...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
Friday, February 22, 2008
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
- 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
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
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Friday, February 1, 2008
PBS Frontline Special : Growing Up Online
PBS aired a special on Tuesday, January 22nd 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:
Working hard to keep up with the ever-changing student culture
Jimmy Scott, Student Pastor
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