Category: Culture

  • The role of father’s in adolescent sexual education

    Existing research preliminarily suggests fathers influence the sexual behavior of their adolescent children; however, more rigorous research examining diverse facets of paternal influence on adolescent sexual behavior is needed. We provide recommendations for primary care providers and public health practitioners to better incorporate fathers into interventions designed to reduce adolescent sexual risk behavior.

    Link

    “Our research suggests that fathers matter when it comes to their adolescent children’s sexual behavior,” Guilamo-Ramos said. “Moving forward, more attention to the role of fathers in shaping adolescent health and wellbeing is needed. Fathers represent a critical missed opportunity to support the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents and represent an additional mechanism to influence teenage sexual behavior.”

    Link

    I’m intrigued about where this research can end up.

    What do you think? Obviously, dads have impact on their adolescent children. But what are ways that you’ve seen dad’s attitudes towards adolescent sex positively or negatively impact his children? 

  • How to trade halloween candy

    OK, so this didn’t quite work for this weeks YouTube You Can Use, but its dang funny.

    Question: How many days go by before you start stealing your kids candy while they sleep? 

  • The desert & cultural exegesis

    Later this afternoon I’ll join 70 high school students and 20 other adults for the Encounter Men’s Retreat.

    This is my second year doing the retreat so this year I have a better idea of what to expect.

    • Intense, respectful content that asks young men to lean into practical realities of walking with Jesus.
    • A large scale, rustic communal experience. No running water, no bathrooms, no cell service, no tents.
    • Moving and setting up a completely self-contained 3 day retreat– built with lots of muscle power and big boy toys.
    • Massive, burning man-style bonfires. (Last year U.S. Border Patrol stopped by– big.)
    • Guns, lots of them. (Used in a very safe, secure, proper way)
    • Explosions, lots of them. Fireworks, explosives, and pretty much anything else that will blow up.
    • Seemingly unlimited paintball, bouldering, and combinations of bouldering & paintball.
    • Lots and lots of meat, potatoes, etc. No crepes or powdered sugar or quiche. 
    • An extremely memorable weekend for all the guys who go.

    No doubt there are parts of that list which absolutely resonate with you and other parts that make your skin crawl. Trust me, I’m totally with you.

    If you know me very well at all you know my convictions on gun control. I’m not just a little anti-gun, I actually think it’s morally wrong for Christians to have guns for self-protection. So the idea of taking a bunch of guys to the desert and shooting off a bunch of ammo is really, really hard for me to swallow.

    Cultural Exegesis

    So, why do I go? If I’m not a big fan of putting a 12 gauge in the hands of 14 year old… why not just bow out? Why support and give 3 days of your life to something that might feel wonky? 

    Because the men’s desert trip works. It’s an example of looking at the culture you are called to reach, reading it properly, and connecting the dots between something that happens in culture and impacting people’s lives.

    And while it I’m not comfortable with parts of it I’m fully aware of these three facts.

    1. East County San Diego dudes go to the desert, blow stuff up, shoot guns, and eat meat. It’s something east county people do for fun. 
    2. God does significant things in people’s lives in the desert. Do a word study on that… there’s a correlation in the Bible between time in the desert and movements of God. 
    3. Reaching young men for Christ is sacred. My opinion, comfort level, and personal preferences are not sacred. 
    What are things that you’re doing at the intersection of your culture & ministering to adolescents? 

  • Turn up the love

    Like you, I’m shocked at the popularity of Haterade.

    a figurative drink representing a modality of thought. those who consume it are themselves consumed by the negativity which with they speak.

    ~ Urban Dictionary Word of the Day, July 26th 2005

    It feels like Haterade is on sale all over Facebook and Twitter these days. People are endlessly extreme and full of hate. It’s as if the middle ground approach, one which gives and takes for the sake of mutuality, has been replaced by an either or mentality… either you are for me or against me. I love people who are for me and damned be the name of anyone who is opposed.

    It’s shocking. 

    I Blame the Internet

    Before Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and Huffington Post… you had to talk to people face-to-face at some point. Additionally, it was harder to find community for extremism. You talked things out a bit more with real people and there was social pressure to move from the extremities of a position more to the middle, something socially digestible, and socially acceptable. Because if you held onto your extreme position your world got really, really small.

    If you didn’t then you were that crazy person on the block with the signs in your yard and 15 dogs.

    The internet reverses this. In order to find community you need to refine your positions. You end up forming community with people just like you, who think just like you, and see things just like you… and that is the fountain from which Haterade flows. In time, you get more popular within an online community when you can clearly articulate and defend the group’s position to others outside of your group. Instead of social sparring knocking the edges off of extreme positions it goes the other way towards reaction.

    As people move more and more of their relationships online we can expect more and more extremism and less and less love, tolerance, and middle ground.

    When an extreme crime occurs in a community, say a school shooting, the news always reports the same things about the shooter. “They kept to themselves” or “They were really quiet neighbors” or “They seemed like loners.”  It leaves me shouting at the TV… “Why are you talking to the neighbors? You should be talking to his friends online. That’s who knows the shooter!”

    Very few people truly know their neighbors enough to be a character witness for them. Maybe we know about them? But do we truly know them?

    That’s rhetorical. We don’t know our neighbors all that well.

    Back to the Coffee Shops

    My dad is a coffee shop guy. For as long as I can remember he’s gotten up at the butt crack of dawn and gone to a local coffee shop to socialize. And by coffee shop I’m not talking about Starbucks or 7-11. I’m talking about the local greasy spoon. A place with a griddle, a wrap-around counter, and an owner who doubles as cook, cashier, server, and moderator. Decades before Facebook and Twitter, coffee shops were the places where folks checked in with one another, gave status updates, and talked about the news of the day.

    We Need Love for Our Neighbors

    That’s something missing in our society. For millennia, neighbors gathered locally for daily chores like this. Women met at the watering hole. Men talked on their way to the hunting grounds or fields. Every society has a type of coffee shop. Romans met at the baths. Greeks met at the agora. On and on.

    And now? We meet no where just to talk. Most people know little about their communities.

    Even at our churches… there’s almost no talking. There are 1% of people who speak and 99% of people who listen. (This, too has changed dramatically in recent decades, leading to extremism. But that’s another topic for another day.) You are seen as a good congregant if you listen well, take notes, smile at the pastor and say nice things. But offer a rebuttal or ask a question? That’s disrespecting authority. Church is anti-coffee-shop… and it wasn’t always like that.

    Left alone, we’ve all become the crazy dog man on our blocks who posts random, hate filled signs. We are encouraged to hold extreme positions created in isolation from one another. And our society is worse off for it. 

    Do you want to be Good News on your block? Open a “coffee shop.”

  • Teenagers are incapable… until they aren’t

    Gabrielle Douglas is 16 years old. This week she won 2 gold medals at the London Olympic games. She will be a junior in high school this year.

    Missy Franklin is 17 years old. She also won 2 gold medals in London and owns 2 world records. She’s entering her senior year in high school.

    If you want to see a few more stories about teenagers in the Olympics, The New York Times has a page dedicated to the endeavor.

    The Capability vs. Expectations Gap

    As a lover of teenagers universal and an often observer of their amazing capabilities— I enjoy the irony that America will celebrate Gabby and Missy’s victories as if they were their own daughters…

    • We acknowledge their physical prowess.
    • We acknowledge their dedication.
    • We admire the grace at which they handle their athletic events and the pressure of the world stage.
    • We admire the maturity in their handling sudden fame.

    We each easily attribute downright adult descriptions on teenage Olympiads. 

    This is ironic because from a societal perspective we don’t expect teenagers to be capable of such adult-like qualities. I mean… they can’t possibly be adults at 15-16-17, can they?

    3 examples of this irony…

    Raise expectations, friends. Most teenagers can do just about everything you can do… maybe better than you can. Let’s not just celebrate teenagers who hoist gold medals, let’s celebrate the capabilities of the teenagers in our lives.

    And let’s kill agism, OK? Let’s judge people by what they can do instead.

    Discover what their coaches know: When you expect someone’s very best, you’ll get it. When you expect nothing, you’ll get it.  

  • The generation that won’t grow up

    The generation that brought you Friends, who embody extended adolescence in every way, are now seeking to eliminate the label of of middle age.

    Patricia Cohen, New York Times reporter and author of another new study of ageing, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age, might not be overly sympathetic to Berkmann’s plight. The mid-life crisis, she suggests, is a marketing trick designed to sell cosmetics, cars and expensive foreign holidays; people in their 20s and 30s are far more vulnerable to such a crisis than their parents. Cohen finds little evidence for so-called “empty nest syndrome”, or for the widespread stereotype of the rich man with the young “trophy wife”.

    The New Ages of Man, Tim Walker of The Independent, March 6th 2012

    These are my people. I get it. We are fast-approaching our 40s or now ungracefully fighting our 40s by voluntarily putting ourselves through bootcamp-worthy physical pain with names like Insanity and Crossfit. We are middle-age but desire to see ourselves as young, hip, and virile.

    Last year, I reconnected with a high school friend via Facebook. As we caught up on life she was shocked that I married at 21 years old and had kids at 25. She said, “I’m 35 and I have a hard time keeping a gold fish alive, I’m not ready for marriage or children yet.” As we got to know one another I couldn’t help  thinking… What went wrong here? Why did some of us take on adult responsibilities in our late teens and early 20s and others didn’t? Was I more mature than my peers? (Um, maybe in some ways?!?)

    It’s normal that each generation would morph and change things a bit. But I find it interesting that my peers reshaped adolescence, extending it through our 20s and into our 30s to the point that we now call it emerging adulthood and these same people are now denying the existence of middle age, as if this stage of life were not the middle of our lives. Those ahead of us, our Baby Boomer parents, have lead the way. With their tummy tucks, cougars, and second careers, they could be named Generation Denial.

    Here’s what I know. If my generational peers don’t step up to the plate and embrace who they are… our kids will rename us into what we really are, Generation Regret. 

  • Yes, your wife is hot

    I’ve got a bone to pick with men who describe their wife as “hot” all the time. To me, it’s in the same category as the “I heart boobies” bracelets. It makes me cringe every time I see it or hear it.

    A few reasons why I don’t like it:

    • It’s demeaning to your wife. If the first thing you can think about to say about your wife is that she’s hot than that says a lot about what you think of her and women in general.
    • It’s immature. No one is going to hear you say that or see it on your Twitter bio or Facebook profile and think, “Now that is a man worthy of respect. Look at how he talks about his wife!“
    • It shows off your insecurity. I think it’s in the vein of thought of, “My wife is way out of my league.” While it seems like a compliment it is displaying your insecurity. It’s comes from a place of, “If I can’t say nice things about her publicly, maybe she’ll leave me?“
    • It’s not getting the joke. For a lot of people it comes from Talledega Nights. I get it. That’s a funny movie. But that’s not how you talk to or treat a woman.
    • You are sleeping with her. It’s implied that you think she is hot.
    • There’s nothing appropriate I can say about your wife in return. I mean, what am I supposed to say back? “Yeah, I heard she makes a mighty fine meat loaf, too.“

    My new response when I hear this or see it:

    “Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing.”

    Still funny?

  • Just Friends, No Benefits

    Kind of reminds me of the movie When Harry Met Sally.

    It seems some things in college life never change, right?

  • A brief history of sexting and the power of media manipulation

    Here’s a brief history of sexting.

    • Some students got in trouble for sending sexually explicit pictures of another student around a school.
    • Local news reported on it, after all it contained “teenagers” and “sex” in the same story. Brittany Spears must have been on vacation.
    • In another town a similar case was reported.
    • To make it more interesting, a regional or national news editor aggregated the two stories and gave it a sensational title: sexting.
    • A single national news organization ran a story with the title “sexting.”
    • Other news organizations and certainly those not in the media but whom enjoy making comment on news items (aka– bloggers) picked up the story and repeated it.
    • Remember, this was 1-2 isolated cases aggregated together as an emerging trend.
    • Someone does 45 minutes of research into teen texting behavior from an unrelated marketing survey and determines that 20% of teenagers have sent a sexually explicit text message.
    • Forget that fact that the study was likely unscientific and didn’t study sending/receiving photos or videos… the thing that gets codified is that 20% of teenagers send sexually explicit texts.
    • Any new case similar to this, among the millions of teenagers in America sending trillions of text messages monthly, was now labeled as “sexting.”
    • Sexting began appearing in the vernacular of the public… and an assumption formed that “sexting is something a lot of teenagers do.“
    • Sexting, now a thing, begins to be written about as if it is a real trend affecting millions of teenagers.
    • A news agency, not to be outdone, labels sexting an epidemic.
    • Legislators, keen to make it on the news, murmur about the teenage sexting problem.
    • School boards and soccer moms start to talk about the horrors of sexting.
    • “Sexting cases” start to get aggregated with ANYTHING teenagers do. Any music trend. Prom. Sports. Everything now has a sexting potential.
    • Some students actually start sending explicit photos of one another around… because they hear about how prevalent it is among teenagers on the news. 
    • Sexting begins to appear in the litany of prevention literature. Teenagers and their “malformed pre-frontal lobes” can’t help themselves. Left alone for more than 14 seconds, they will drop their pants and send pictures of their privates to everyone they know. At least that’s what you’d learn from these “concerned organizations.”
    • Soccer moms, parenting from a cocktail of fear and living vicariously through their children, buy the whole thing. They start looking through their children’s texts while they sleep.
    • Sexting becomes something every adult assumes is happening rampantly among teenagers.
    • Someone actually does a study and proves that the whole thing is a fabrication. About 1% of teenagers have ever sent or received a sexually explicit text message.
    • And of course the news machine makes money talking about why sexting isn’t happening at the rate everyone thought it was.

    “Even if you look at 1% or 2% of kids in a high school of a thousand kids, that’s 10 to 20 kids, and that’s plenty of people for whom this is a big issue and for whom this is a troublesome problem in their lives,” says Lenhart, who has researched teen sexting but was not involved in the new study.
    Source

    1% of teenagers isn’t something we need to have a prevention focus on. Stop this perverted fascination on adolescent sexuality! As long as humans could write, people have drawn and written sexually explicit messages.

    As advocates for adolescents, we need to call this stuff out. Our cultures bias against adolescents, including the false creation and labeling of phenomenon, is a form of discrimination that we need to root out.

    Want another example? Look at this Fox News piece.

    It has every stereotype of teenagers in one story. Teenage sex is bad. (Er, look at history. We wouldn’t exist as a society without teen sex.) Malformed teen brains. Negative brain development ties with experiencing sex in the teenage years. (The study is of HAMSTERS!) Fear, fear, and more fear.

  • Snapshots from campus life

    Two moments at SDSU from last weekend… both are jaw-dropping crazy and deeply sad at the same time.

    1. After the basketball game Friday night Megan (10) and I were walking through campus on our way home with a ton of underclassman. Two girls who seemed like new friends were chatting about why they chose SDSU versus other schools. One girl asked the other, “Oh, what other schools?” Westmont, Azuza Pacific, Biola… she listed a bunch of Christian schools. Her friend goes, “Oh, my parents wanted me to go to a Christian school too.” And she listed off a few on the east coast. The first girl kind of quietly says, “Yeah, well I didn’t want to go to a Christian school because I wanted to F a lot of guys.” Her friend said, “Yup, that’s pretty much it for me too.”

    Scary. I nearly stumbled over my jaw when they said that.

    2. Same walk Saturday night. After the game Paul and I are walking. Uneventful past the freshmen dorms and off campus into the frat/sorority area. 10 o’clock is pretty quiet. All the dudes are usually out at Rite Aid trying to score a 30 pack of Keystone. (Or pre-gaming while watching Sportcenter) So it’s dead quiet on frat row. But up ahead I see 4 girls coming towards us. Then one of them sees us and they all try to hide behind a car. Um, too late… we’re like RIGHT THERE. So they pop up and kind of half jog past us, trying not to make eye contact…

    All four of them in thongs, bras, high heals. (It was like 50 degrees out!) Nothing else. They were totally embarrassed. They didn’t know where to put their hands as they tried to cover themselves.

    We get in the car and I start laughing. Paul (8) looks at me and goes… “That was awkward.”

    Two thoughts…

    1. I might pull all the money out of the kids college fund right now and just give it to them. Forget college. They are not going.

    2. What the heck happened in our culture when women willingly show up to a party in their underwear? I mean nothing says “please take turns having sex with me when I get drunk” quite like showing up in your underwear, right?