Helping Teens Take Perspective of the New Year

The teen years can be the most difficult of all years. Think back on your sixth grade through twelfth grade years. What do you remember? Unfortunately our lives are often colored by events that happen to us in our teen years. Maybe you were bullied. Maybe your parents got a divorce. All of life's embarrassing changes happen to our physical bodies during our teen years. And everything tends to be amplified and awkward. How do we help our teens get perspective and make changes for the New Year?

The New Year is a great opportunity to sit down with your teens and reflect on those things - good and bad - that occurred during the year. Grab an old calendar and take it apart, or on a large sheet of butcher paper, draw lines dividing into twelve equal parts. Lay out the year by month in sequential order from January to December. Using various colored pencils or markers, pick a color or group of colors to mark the bad events. Use another color or set of colors to mark the good events. Go through the year, month by month writing down the events. For every bad event that is remembered and marked, the teens need to come up with at least two good events to place on the calendar. For every bad event remembered, have the teens think of at least one good thing that happened because of the bad event.

What the teens will eventually discover is that the good events outweigh the bad and they will actually remember the good, more than the bad.

After that exercise, talk with your teens about the New Year as an opportunity to start over, make a few changes, and make the bad events of the past into good events of the future.

Grab a new calendar for the New Year and start making plans to implement changes and make hopeful plans.

-Jan Sullivan
AprilWord

Jan Sullivan received a Masters Degree in Youth Ministry from Asbury Theological Seminary. She served as a youth pastor for thirteen years in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. She published her first book, Forever Family, in July 2008. Her second, Never Alone, was published in August 2009. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her dog Abby and spends her time loving teenagers and consuming Christian fiction. Modeling her life after Christ, the great storyteller, Jan hopes that her stories will lead young people to make decisions to follow Christ.

jan@aprilword.com

http://www.aprilword.com

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Christmas Gift for Teens

The Christmas holiday will be here before we have a chance to breathe after Thanksgiving. Stores have had their Christmas decorations up for weeks now and parents are gearing up for the dreaded holiday shopping.

Some of the most difficult gifts to buy at Christmas is for teens. With all the gadgets teens want, they may not realize what they need. That's where parents step in.

Why not give your teen something that will help them move through their teen years with Godly insight? A book designed to discuss topics that affect teens daily. A book that gives teens and parents a place to come together to openly discuss some of the difficulties they face.

The book is, Tools4Teens.

Rich in truth, moving in story, profound in content … it’s what you want every teenager to read, reflect and relate to as they attempt to navigate the most turbulent waters of life … the teenage years! With the Spirit of faith, hope and love, Kelly Litvak and Shirley Hanson have assembled more than a book, it is a snapshot of an intersection between the two most important stories in history, God’s story and yours. ~ Jerry Edmonson, Lead Pastor, The Fellowship at Cinco Ranch

Order yours today. It's the easiest gift you'll purchase but the one that will sow seeds that will grow a lifetime.

Teen Pregnancy: A Growing Issue

Despite countless government, religious, and community efforts, teen pregnancy continues to be a growing teen issue. An issue, that some teens, actually think they want.

Post staff writer N.C. Aizenman discusses why two teen sisters from Silver Spring would decide to start trying to get pregnant at ages 14 and 15, and why the teen pregnancy rate for Latinas born in the United States remains stubbornly high.

Read entire aritcle.

N.C. Aizenman

Washington Post staff writer, WashingtonPost.com
Friday, December 11, 2009; 12:30 PM

Helping teens see their potential future may help those teens who think having a baby will give them a life they desire.

Bullying May be Considered a Silent Epidemic

Experts have found that bullying links a rash of suicides by young teens in the United States, reports MNN.

A 2007 report entitled "Health Behavior in School-Aged Children" said, "Being bullied is also associated with poor academic achievement, low self-esteem, problems making friends, loneliness and higher levels of substance use." The report also said that 11 percent of U.S. students reported being the victims of bullies at least twice in the last two months.

Do the numbers mean that bullying could be considered a silent epidemic? What exactly is it? In today's world, it seems like bullying has become more insidious with the advent of the internet, text messaging and social networking sites.

Read entire article.

-ChristianTelegraph.com