Crisis" by Jim Hancock and Rich Van Pelt, copyright 2008, Youth Specialties/Zondervan. Learn more and order the book here.
https://shop.youthspecialties.com/store/product.php?productid=568

Textonyms give mobile phone addicts a new language

Under The Influence Of Music

PBS Frontline Special : Growing Up Online

PBS aired a special on Tuesday, January 22^nd entitled, “Growing Up Online: Just How Radicallly is the Internet Transforming the Experience of Childhood?” This program was extremely beneficial for me as the Youth Minister here at Hazel Dell Christian Church and I’m sure it would prove to be beneficial for you as a parent, grandparent or anyone who has an interest in student culture.

Every person who has been called by God to reach out to students – youth workers, parents, grandparents, pastors, educators – is a cross-cultural missionary, whether he/she realizes it or not. In today’s emerging and rapidly changing culture (both postmodern and whatever else lies over the horizon), it’s increasingly necessary for people involved in the lives of youth to not only know God’s Story, but also to know and understand the rapidly changing culture context in which it 's to be told.

WFYI TV 20 - CHANNEL 20

PBS is offering "Online" viewing of the program. Here is the web address for additional details:

Growing Up Online

Working hard to keep up with the ever-changing student culture

Jimmy Scott, Student Pastor