background on Teenagers

A quarter of American teenagers are connected to a device within five minutes of waking up. Most teenagers send one hundred texts a day. Eighty percent sleep with their phones. Forty-four percent do n...

The Texas-based pastor Matt Chandler spent a decade working with teenagers, and during that time, he realized how a specific change takes place between sixth graders and ninth graders. As Chandler say...

Adolescents have been offered a license to post without any accompanying ethical framework. Is it fair to blame teens for misusing tools that didn’t exist in our childhood? If I had been given a phone...

In an article for The Atlantic, social scientist Jean Twenge shares the results of a study on the activities of American teenagers and their impact on happiness. Some of these activities included scre...

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been very good at paying attention to my car’s fuel tank. I remember in high school I drove an old Jeep Grand Cherokee that had a digital fuel gauge. In 1998 tha...

Those who insist we are even more self-centered today might point to how the titles and focus of our popular magazines have shifted, as photographer Fred Ritchin notes: “I always use a quote by Paul S...

13-year-old Mary is having a tough day and has stretched herself out on the couch to do a bit of what she thought to be well-deserved complaining and self-pitying. She moans to her Mom and brother, “N...

There’s a cartoon that makes a profound statement about happiness. The first panel shows happy schoolchildren entering a street-level subway station—laughing, playing, tossing their hats in the air. T...

Sometimes in our adolescence what we need most is just someone to stick by our side, even if we make some rather hasty decisions. In this short excerpt, Bob Goff tells a story from his own teenage yea...

In this excerpt from Jay Y. Kim’s book, Analog Church , the author shares about an experience at a local restaurant after being convicted of his own smartphone use at home, keeping him from being p...

Martin has just received his brand new driver’s license. The family trots out to the driveway and climbs in the car, where he is going to take them for a ride for the first time. Dad immediately heads...

Let me share one more lesson I am learning about daily surrender. It concerns the way we relate to others. Daily we encounter people who express views opposite to our own, hold values with which we ca...

Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak arrested my heart a few years back. It begins with a poem by William Stafford, “Ask Me”, that begs this question: “Some time when the river is ice ask me mista...

When I talk with parents of adolescents, the conversation often turns to smartphones, social media, and video games. The stories parents tell me tend to fall into a few common patterns. One is the “co...

When singer John Davidson was learning to drive, his father, a Baptist minister, offered him a deal: he could have a car if he earned straight “B’s” on his report card, read the Bible more, and got a ...

We swim in an ocean of feedback. Each year in the United States alone, every schoolchild will be handed back as many as 300 assignments, papers, and tests. Millions of kids will be assessed as they tr...

Is God just a nice person who created the world, tells us to be “cool” to people, helps out with some of our problems (but otherwise leaves us alone), lets us do what makes us happy, and then takes us...

Teenagers whine about it constantly. Office mates step out multiple times a day to Starbucks to escape it. Parents die of it every night as they try to get small children to fall asleep. We use the wo...

Would you like a no-stress life? A wise person would not accept that option, no matter how tempting it might sound. A stress-free life would be fatal. If we do not have change, challenge, and novelty ...

In his excellent book on worship, The Dangerous Act of Worship , pastor and president of Fuller Seminary Mark Labberton shares a story of the transformation of one of his former congregants: Ben ...

One Sunday I was preaching on Psalm 27. It is a remarkable psalm of hope for God’s- deliverance from fear for those who have faced tough times. With the same candor found in many psalms, this one vivi...

We come into this world blissfully unaware of these fragile, beautiful things we call our bodies. In our mother’s womb, we bathe in continuous warmth and nourishment, changing shadows and muffled voic...

When I engaged with twenty-somethings, for example, who were just entering the adult years, I found them preoccupied with clarifying their identity. What kind of a man or woman am I becoming, they w...

Most alarming is the absence of peace among our youth. Research from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is showing an epidemic of mental health problems among eighteen- to twenty-four-year...

Fully 93% of 18-29 year old smartphone owners in the experience sampling study used their phone at least once to avoid being bored, with respondents in this age group reporting that they did so in ave...

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addic...

The twenties are a time when one asks, What will I do with my life? What is it that I really want in exchange for my life’s labors? Most denied that the key desire of life was for material wealth; t...

If there is one word that sums up how many of us feel about technology and family life, it’s Help! Parents know we need help.  We love the way devices make our lives easier amid the stress and busy...

In today’s culture, it’s a race to the top of the ladder. According to Pew Research, millennials are the most educated generation. No one does comparison quite like millennials. We have apps for every...

Raising kids today is more complicated than it was when I was a kid. Parents feel out of control, hopelessly overmatched by the deluge of devices. And we can’t even count on one another to back us up....