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A Parent’s Guide To Understanding Teenage Brains – Book Review

March 8, 2013 By Stephen Pepper Leave a Comment

A Parent's Guide To Understanding Teenage Brains - Mark OestreicherMark Oestreicher – A Parent’s Guide To Understanding Teenage Brains

4.5 / 5

This book about teenage brains is part of a series of parent guides to help them understand different aspects about their teenage children. We’ve previously reviewed the books about teenage guys and social media.

All the other books in the series are co-authored, but this one has been solely written by Marko. It’s a great book and so I can highly recommend it for you and the parents of your youth to read.

What I Liked

Seeing as I’ve given it a 4.5 rating, I obviously liked a lot of it. Here are three things in particular that I liked about it though:

1. Parenting Goal

Early on in the book, Marko explains that the goal he and his wife had when raising their teenage children wasn’t for them to be happy, successful or unique, although those were obviously things they did desire for their children.

Rather, their goal was to raise an adult. When you look at your role as a parent from this perspective, it will change the way you treat your teen children in terms of the responsibility you give them.

2. Importance Of Responsibility

Following on from the previous point, Marko goes on to explore the importance of giving your child more responsibility. He explains that throughout their teenage years, their brain is developing. Many people see this as more of a reason to control young people as their brains aren’t developed enough for being responsible.

Marko makes an important point to counter this view though:

“…a teenager who is never given meaningful responsibility (meaningful is a key word there) can’t be expected to be responsible.”

Practice makes perfect, so if you don’t let your teenager practice responsibility, they’ll never be perfect 😉 Yes, they may fail, but let them “exercise” their brains so that this ability grows stronger.

3. Brain Neurons

Towards the end of the book, Marko mentions that a couple of years before puberty hits, the brain adds millions of additional neurons. A few years later though, the neurons which haven’t been used are lost.

This makes opportunities to be responsible in the early to mid-teen years so much more important, as this can be vital in forming neural pathways in the brain of young people. In the book, he advises that a researcher in to teenage brains believes that the brain is therefore hard-wired in the teenage years for how it’ll function when they’re an adult.

That being the case, what can you do in your youth work that gives teens more responsibility? Check out our post on youth participation that details 7 ways you can do this.

What I Didn’t Like

As mentioned above, this is the third of the Parent’s Guide books that I’ve read. All of them are quite short books and so the amount of information and advice they can fit in them is limited.

All three books have felt like there’s more that could be said on their respective subjects, but this book in particular feels like the ideas and advice could be fleshed out even more. Part of this is because Marko’s written several times on his blog about teenage brains, so it’s clear there’s even more that he could say on the subject; hopefully he’ll write a more in-depth book in the future.

Conclusion

All in all though, despite being shorter than I’d like, it’s a great book for learning more about teenage brains and how this can impact both parenting and youth work.

It gives practical advice on how to approach the way you deal with teenagers and is a positive look at their brain development, rather than the common negative media narrative of teenage brains being less developed and thus less capable.

Buy A Parent’s Guide To Understanding Teenage Brains

Amazon – Paperback

Amazon – Kindle

Youth Cartel – Paperback

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A Parent’s Guide To Understanding Social Media – Book Review

February 15, 2013 By Stephen Pepper 2 Comments

A Parent's Guide To Understanding Social Media book reviewMark Oestreicher & Adam McLane – A Parent’s Guide To Understanding Social Media

4.5 / 5

This book is part of a series of ‘Parent’s Guide’ books published by Simply Youth Ministry (see our review of A Parent’s Guide To Understanding Teenage Guys). It’s written by Marko and Adam who are the founders of The Youth Cartel and have been involved in youth ministry for decades.

Initial Reaction

Before reading it, I’d questioned the wisdom of this book being published in the first place. The social media scene is changing all the time, so I figured any book published on the subject now could easily be irrelevant within a year or two.

The good thing is, Adam and Marko were clearly aware of this – they even make reference to this very problem in the book. This book therefore isn’t a guide to specific types of social media like Facebook and Twitter, although they do cover these two sites more than others, giving various stats about them and how young people are currently using them.

How To Parent

Instead, this book gives overarching ideas and principles for parents to guide them in how they can approach the subject of their child’s social media usage. There’s no scaremongering involved – the authors don’t sensationalize anything or make it seem like every teenager is posting naked pictures of themselves online.

They’re also very realistic about the fact that even if parents ban social media accounts, young people can easily find a way around them. It’s therefore much better for parents to help guide their children in how they should conduct themselves online (and off), particularly due to consequences that they may not have considered.

In fact, they even suggest that it can be counter-productive to install things like internet blocking software, going so far as to describe it as lazy parenting! Instead, parents should be proactively involved in how their children are using the internet.

Even though it offers suggestions for people on how they should parent, it’s not done at all condescendingly. Besides, if a parent’s reading this guide, there’s a good chance that they’re wanting guidance on how to parent when it comes to social media.

Practical Tips

Despite being a fairly short book (all the books in this ‘Parent’s Guide’ series are of a similar length), it has numerous useful tips that parents can put in place in their household.

This includes suggestions like:

  • Having computers in public areas in the house
  • Having access to your child’s accounts
  • Having all family members (i.e. parents too!) keep mobile devices in one central location overnight to charge

In my opinion, these are the types of extremely useful ideas that parents may not have thought of, so make the book worth getting for that reason alone.

Privacy

This guide also covers the all-important topic of online privacy and how young people’s actions now could come back to haunt them again in the future.

As mentioned earlier, this isn’t done in a scaremongering way, but is an important issue to address with youth as once something’s online, deleting it doesn’t mean that it’s gone.

Good For Both Christians & Non-Christians

Marko and Adam are both involved with youth ministry, so some small sections look at social media from a Christian perspective. However, it’s not at all preachy so I’d feel comfortable giving this book to parents who aren’t Christians.

All the underlying principles and ideas are valid whether or not you’re coming from a Christian perspective – we’ve therefore bought a copy for some friends of ours who have a teenage daughter.

Downsides?

Similar to the Teenage Guys book, the flow of the book isn’t always completely smooth due to the need of advising which of the authors is writing at a given point in time.

For example, you have sentences that read:

  • When I (Adam) fell…
  • When I (Marko) post…
  • Over the years I (Adam) have…

Like I mentioned in the other review, I’d personally have preferred it to be laid out slightly differently:

  • AM: When I fell…
  • MO: When I post…
  • AM: Over the years I have…

Again, this is my personal preference and doesn’t negate the great ideas and information that’s throughout the book.

I can therefore highly recommend this book for all parents of young people who are old enough to be using social media.

It’s also an excellent resource for youth workers. Even if you’re well versed in social media, the book will give you many ideas that you can pass on to parents. Better yet, get them a copy of this too!

Buy A Parent’s Guide To Understanding Social Media

Amazon – Paperback

Amazon – Kindle

Youth Cartel – Paperback

 

The 10 Best Things About Open Boston

February 8, 2013 By Shae Pepper Leave a Comment

Open Boston
Making the most of being up in Boston

Open Boston – Mission accomplished! What’s next? Hopefully an Open event near you!

Open Boston was the completion of the Alpha Testing phase of Open youth ministry training events by The Youth Cartel. I had the great fortune to speak there and be blessed by hearing others speak about topics that my day to day life, work and ministry doesn’t often intersect with.

Top 10

Here are my Top 10 likes from Open Boston (in no particular order):

  1. Getting to know new youth workers from across the country
  2. Hearing Morgan Schmidt from Youth Collective Seattle
  3. Seeing snow (excellent location choice!)
  4. Hearing Tammy Burns speak about Austism in youth ministry
  5. The great price – $25 per ticket
  6. Getting to know Adam McLane better and his son
  7. Finding out about the great work of Hume NE, Fold Ministries and Arise Youth Ministries
  8. Seeing the World Vision 30 Hour Famine folks again (shout out to Nikki!)
  9. Being able to share my heart for helping youth think globally
  10. Working and relaxing alongside the other half of Youth Workin’ It who works harder than anyone knows, especially when it comes to keeping me sane!

The Future

Here is my main thought moving forward:

How can we get an event like this everywhere?! Especially closer to where I currently live. It was a great day for making connections within the local area and across the nation. It was really low pressure and gave good nuggets, especially for the cost (did I say it only costs $25 to attend!?).

I highly recommend attending an Open event that ends up anywhere near you if you’re looking for some low cost, high content training for you and your team of staff or volunteers.

Here is what a few others have said about Open Boston:

Adam McLane – The Youth Cartel

Timbo – Student Ministry Central

Leneita Fix – YouthWorkTalk.com

Question: Where would you like to see the Open events go next? Let us know in the comments below.

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A Couple Of Things To Check Out……

January 18, 2013 By Stephen Pepper Leave a Comment

There are a couple of things we think you should check out today:

1. Stuff Christians Like

We have another guest post on Stuff Christians Like today – Jon Acuff’s blog. It’s called “Stuff Christians Like – The Movie” and is a funny look at what his blog would look like if it was made into movie form.

If you’re a regular reader of his blog, I’m hoping you’ll appreciate a lot of the references, so go check it out here.

2. Open Boston

In just two short weeks (February 2, 2o13 to be exact), there’s going to be a youth ministry event run by the Youth Cartel called Open Boston. It’s bringing together a bunch of different youth workers who will be exploring three overall themes:

  • The Future Life of Ministry – Innovation and Looking Ahead
  • The Life In Ministry – Practical Youth Ministry Training
  • The Life of the Youth Worker – Soul Care and Looking Inward

This is going to be an awesome day, so don’t miss out. If you’re on the east coast (or even if you’re not), it’s not too late to get a ticket. They’re just $25 and will be well worth the price – you can find out more about Open Boston here and register here.

In case you needed just a little more convincing, Shae is one of the speakers and will be talking about helping your students think globally. I’ll be there too, so come and meet the Youth Workin’ It team in Boston. We’ll probably be dressed like we are in the picture above because, well, it’s Boston in February.

 

Come Open Your Mind (And Ministry!) In Boston

November 23, 2012 By Stephen Pepper Leave a Comment

Open BostonIf you weren’t at The Summit a couple of weeks ago, make sure you don’t miss out on the Youth Cartel’s next event – Open Boston – on February 2, 2013.

This is a new kind of youth ministry conference that will be focusing on a wide range of different ideas – you can check out the manifesto here. One of the best things is that tickets will start from just $25, making it much more affordable.

And now there’s another good reason to be there – Shae will be one of the speakers! She’s going to be talking about “helping your students think globally” and this will be:

An informative and practical session about how to help young people in youth ministries internalize global issues in youth work and turn those changed attitudes into action. We’ll look at how youth ministers can engage young people in the process of global learning that goes beyond being sympathetic. This session provides practical tools and tips on how to engage young people in the church in global issues through empathy and community volunteering opportunities.

I can’t recommend this highly enough and not just because I’m her husband! Being at Shae’s session will be worth the $25 by itself, but there are so many other great speakers and sessions, there’s really no excuse not to be there.

Unless you live thousands of miles from Boston.

Even then, I’d recommend jumping on a plane to be there.

I’ll be there as well (albeit as a learner rather than a speaker), so come meet Youth Workin’ It at Open Boston. Don’t miss out – register here now.

 

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