Youth Workin' It

Consultancy and Resources for Youth Workers and Organizations Worldwide

Should You Let Your Young People Smoke?

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Youth and smoking
Should you let youth in your programs smoke?

“Sometimes doing the right thing, ain’t doing the right thing”

Nothing like some hard truths from the 2003 Colin Farrell movie, SWAT.

Sometimes youth workers have to make hard choices and what seems like ‘the right thing’ isn’t always ‘the right thing’.

Youth and smoking. This is one of those topics that can lead some youth workers to have moral dilemmas. On the one hand, you don’t want to encourage youth to break the law and you want them to be healthy.

On the other hand, sometimes smoking isn’t the root issue. By not allowing them to smoke, you might be keeping them from your youth work program and thereby not helping them with any of the issues, of which smoking might be the least damaging.

When I worked in the UK, we allowed our Year 10 youth to have set smoke breaks during our six-hour long program. Technically, they were too young to legally smoke. However, they were already doing it – at school, at home and out with their friends. They were allowed one break in the morning and one in the afternoon.

It was the opinion of our organization, and me as the program coordinator, to accept youth where they were at. This was so that we might later have the opportunity to speak into their negative behaviors like swearing, smoking, anger issues, etc.

Often, being in our group sessions and exploring personal relationships and social/emotional skills caused stress that youth often needed a break to escape from. Their coping mechanism was smoking when they were stressed. By allowing them a smoke break, we provided a structured and supervised time for their behaviors and were able to talk with them about that lifestyle choice in a more relaxed atmosphere. I often had some of my best, most personal and vulnerable times with youth while on their smoke breaks, as they reflected on their feelings from group.

It’s not the choice I would make for every group and I would certainly monitor youth that didn’t smoke before the group started. We also provided information to parents to let them know that we did allow smoking during our sessions and that they were welcome to ‘opt-out’ of that for their youth if they desired.

I often found that ‘doing the right thing’ of banning smoking, wasn’t ‘doing the right thing’ for my youth.

Question: How about you? Do you allow smoking at your youth program or club? Do you have other moral dilemmas that come up in your work? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

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Grocery Store Scavenger Hunt – Life Skills For Teenagers

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Grocery store scavenger huntLast week’s session idea gave ideas on how to teach food shopping life skills to teenagers. This week continues the theme with a grocery store scavenger hunt.

The aim of this session is to help young people learn more about the cost of food. This is done by having them find various premium brands during the grocery store scavenger hunt and noting down their price, then finding similar products by other brands/store brands that cost less.

Resources

  • Scavenger hunt list (see below)
  • Pens
  • Clipboards (not essential, but useful)
  • Calculators (they should have this function on their phones)

Preparation

Put together the scavenger hunt list. This should be split into two columns – the left column should list some premium brands and have space for youth to write down the cost of the item, while the right column should be left empty so they can write down the alternative brands and their prices.

How To Organize

Take your youth to a grocery store – the larger the better, as this will mean they have a greater variety of products to choose from. Depending on how many young people you have, either split them into teams or have them go around the store individually.

As they’ll be out and about representing your youth group/project, remind them of any group agreement or behavior policy that you have. Set a location and time to meet up once they’ve completed the scavenger hunt.

Provide each team/person with a copy of the grocery store scavenger hunt list, along with a pen (and clipboard if applicable). Explain that they need to find all the premium branded items on the list and write down their cost; advise that this should be written down in the left column.

Once they’ve done this for an item, explain that they need to find a similar product of a similar size/weight, but which is cheaper. They should then note down the name of the brand (or if it’s a store brand) and the cost.

Evaluation

Once they’ve completed the scavenger hunt, get the young people to total up both columns. Next, have them calculate the difference between the two columns and get the teams/individuals to compare each others’ different totals.

Finally, facilitate a discussion about food shopping on a budget and get their observations on what they learned during this activity regarding the cost of food. Do they think that the premium brands are worth paying that much more money for?

Grocery Store Scavenger Hunt List

The list can be as long or short as you like; this will also vary depending on how much time you’re allocating to the scavenger hunt itself.

We know our readers are based all over the world, so it’s hard to provide a list of items as brands will vary by country. Here are some suggestions of items to list though given that they’re global brands (as far as I’m aware anyway!)

  • Heinz Tomato Ketchup
  • Newman’s Own pasta sauce
  • 12 pack of Coca-Cola cans
  • Salt & Vinegar Pringles
  • Nutella
  • Nutri-Grain bars
  • Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes
  • Dannon Activia yogurt
  • Tropicana orange juice
  • Nacho Cheese Doritos
  • Green Giant frozen sweet corn
  • Ben & Jerry’s chocolate fudge brownie ice-cream

Tip

Contact the grocery store in advance to advise them of what you have planned. They’ll no doubt appreciate being given a heads-up as to why there’ll be a number of teenagers wandering around their store with no basket or shopping cart!

They may even be willing to have someone at their store offer advice about food shopping, coupons, meal planning, etc.

If you’ve found this idea helpful, check out our other scavenger hunt ideas on this site, plus our food label scavenger hunt idea on our sister site.

We’ve also published 52 Scavenger Hunt Ideas – a book with all the scavenger hunt activities that you’ll ever need. Pick up your copy now from Amazon or direct from us.

Question: What other items would you include on the grocery store scavenger hunt list? Share your ideas in the comments below.

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3 Youth Unemployment Solutions (And Why It Matters)

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Youth unemployment solutions
Use these ideas to help your young people get a job

We’re starting a new series on Wednesdays that compiles some of our previous posts. We’ve published hundreds of posts over the last year, so you may have missed some of these (shocking, I know!)

This first compilation covers some youth unemployment solutions by providing tips on how to help young people gain a job:

1. Youth Unemployment – Does It Matter? – This post from the early days of Youth Workin’ It’s blog looks at whether we should be concerned about the youth unemployment rate more than the unemployment rate that encompasses people of all ages (spoiler alert – we should)

2. Job Interview Attire For Youth – Before they go for a job interview, young people need to know what to wear. The first of our youth unemployment solutions has a number of activities to organize to help your youth identify appropriate interview clothing, including how to find cheap job interview attire.

3. How To Conduct A Mock Interview – Now that your young people know what to wear, it’s time to practice their interview skills. This youth work session idea on how to conduct a mock interview has suggestions on how to give your youth this essential practice, along with ideas of who to partner with in order to perform these mock interviews.

Mock interviews can be extremely useful in helping unemployed young people gain the confidence they need, while also providing them with vital feedback on what they need to change to become more employable.

4. The Retweetable Job Interview Resource – After conducting the mock job interviews, your young people may have received feedback that they weren’t concise enough in the interviews. If that’s the case, the third of our solutions for youth unemployment could be just the thing to help them.

The purpose of the Retweetable Job Interview Resource is to help young people practice being concise when being interviewed. This enables them to convey the main points of what they want to say without waffling on, or going off on a tangent and not answering the question they’ve been asked.

Question: What other youth unemployment solutions have you used to help young people get a job? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments below.

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How To Use Toilet Paper As An Icebreaker

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Toilet paper icebreaker
Use this toilet paper icebreaker to get your youth group on a roll

Q: Due to the start of the school year, a lot of new young people have moved up into the youth group I lead. Do you have any good icebreakers I can use to help them get to know each other better?

A: The start of a new school year can be tough for youth groups as it can often mean that they go from the adjourning stage of group development to the forming stage.

Effective icebreakers can therefore be a great way to help the group form. One fun option is to use the toilet paper icebreaker – here’s how it works:

Resources

1 roll of toilet paper. If you have a very large group of young people, it may be worth splitting into smaller groups and giving each small group a roll each.

How to play the Toilet Paper Icebreaker

Have the group sit in a circle. One-by-one, pass around the roll of toilet paper and have each person take as much paper as they would normally use when using the restroom – this includes leaders!

When everyone has taken their share of toilet paper, advise them that for every square of paper they took, they have to tell the group something about themselves. i.e. If they took 8 pieces of paper, they would have to tell the group 8 things about themselves.

They can share anything they like, such as:

  • Favorite sport
  • Favorite band
  • How many brothers & sisters they have
  • Where they live
  • Other interests
  • Favorite food
  • Funniest thing that’s happened to them
  • Anyone famous they’ve met
  • What they want for Christmas
  • What pets they have
  • A country they’d love to travel to

They don’t have to go super-deep where they’re revealing their deepest and dark secrets, like the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to them; just whatever they’re comfortable with. Remember – at the forming stage, they still need to build up trust with each other.

Finding common ground

The Toilet Paper Icebreaker is also a great way to help emphasize similarities and common interests between the young people. After each person has shared about themselves, pick out one or two facts about them and see if anyone else in the group has similar interests or experiences. For example:

  • Bobby’s favorite sport is football – is that anyone else’s favorite sport?
  • Jenny loves Chinese food – who else loves to eat Chinese?
  • Andy has a dog – does anyone else own a dog?

Try to pick out the things that it’s likely other people will have similar interests in, rather than some of the more vague facts you’re likely to hear. This will help show the young people that despite differences between them, there are still common areas that they can agree on, helping set the group off on the right foot.

Check out our previous post on team building activities for further ideas on helping your youth group to gel, along with our other toilet paper games.

Question: What other interests/topics would you suggest young people share about when playing the Toilet Paper Icebreaker? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments below.

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How To Play The Yes Or No Game

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Yes or no game
No, you can’t say yes

The Yes Or No game is a quickfire, rapid thinking, rapid speaking game that’s perfect for playing in front of a large group of youth, as an icebreaker, or even with a smaller group so that each young person can participate.

Here’s how to play the Yes Or No game:

Resources

This can be played with no resources at all, so is also perfect for using as a spur of the moment game when you need something to do with young people, but have no resources.

Having said that, you can enhance the game a little more by using the following resources:

  • Gong – The gong can be hit when someone says “Yes” or “No” (see the video below). Other alternatives instead of a gong can be airhorns, cymbals or hitting a cooking pot with a spoon.
  • Timer – You don’t have to time how long they last, but it adds an extra competitive element and could be used to decide who wins a prize if you wanted to award one.
  • Questions – If you’re concerned about being able to think of questions quickly enough, you could make a list of them in advance in case your mind goes blank during the game.

Rules

The Yes Or No game rules are nice and simple. You ask a young person a long series of questions that would normally require that they answer “Yes” or “No”; however, the young person isn’t allowed to say either of these words. They’re also not allowed to nod or shake their head.

For example, you might ask the young person “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Their natural inclination would be to answer “No” or “Yes”, but instead they’d need to say something like “I have two – one brother and one sister”.

Your next question could then be “Did you say you had three siblings?” This will hopefully trick them into saying something like “No, I have two”, in which case they’re out. Ask the questions in quick succession so that they have less time to think about their answer.

You could keep playing for as long as it takes for the youth to say “Yes” or “No”, or instead set a time limit of 1 or 2 minutes – if they manage to go that long without saying either of these words, they win (or the next person gets a chance to play).

Winner

The person who lasts the longest without saying either of the two words.

Yes Or No Game Questions

Don’t just ask closed-ended questions – throw in some open-ended questions to try to catch them off guard. For instance, you could try the following series of Yes Or No game questions (those in bold are yes/no questions):

  • Do you have any brothers or sisters?
  • Did you say three?
  • What are their names?
  • So how do you spell your brother’s name?
  • Was that ……… (repeat how the brother’s name was spelled)
  • Are you older than him?
  • How old is he?
  • Do you get on well?
  • What’s his favorite sport?
  • Do you ever play that with him?
  • Are you better than him at the sport?
  • When’s his birthday?
  • What present did you get him for his birthday?
  • Did he like it?

How To Use The Game

As we mentioned at the beginning of the post, this game can be played in all sorts of settings. It’s also perfect to use prior to a youth ministry talk or at the beginning of a youth work session on some of the following topics:

  • Peer pressure – how it can be hard to say no to friends (or even hard to say yes to something positive if your friends are against it)
  • Social skills – when working on conversation skills to encourage them to move beyond just one word answers
  • Interview preparation – similar to the social skills point above, you could play this game before they conduct mock interviews to get them into the mindset of being more talkative and answering questions more thoroughly
  • Staying focused – if they’re not focused when playing the game, it’s easy to say “Yes” or “No” by accident
  • Temptation – the person asking questions is trying to tempt you into saying “No” or “Yes”, so it’s important to be vigilant against the temptation, just like it is in real life when you’re tempted to do things you know you shouldn’t do

To help give an even better idea of how this game works, check out the video below. Please excuse the cheesiness of Des O’Connor (or just skip to 1:39 to avoid the 90s theme tune/intro and his cringeworthy jokes).

 

If you liked this idea, check out our other youth group games for further game ideas.

Question: What tips do you have for the Yes Or No Game? Can you think of any great questions to ask when playing this? Let us know in the comments below.

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