Children’s Ministry and Culture

Our friend Eric Bryant, of Mosaic in LA, will be sharing his thoughts with us again soon. Eric is the author of Peppermint Pinatas: Breaking Through Tolerance and Embracing Love. Eric will be touching some two important themes that resonate with our mission to read culture for the purpose of reaching children. First, he’ll help us figure out how we should respond to CA’s overturning of the same sex marriage ban. Secondly, he’ll explore what the relationship between the economic recession and generosity.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, a cool study finds that if a stay-at-home mom could be compensated in dollars rather than personal satisfaction and unconditional love, she’d rake in a nifty sum of nearly $117,000 a year.

That’s according to a pre-Mother’s Day study released Thursday by Salary.com, a Waltham, Mass.-based firm that studies workplace compensation.  See the complete story here http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20080508-1424-momssalary.html

In a very challenging case for school officials, a 9 year old child (and of course the very accomodating parents) is asking to start dressing like a girl. The school decided to let the other 100 Third Grade families know about the “transition” in a meeting.

About one in 5,000 people is transgender, said Walter O. Bockting, a psychologist and coordinator for transgender health services at the University of Minnesota. Bockting said he sees about 10 children a year who are 9 or younger.

“It’s a little early, but occasionally that happens,” he said.

Not all transgender people have sex-reassignment surgery in adulthood, and such surgeries are not typically performed on children, said Sharon Garcia, president of TransYouth Family Allies, a non-profit group that helped the Chatham Park student and school officials devise a way to explain the situation to parents.

So far, 49 families have contacted TransYouth Family Allies asking for help with a transgender child, Garcia said. Most of the children are between 6 and 10.

See the complete article at http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/chester/20080503_School_challenge__Transgender_student_is_age_9.html where the writer seems to avoid the tabloid topics and has done some pretty thoughtful research. For Children’s Ministries there is an opportunity to share how in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, Male nor Female, while at the same time demonstrating a love that transcends our gut response. We had the same polarizing discussions when AIDS/HIV was discovered among children (should we allow them to be in the same class, let’s have a well-child-policy) and now we are all pretty informed so we can be calm!

What do you think?

I’ve been oddly fascinated by the recent spate of 20/20 News pieces on a spying camera showing what passers-by would do when a visibly drunk person tries to drive, when kids are berating an overweight woman, or when a child is visibly lost (http://abcnews.go.com/2020/WhatWouldYouDo/story?id=4709538&page=1). These all try to assess the level of cultural readiness to intervene. They ask good questions and seek pretty routinely to reward those who DO intervene.

Now I have to say that my life experience is divided on this. In Minnesota, we are ALWAYS prone to intervene in public because there is a shared sense of values. Growing up in California there was NOT a shared sense of values and in fact a heightened sense of that independent spirit that rewards creativity and a sense of differentness. Intervene? We build fences around our homes in California. Are the neighbors are a little creepy? Well we’ll just move to a gated community and MAKE them clean up their yard.

So you can imagine how interesting it is for me to see these 20/20 segments and cheer when our culture is now applauding the Minnesota norm rather than the California trend.

In one of our counties, Ramsey, we have an amazing community service approach called the Wakanheza Project (http://www.co.ramsey.mn.us/ph/hb/wakanheza.htm). It is “a community-wide effort that provides tools and strategies to help us effectively respond in these every-day situations and prevent them from happening in the first place, by creating welcoming environments for our children, young people and families.” What are “these every-day situations”? Have you ever been in a public place like a grocery store, a library, or a mall and seen a parent struggling with their children, trying to keep them in line and well behaved? Have you watched that situation escalate? Did you wonder then, and are you still wondering, what you could have done? Have you ever BEEN that parent?

This is really remarkable! We are seeing a trend that promotes LESS privacy and isolation and is encouraging MORE involvement! I’ve been in California for the past three days and have had many conversations with ministers who have seen LESS parental connections outside their church and a rise in gang behavior, anti-social anger and other community killing behaviors. What they need is to join the rest of the nation to get MORE involved, not to circle the wagons and wail and moan in our fortress churches!

I was on the treadmill last Sunday night watching (ok, reading the closed caption) of the speech that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright gave to the NAACP Detroit chapter. He hit on a variety of subjects that are important to what we do with children in churches; learning styles, right-brain, left-brain learning, etc. But I found his sermon/term-paper full of the kind of conclusions that did nothing to “Advance” the NAACP cause. In fact it was demeaning and subtly bigoted by presuming that African American children cannot compete with European American education structures (his term)! Even his pseudo-logic statement (Chaim Perlman’s a great source for the kind of rhetoric Wright delivered) “Different is not Deficient” was a deeply flawed contrast. It created a straw man Rev. Wright trounced when it came to the kind of brain that belongs to an African American. He offered no solution and in fact created the kind of bombast that made me wonder why he was straying from his area of expertise…pastoral ministry. For a transcript of the speech, click here http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/28/wright.transcript/index.html

Well, today, Barak Obama gave a press conference where he stated, “[Rev. Wright] was never my, quote/quote, “spiritual advisor.” He was never my spiritual mentor. He was my pastor.” WOW, did you hear what he said? Someone can “pastor’ while not advising nor mentoring! Would you want to hear those words from your lay people or children? Unbelievable!

I think that when a pastor strays from the source of their authority (scripture) they run the risk of neither mentoring nor guiding but becoming a charade and make our churches deeply misguided!

That’s a remarkable uptick from the 6 - 8 million just 10 years ago. I got my start at Indian Hills Bible Camp (lowly service staff in 9th grade to Program Director as a freshman in college) then at Hume Lake Christian Camp (Program Director of the camp that made Hume famous, Wagon Train Camp, in the early 80s and it was there I met my wife of 24 years). Camping is an amazing way to engage children relationally in a setting void of distractions…Moses did it for 40 years with the Israelites, for goodness sakes!

Now it is a $20 billion annual business, with about 12,000 overnight and day camps in the United States, according to estimates from the American Camping Association. The number of day camps alone has risen by nearly 90 percent in the past 20 years, according to the ACA.

“Kids today are experiencing some unique opportunities that a generation ago didn’t exist,” said Jeff Solomon, executive director of the National Camp Association. “They may do a community service camp that works in a rain forest in Costa Rica or a Native American reservation in the Southwest.”

Great article in the San Diego Union on how parents are driving the details and the variety of offerings!

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20080405-9999-1n5camps.html

Kids everywhere have played Simon Says for generations without the slightest inkling that such games may be preparing them for success in the classroom and the work world. … Improving working memory also could aid self-control, said Philip David Zelazo, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development. So reports the Chicago Tribune (Here) which looks at research by Adele Diamond (she is one of the world’s leading researchers on the development of the cognitive functions: self-regulation, cognitive control).

I love the tests researchers used with preschoolers to test if play HELPED their self-control responses. In one test, children were given a piece of paper with a heart or flower on one side, and they were told to press on the side that does not have an image. Because a natural tendency is to point at the image, having children go against that instinct is considered a good test of their ability to inhibit their first impulse.

The children who received the special play curriculum performed significantly better on such tests than children on an ordinary preschool curriculum, the researchers found.

Parents can help children develop many such executive function skills at home, Diamond said. She suggested reading to children without showing them the pictures, a technique that can make kids use working memory to follow along with the story rather than use the pictures as a crutch.

Games such as Simon Says and Red Light, Green Light also can go a long way toward helping children learn to be guided by their choices rather than their instincts, she said.

“Those are great games that kids used to play a lot more than they do now,” Diamond said. “And they played them for a very good reason.”

…BUT, it must show an “all-inclusive approach to sex education.” What does “all-inclusive” include? The curricula should include teachings about abstinence, birth control and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. While this sample size includes only one state (Minnesota) the “n” of the research is broad enough to find significance in the broader population.

1605 parents were surveyed by the University of Minnesota Prevention Research Center (http://www.minnpost.com/client_files/pdfs/ParentSurvey08FactSheet.pdf for the pdf report) and it found that only 10 percent of the 1,605 parents of children ages 5 to 17 interviewed for this study felt students should be taught abstinence exclusively. A whopping 89% felt it should be all inclusive. In fact 81% of parents felt that sex education doesn’t lead to more sex by teenagers! I find this to be accurate. I think most thinking children’s ministers would agree that INCLUDING abstinence is a great thing for children.

Making abstinence EXCLUSIVELY the message seems forced and wrong but is hardly taught. The media would THINK this is what is taught or even forced on the masses by hyperventilating fundies. But it is not. I frankly find it as dishonest a characterization as, say, to hear the actress Kate Walsh from Grey’s Anatomy state “Abstinence is one — abstinence is one aspect of sex education, but it is not the complete aspect. And to expect, I think, everybody to remain abstinent is just — it’s like asking them not to grow. It’s like we don’t ask people to not try out for sports.”

Or George Michael’s odd appearance last night on an episode of Eli Stone (http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2008/03/28/eli_stone_recap_george_michael_comes_to_ for a recap) where he defends a girls protest against an abstinence-only school assembly by playing Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” song over the loud speaker. I was reading while it came on and was totally baffled by the role Michael played of the noble artist-as-ethicist…are you KIDDING ME?

What makes the University of Minnesota study so compelling is because it offers rendolent balance and perspective to what the media often hypes with hyperbole in the two extremes of “abstinence-only” pandered by artists and those outside of the actual hard world of REAL Parenting! But could it be that the media hypes the extreme to EXCUSE its own of what is often the chosen path MOST trod by those same spokespeople?

I love how parents see through the haze of media culture to understand that human sexuality is more than permisiveness and disdain for the chaste.

I just LOVE Ben Stein, ever since Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986, finishing my first MA as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Communication at University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA)! If you’ve not heard the buzz about this really thought provoking movie detailing the divide among darwinism and intelligent design or creationism, check out the trailer at http://www.expelledthemovie.com/playground.php

I am totally out of it as a children’s minister when I read the following:

Bill Doherty, a professor in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota is one of the founders of Birthdays Without Pressure, an informal citizen-action group that’s trying to raise awareness and reverse the trend it calls “out-of-control birthday parties.”

http://www.sunjournal.com/story/256112-3/Entertainment/Parents_giving_outofcontrol_birthday_parties_left_holding_the_bag/

At the conclusion of the lovely kids birthday party, with cake and ice cream and games, the hostess bid each guest farewell with a smile and a goody bag. A 6-year-old boy grabbed his, peered inside and said, “This is a rip-off!”

At another party, a mother decided to do the unthinkable and not even give treat bags. A group of 7-year-olds cornered her and complained: “You should have told us before we came!”

Still another mom called her child’s friends to invite them to an upcoming birthday bash. At least one of the kids refused to accept the invitation … at least until she told them what was going to be in the gift bag.

WOW!!!!!