Essential Reads For Parents:
Shepherding a Child’s Heart is about how to speak to the heart of your child. The things your child does and says flows from the heart. Luke 6:45 puts it this way, “. . . out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” (NIV) Written for parents with children of any age, this insightful book provides perspectives and procedures for shepherding your child’s heart into the paths of life. Click here to purchase the book.
Click here for the parents handbook. Or Click here for a leaders guide.
If parents, educators, and youth workers were to read only one book about helping adolescence—this would be the one. Chap Clark managed to get inside the world of US teenagers and reveal the depths of angst, pressure and loneliness they feel. Hurt is a illuminates the under layers of teen culture, the places where adolescents are most honest and vulnerable, only to discover that today’s youth are indeed a tribe apart—and it is the adults who have isolated them.
Most of Clark’s research took place in Crescenta Valley High School in north Los Angeles County. One might wonder how a middle-aged dad could get inside the heads of so many teens from so many walks of life. He did this by doing what most adults are unwilling to do—spending time with teens and asking questions, by showing a genuine curiosity in their world and a willingness to hear their answers without judgment. The results are riveting.
Ultimately this is an indictment of our increasingly adult-centric society that is more invested in adult interests than the individual needs of our youth. By the time adolescents enter high school, most have been subjected to at least a decade of adult-driven agendas. He slams coaches who are so invested in winning at youth sports that they leave mediocre athletes on the bench or pull them off the team. He points to the once playful dance classes that somehow morph into intensive dance training and regional competitions. Or the high school junior who faces a nightly four-to-five hour marathon of homework only to rise at 7 a.m. for morning band practice before AP calculus. We reward youth for their adult-pleasing achievements, failing to consider the price of isolation, stress and fear of failing that this generates.
Clark (the author of Daughters & Dads 1576830489 and From Father to Son 1576832945) concludes the book with solid recommendations for turning this tide. Unfortunately, he often defends his research and recommendations, as if a critical academic was looking over his shoulder. The truth is this book belongs less to the world of academics and more appropriately in the hands of anyone who lives with or directly works with teenagers. –Gail Hudson
Click here to purchase the book.
Tripp unearths the premises that underlie popular views of sex and notes several characteristics that make teenagers especially vulnerable to sexual temptation. He offers a threefold plan for helping teens deal with sex realistically and in the hope of the gospel. Click here to purchase the book.
The Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling was first published in March 1988. While its primary intention was to help counselors and pastors, over the years laypersons have also found it indispensable in helping them meet their personal needs as well as mold their personal and family devotions.
This revised and expanded edition is specially designed to help people use the Scriptures more effectively in their lives. Scripture quotations are from the popular NIV. Scripture passages on each of the practical topics are thoughtfully arranged in a numbered list so that users can see their significance at a glance. Users have all the pertinent Bible passages at their fingertips when they need them most. Click here to purchase book.
Tripp uncovers the heart issues affecting parents and their teenagers during the often chaotic adolescent years. With wit, wisdom, humility, and compassion, he shows parents how to seize the countless opportunities to deepen communication, learn, and grow with their teenagers. Click here to purchase the book.
Click here for a study guide Or Click here for a leaders guide to the book.
What I Read About Youth Ministry:
RESOURCES TO HELP YOU GET UNDER THE SURFACE OF YOUTH CULTURE
Contemporary adolescents seem confident, well-adjusted, and happy. But beneath the surface, they’re often lonely, insecure, and empty. What’s going on? Claiming that adults have “abandoned” teens just when they most need support, Clark’s ethnographic study examines today’s changing youth culture from the inside out and suggests five strategies to “turn the tide of systemic abandonment.” 236 pages, softcover from Baker.
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Before we can reach today’s youth with the turth of the gospel, we need to see what they see and hear what they hear. We need to catch the messages encrypted in their culture and understand what’s really being communicated.In Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture Walt Mueller, founder and president of the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding, helps us to navigate the troubling and confusing terrain of teen worldviews so that we can effectively and compassionately pass along good news: our God is their God, our Savior can be their Savior.
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They are the digital generation, the Mosaics, a new wave of connected and decidedly upbeat young people who are anxious to make a positive difference in the world around them. Skepticism-once the hallmark of Generation X-is waning as the prevalent attitude among teens. As teens change, so must our way of teaching them and reaching them. How can we effectively convey the eternal truths of the gospel to high-tech, information-drenched, highly mobile youth who believe themselves to be self-sufficient? What are the challenges we face in reaching out to the Mosaic generation? And what are the opportunities they present? Once again, George Barna points the way.
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Many people today, especially among emerging generations, don’t resonate with the church and organized Christianity. Some are leaving the church and others were never part of the church in the first place. Sometimes it’s because of misperceptions about the church. Yet often they are still spiritually open and fascinated with Jesus. This is a ministry resource book exploring six of the most common objects and misunderstandings emerging generations have about the church and Christianity. The objections come from conversations and interviews the church has had with unchurched twenty and thirty-somethings at coffee houses. Each chapter raises the objection using a conversational approach, provides the biblical answers to that objection, gives examples of how churches are addressing this objection, and concludes with follow-through projection suggestions, discussion questions, and resource listings.
WARNING THESE BOOKS WILL GET UNDER YOUR SKIN AND DISTURB YOU, YOUTH CULTURE NEEDS A GRACIOUS SAVIOR AND REPENTENCE MAY NEED TO BEGIN WITH US
According to consumerism and economics expert Schor (The Overspent American), the average 10-year-old has memorized about 400 brands, the average kindergartner can identify some 300 logos and from as early as age two kids are “bonded to brands.” Some may call it brainwashing, others say it’s genius; regardless of how you see it, the approach is the same: target young kids directly and consistently, appeal to them and not the adults in their lives and get your product name in their heads from as early an age as possible. From TV shows and toys to video games, snacks and clothing, kids today, according to Schor, know too much yet understand too little, sopping up subliminal and not-so-subliminal messages of “buy, buy, buy.” Drawing on a significant body of research, including interviews with everyone from advertising executives to the kids themselves, Schor exposes what she believes to be a huge cesspool of materialism, consumerism and commercialization that could be, and perhaps already is, leading to a generation of kids with no concept of what is important and truly necessary in life. By offering up her own ideas of what can be done by parents, educators, advertisers and others to lessen these problems, Schor goes beyond uncovering the problem and into the realm of concrete solutions.
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There’s a lot more cold cereal than sex or drugs in Klosterman’s nostalgic, patchy collection of pop cultural essays, which, despite sparks of brilliance, fails to cohere. Having graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1994, Klosterman (Fargo Rock City) seems never to have left that time or place behind. He is an ironically self-aware, trivia-theorizing, unreconstructed slacker: “I’m a `Gen Xer,’ okay? And I buy shit marketed to `Gen Xers.’ And I use air quotes when I talk…. Get over it.” The essay topics speak for themselves: the Sims, The Real World, Say Anything, Pamela Anderson, Billy Joel, the Lakers/Celtics rivalry, etc. The closest Klosterman gets to the 21st century is Internet porn and the Dixie Chicks. This is a shame, because he’s is a skilled prose stylist with a witty, twisted brain, a photo-perfect memory for entertainment trivia and has real chops as a memoirist. The book’s best moments arrive when he eschews argumentation for personal history. In “George Will vs. Nick Hornby,” a tired screed against soccer suddenly comes to life when Klosterman tells the story of how he was fired from his high school summer job as a Little League baseball coach. The mothers wanted their sons to have equal playing time; Klosterman wanted “a run-manufacturing offensive philosophy modeled after Whitey Herzog’s St. Louis Cardinals.” In a chapter on relationships, Klosterman semi-jokes that he only has “three and a half dates worth of material.” Remove all the dated pop culture analyses, and Klosterman’s book has enough material for about half a really great memoir.
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This book — an essential guide to the world of MySpace.com specifically written for the parents of the millions of teens who use it and other social networks — can’t be catalogued quickly enough. Kelsey, a teacher, counselor, and parent, believes that parents must find out how overpowering and influential social sites have become. The message millions of kids receive from today’s online culture is scary: that in order to be successful, it’s important to be a consumer; that glamour is everything and that you must be entertained all the time; relationships are disposable. And, perhaps the most onerous: privacy is not important. Kids can be anybody; they can post any pictures, and they can “friend” anyone or destroy less popular kids with a click. Kelsey shows readers how to create a MySpace account safely and how to interpret what other bloggers are saying. She looks at cyberbullying, porn on a cell phone, “podporn” (pornographic video viewed on iPods), and more. After 300 eyeopening pages, she also helps parents understand how to protect their online teens. Much more thorough than Larry Magid and Anne Collier’s MySpace Unraveled.
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For the last 30 years, Pennsbury High, a huge public school in Fairless Hills, Pa., has staged such an over-the-top senior prom that thousands of local residents turn out on prom night just to watch the seniors enter their “Wonderland.” Bamberger, a Sports Illustrated senior writer, spent a school year with Pennsbury’s seniors, recording their “true-life” stories. Since prom planning starts in September and climaxes in May, the event is both a good hook for readers and a convenient organizational device for various subplots that develop month by month. Will up-and-coming musician John Mayer finally agree to play for the prom? Will Rob and Stephanie still go to the prom, now that they’re parents of a newborn baby? Will Lindsey keep co-chairing the prom committee even though she needs heart surgery? Bamberger cuts from one subplot to the next like a seasoned TV soap director, breaking away from each story just when it gets juicy. While much of the drama is about who’s attracted to whom (high school kids are “on display, like mating birds”), for variety there’s an ace student involved in a drinking death, another coping with cerebral palsy, some with college admissions problems, one or two kids planning for upward mobility via sports, plus a few faculty members with their own issues. Bamberger’s teens may not be 100% typical, but they offer a good window onto at least a segment of contemporary teen culture.
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you should also read the 7 checkpoints for leaders…