What Kids Say is Impacting Them Negatively
Late last year, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of almost fourteen hundred teens, ages thirteen to seventeen, to come to an understanding of our teenagers’ experiences and attitudes around social media and their mental health. One of the…
Read More
Preventing Anxiety 4
With anxiety off the charts as a growing epidemic among children and teens, we’re spending all this week looking at strategies you can employ to prevent anxiety in the kids you know and love. Research is showing that one of…
Read More
Kids, Screens, and Addiction
I was recently walking through a local retail establishment and passed a mother pushing her young son in a shopping cart. The boy, who I guessed to be either two or three years old, was not sitting up in the…
Read More
Deepfake Nudes
The story I’m about to share is not unique in today’s online digital world. USA Today recently reported on what happened to fourteen-year-old Elliston Berry in October 2023, when she received a text telling her that nude images of her…
Read More
What 73 Percent of Parents Think about Kids and Screens
Parenting in today’s world can be difficult and exhausting. One of the go-to’s for parents seeking rest and reprieve is to redirect our kids away from making demands on us and our time by putting a screen in their hands…
Read More
If You Were The Devil: Strategies For Destroying Kids
I recently asked ChatGPT to play the devil. If you’re unfamiliar with ChatGPT, it’s an artificial intelligence chatbot that can understand and respond to text in a human-like way, helping with tasks like answering questions, writing, etc. It operates rather…
Read More
Put Down the Phones
With loneliness off the charts for kids in today’s world, we can reasonably conclude that more time looking at screens means less time with others. In her new book “the extinction of experience: being human in a disembodied world”, Christine…
Read More
Exposed to Porn
A recent article in the first things journal, parents can’t fight porn alone, tells the story of a 19 year old girl named Maddie and how she got wrapped up in a pornography addiction. Maddie grew up in a faith-based…
Read More
When Do I Get My Kid a Smartphone?
A couple of years I heard some very challenging words from the parents of a ten-year-old girl. They were part of a roomful of parents attending a seminar where I was speaking about kids, technology, and social media. At the…
Read More
Is Life Getting Harder?
When you were growing up, how many times did you hear your parents begin a sentence with these words: “When I was your age. . .” What usually followed was some kind of revelation comparing the relative ease of teenage…
Read More
Episode 83: “Reading Theology Books with Students” with Malachi Sweeney
Download the podcast as an .mp3 by clicking here.RSS FEED – click here.Access from Apple Podcasts. FURTHER RESOURCES Resources, links, or other helpful tools mentioned in the podcast:Kyle Hoffsmith (website)Old North Church (Kyle’s church)RYM Track SeriesA Student’s Guide to Sanctification…
Read More
Meeting New Challenges In Youth Ministry. . .
While there’s really nothing new under the sun, things have changed. . . a lot. Those of us who have been involved in youth ministry for the long haul have been the given the “long view”, which is a perspective…
Read More
