Because I’m a culture-watcher, I’m a TV watcher. Television offers a reflection of culture that’s as big as the massive mirror that hung in my grandparents’ living room over their couch. You could look into that mirror and see just about everything. Since last fall, the new TV show that’s offered one of the most wide open and insightful reflections of our changing culture is ABC’s comedy mockumentary “Modern Family.”
According to “Modern Family,” the definition and makeup of the American family is changing and changing fast. The show chronicles the relationship between Jay Pritchett, his two grown children (Clarie Dunphy and Mitchell Pritchett) and their families. Locked in a mid-life crisis, Jay is re-married to a much younger divorcee from Columbia. They are raising her young son from a previous marriage. Stay-at-home mom Claire and her husband are raising their three children in a traditional family. Mitchell lives with his homosexual partner, and together they are raising an infant daughter adopted from Vietnam. Incidentally, Entertainment Weekly branded “Modern Family” as “the best new sitcom of the fall.”
As a reflection of reality, “Modern Family” gets it right: Things are changing. Several years ago, I began asking high-school-aged audiences about their family situations. Asking for a show of hands in a room full of kids was eye-opening. Listening intently to their sometimes harrowing first-person accounts of life at home led me to the conclusion that family meant something different to many of these kids. Little has changed for the better. Some live with Dad and Mom. Others live with Mom. Some with Dad. Some with neither. A few don’t know one or both of their parents. The words divorce, separation, abandonment, abuse and broken come up repeatedly. A growing number of kids from what are known as traditional intact families describe living in homes filled with deep turmoil.
We’re living in a period of unprecedented and historic change in family composition, family life and family experience. This radical shift in family patterns can’t help but affect our kids, creating more stress and confusion. The shift is the result and cause of a growing amount of childhood heartache, pain and difficulty.
While these issues are deep and complex, they require our attention and response. Youth workers are uniquely positioned to minister to kids who have been hurt deeply by their families’ past and present, through ministry that brings the way and will of God to bear on the present and future families of these kids in some amazing ways.
How should we minister with sensitivity to kids growing up in a modern family? We must begin by raising our awareness of the cultural shifts and changes taking place in terms of the family and how those shifts and changes are visiting and effecting the kids we know and love. Here are five of the main family shifts that are visiting the homes of kids in your community and church.
The increase and acceptance of divorce: The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s combined with a changing moral climate, rising individualism and other factors to lower our collective view of marriage, thus leading to a rise in divorce. In 2008, there were 7.1 marriages per 1,000 people and 3.5 divorces per 1,000 people. The American divorce rate today is nearly twice that of 1960 but has declined slightly since hitting the highest point in our history in the early 1980s. It is estimated that up to 60 percent of the children born in the 90s will live in single-parent homes for part of their childhood. All of these statistics add up to this sad fact: The United States has the highest divorce rate and the highest proportion of children affected by divorce in the developed world. My one-on-one conversations with and observation of children of divorce have led me to a deeper understanding of the toll that divorce takes on our kids. The family was created by God as the basic unit and building block of society. It is the unit into which we are born and where we find our identity, are socialized and are nurtured. The increased incidence and acceptance of divorce indicates that the building blocks are falling apart. As our society changes, husbands and wives increasingly are committed to being uncommitted. The result is that more and more of our kids are suffering.
The rise in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births: A lower view of marriage has combined with changing morals and the experiences of so many adults having grown up in families in which marriages fell apart, leaving a growing number of people ready to live together and have families without the willingness to commit. In 2006, 38.5 percent of all births were to unmarried women. Since 1970, the number of people living together outside of marriage has increased tenfold. Not only do these trends affect children’s well-being as they grow through childhood and adolescence, but they also influence the growing child’s own view of marriage as they look forward to being grown up. The 2003 Gallup Youth Survey specifically asked teens about their views on cohabitation. A significant majority (70 percent) of teens say they approve of couples living together prior to marriage. As might be expected, 85 percent of teens who do not attend church approve of pre-marital cohabitation. Alarmingly, 50 percent of teens who regularly attend church approve of couples living together before marriage. Clearly, the culture is influencing our kids’ values and attitudes toward God’s institution of marriage.
The crisis of fatherlessness: Tonight, approximately 34 percent of our nation’s children and teens will go to bed in a home where their biological father does not live. Some estimate that almost 60 percent of the children born in the 1990s will spend some part of their childhood in a fatherless home. These are our youth group kids! Sadly, more and more children don’t know who their fathers are. Millions of other children are growing up in homes where their fathers may be physically present but are spiritually or emotionally detached. The consequences are grave. We now know that father absence is the number one variable in the present and future well-being of teens. Children who grow through the difficult, challenging and formative years of adolescence without their dads have a greater risk of suffering from emotional and behavioral problems such as sexual promiscuity, premarital teen pregnancy, substance abuse, depression, suicide, lower academic performance, dropping out of school, intimacy dysfunction, divorce and poverty. Not only that but our boys grow up with no positive model to show how to fulfill their responsibilities in God-honoring ways when they become dads themselves.
The decreasing amount of time parents spend with their children: Men and women in high-pressure careers often work more than 40 hours a week and bring home work pressures and economic worries. Children are the ones who get shortchanged. The ongoing myth of “quality time vs. quantity time” often is invoked to justify absence from the kids. When asked about their wishes for a better life, 27 percent of high school students wanted “more money to buy items such as televisions and cars,” and 14 percent wished for “a bigger house.” The largest percentage of high school students–46 percent–wished for “more time spent together with family.”
More and more children and teens are victims of family violence. It’s frightening to think that much of our nation’s child abuse and sexual abuse goes unreported. The statistics that are available are frightening enough. It’s believed that one out of every three girls and one out of every four to five boys is sexually abused by the time they reach the age of 16. Most of the abuse is perpetrated by a parent, sibling, relative or family friend. In addition, studies indicate that between 3.3 million and 10 million children are exposed to domestic violence annually. Some of that violence is the direct result of alcoholism in the family. Children who are exposed to or are victims of family and sexual violence are more likely to become perpetrators of violence themselves. They’re also more likely to exhibit a variety of health and behavioral problems as they grow up, including depression, anxiety, suicide and drug and alcohol abuse.
Home used to be a place of refuge and source of much-needed resiliency for kids growing through the normal changes and difficulties of the adolescent years. I remember how great I felt entering the warmth of my house after battling the pressures and expectations of my peers at the war zone known as middle school. While my family was by no means perfect, I at least knew that when I got home, I could open the door and walk into a place where I would be loved, encouraged, accepted and nurtured. For a growing number of today’s children and teens, my experience will go unknown. Their experience is shaping their present and future.
For that reason, we must develop and implement ministry responses that answer these cultural realities with biblically sound guidance and nurture that reflects God’s will and way for our kids and their present and future families.
First, we must aggressively engage in prophetic ministry in relation to the family. A conversation I had 20 years ago with a frustrated and fearful dad has served me well through the years. He asked, “How can I expect my 13-year-old son to hear the still, small voice of God with all these other voices screaming in his ears?” This man recognized that culture is not only a mirror but a map. It points our kids in the direction they should take in life. It shapes their values, attitudes and behaviors. The conversation reminds me not only of the power of culture to shape but the power of God’s Word to transform and renew when it’s taught and modeled by us through our youth ministries. First and foremost, we must answer the decline of the family through the proclamation of God’s order and design for this wonderful institution He has given to us as a gift. We must employ the teaching formula Jesus used in the Sermon on the Mount to answer cultural assumptions with Biblical truth. We must recognize every “you have heard it said that…” with God’s “but I tell you…” We must communicate God’s will and way on family, marriage, sexuality, divorce, child-bearing, gender, authority, etc. Sadly, a growing number of our kids won’t hear these things unless we say them.
In addition, our teaching must incorporate each and every chapter of the biblical drama that’s unfolding around us. The chapter called “Creation” includes a clear design and order for the family. The chapter titled “Fall” recognizes that God’s shalom has come undone. There are no perfect people, families, marriages, etc. The human heart is corrupt and that corruption stretches into every nook and cranny of the creation; but the chapter titled “Redemption” offers great hope as we know that through Jesus Christ, God is active in the process of restoring all things to what they once were. We always should be asking ourselves, “What does the Bible say in response to the negative realities that exist?”
Second, we must aggressively engage in preventive ministry in relation to the family. Once we know what our kids are learning about the plethora of issues related to marriage and family, we must do all we can to spare them the heartache of pursuing a wrong path. Instead, we must lay out the best way. Because many never have heard about the best way, we must teach them the skills necessary to live their lives in that direction. For example, think about how children of divorce learn to handle conflict. The conflict they witnessed as children resulted in the breakdown of their family. They grow up swearing they never will let the same thing happen in their own marriages, but when they enter marriage themselves with another imperfect and sinful human being, conflict inevitably will come. Without any knowledge about how to handle conflict, they often will watch their marriage decline, sometimes to the point of divorce. When we enter a preventive ministry mode with children of divorce, we will teach them 1) no spouse is perfect; 2) no marriage is perfect; 3) conflict is inevitable; 4) conflict doesn’t mean failure; and 5) there are healthy, God-glorifying ways to manage and resolve conflict. Then, we must take the time to teach and model those skills that will equip them to handle conflict so we might prevent them from destroying their marriages. Preventive youth ministry is necessary if we are going to see a reversal of the negative family trends. We always should be asking ourselves, “What must I do to prevent kids from embracing the negative realities that exist, while encouraging them to embrace God’s order and design for the family?”
Third, we must aggressively engage in redemptive ministry in relation to the family. No doubt, your community, church and youth group already are populated by people living in family brokenness. You have children of divorce, the fatherless, the unmarried teen mother and countless others in your midst. If you don’t, you most likely don’t know what’s really going on in people’s lives, or your church culture has driven them all away. The goal of redemptive ministry is to see forgiveness, wholeness and restoration through the saving grace of Jesus Christ blast through broken lives. Our youth ministries sometimes will require us to provide triage, hospitalization and rehab for the casualties of family breakdown. We must be poised and ready to refer people to the expert help and assistance they need, to rally the troops to show mercy and love, and to equip those who have made horrible choices to repent of the error of their ways and then move forward. We always should be asking ourselves, “What must I do to minister in a Christ-like fashion to those whose lives have been harmed by embracing or being victimized by the negative realities that exist?”
Some time ago, after being away with a group of kids on an exciting senior high retreat, I noticed that every kid on the bus was asleep–except for Meg. She was staring out the window. The tears running down her cheeks told me she was thinking about more than the passing scenery. I thought she might be disappointed that the weekend had come to an end. “Sure, I’m sad the weekend is over,” she said, “but that’s not what I’m crying about. My Dad hasn’t talked to me or my Mom in weeks. He just sits in his chair and watches TV. My Mom’s an emotional basket case. Sometimes I feel like I’m her mother. And my brother–he yells at all of us. I don’t want to go back home.” Meg’s home had become a war zone.
Meg’s sad story is only one example of how the changing face of the family is taking its toll on kids. The result is a hunger for genuine and meaningful relationships so pervasive among teenagers and young adults today that relational deprivation is one of the marks of today’s emerging generations. Our children and teens were created to be in relationship. Humanly speaking, the primary relationship for which they were made is one with Dad and Mom. Today’s teenagers desire real relationships that are characterized by depth, vulnerability, openness, listening and love–connectedness in their disconnected, confusing and alienated world. As you evaluate how you’re doing youth ministry in this frightening new world, ask yourself what you’re doing to redefine the institution of the family that’s not the way it’s supposed to be, in ways that it was meant to be. You’ll not only be ministering to the kids in your group but investing in the generations yet to come.
