Youth Culture Today with Walt Mueller

Because the teenage years are filled with so much change and uncertainty, your kids yearn for stability and normalcy. Their search for a safe place to belong leads them to the haven of friendships with peers. These friendships are important and necessary as our kids begin to move towards the independence of adulthood. This means that they’ll face peer pressure. That pressure can either be positive...

New research from the University of Cambridge offers up some noteworthy information on the relationship between teen social media use and mental health conditions. Researchers found that kids who struggle with anxiety and depression report higher rates of being negatively affected by social media. Those with anxiety and depression have a higher rate of comparing themselves to others on social medi...

I’ve become known around my house as the guy who asks too many questions. To be honest, I think I get a little annoying. One thing I’ve learned is that I need to ask good questions. Our tendency is to talk at, rather than listen to our kids. The bad news is that this approach is a communication killer. Asking good questions serves to open the floodgates of communication by encouraging your kids to...

Online pornography is an ever-present reality in today’s world. I recently asked Google this question: “What percentage of the internet is pornography.” I was told it’s estimated that around twelve percent of the internet is dedicated to pornographic content. In a recent letter to First Things journal, reader Isabel Hogben wrote these compelling words about the power of porn: “Online porn shatters...

As a dad, I’ve learned over and over that I need to choose my words carefully. I’m usually reminded after moments of being very careless with my words. Proverbs 12:18 tells us that “Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” I read that and can only respond with one word. . . . “Guilty!” I’ve thrown reckless words around my relationships with abandon, especiall...

Remember what used to happen to the teenage girl from the Christian family who got pregnant? Maybe you don’t, because you never heard in the first place that the girl was even pregnant. She just disappeared. . . usually halfway across the country to Aunt Martha’s farm. Then, a year or two later, she’d reappear and life would go on as if nothing happened. That’s the way it used to be in the church...

Late last year, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of almost fourteen hundred teens, ages thirteen to seventeen, to come to an understanding of our teenagers’ experiences and attitudes around social media and their mental health. One of the most interesting findings is one that I also find encouraging. Teens were asked about who they are most comfortable talking about their mental health w...

It’s been twenty five years since Nancy Pearcey and the late Chuck Colson published their book, titled with this question: How Now Shall We Live? The book is still relevant, as it offers us an understanding of how to confront and navigate the cultural narrative in ways that lead Christians to live counter-culturally to the honor and glory of God. There are a couple of sentences in the book that ca...

I love listening to music. As a music lover, nothing enhances my own listening experience as much as a good set of ear buds and a volume setting that I’m sure is higher than it should be. Lately, my difficulty hearing conversations when there’s ambient noise have me wishing I could rewind to turn down the volume that I’m sure now effects my hearing as I’ve gotten older. The World Health Organizati...

Listen to these heartfelt words of warning from Megan Garcia, the mother of a fourteen year-old boy who died by suicide in February: “There is a platform out there you might not have heard about, but you need to know about it because, in my opinion, we are behind the eight ball here. A child is gone. My child is gone.” Her son, Sewell, had logged on to a site known as Character. AI. The site allow...

All this week we’ve been looking at the thought and planning that went into the Philadelphia area’s Delaware County Christian School’s establishment of their well-received and highly successful phone free school policy. The school wanted to address a rise in mediocrity. Administrators write, We are far too easily pleased with superficial counterfeits for the good, the true, and the beautiful, medi...

All this week I’m looking at the thought and planning that went into the Philadelphia area’s Delaware County Christian School’s establishment of their well-received and highly successful phone free school policy. One pattern of life in today’s world that the school wanted to address was the ever-present reality of interruptions. As an introduction to their policy, the school shares these words: th...

All this week I’m looking at the thought and planning that went into the Philadelphia area Delaware County Christian School establishment of their well-received and highly successful phone free school day policy. The first pattern of life in today’s world that the school wanted to address was noise. As an introduction to their policy, the school shares these words: “The modern age is filled with n...

All this week I’m looking at the thought and planning that went into the Philadelphia area’s Delaware County Christian School establishment of their well-received and highly successful phone free school day policy. Administrators took seriously the Apostle Paul’s call in Romans twelve to no longer conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. They recognize...

In his book “The Anxious Generation,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers a series of recommendations for how to stop the epidemic of youth mental health issues. One of those recommendations is straightforward and blunt: no smartphones in schools. Fortuneately there’s a growing movement among schools, parents, and even some students themselves to make this necessary move. I’ve had conversati...

Late last year, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of almost fourteen hundred teens, ages thirteen to seventeen, to come to an understanding of our teenagers’ experiences and attitudes around social media and their mental health. One of the most interesting findings is our teenagers’ shifting attitudes on whether or not social media is harmless, or harmful. Back in twenty twenty-two, thirt...

Late last year, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of almost fourteen hundred teens, ages thirteen to seventeen, to come to an understanding of our teenagers’ experiences and attitudes around social media and their mental health. One of the most concerning findings to me is that thirty-four percent of our kids say they go to social media to get mental health information, with sixty-three p...

All too often I’m the guy who’s described in Proverbs 18, verses two and thirteen. I’m the fool who “finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions” and the shameful fool “who answers before listening” . I’ve had to learn the hard way that when I’ve been thrust into conversations with my kids where we don’t see eye-to-eye, it’s sometimes best to bite my tongue, shut my...

We all know that social media has fueled a trend known as looksmaxxing. This online movement encourages men and boys to live up to body-image and fashion standards through working out obsessively, spending on clothing, and even going so far as getting cosmetic surgery. It’s one more evidence of our culture’s obsession with finding our identity in outward appearance. In a strange effort to push bac...

It’s been almost forty years since I tried to intervene in some decisions a group of teenage girls were making on a day off from school. I was a youth pastor at the time and my station wagon was one vehicle in a convoy of several that were driving a couple of hours away for a day of youth group skiing. Three of the girls in the way back seat were buried in their books. I asked,“Do you ladies have...

I once heard it said that raising teens is like holding a wet bar of soap: too firm a grasp and it shoots from your hand: too loose a grasp, and it slides away. A gentle but firm grasp keeps it in your hand. One of the greatest gifts we can give to our kids is the gift of reasonable and loving boundaries. Boundaries help our kids to recognize right from wrong, to stay safe within the confines of G...

Eugenics is defined as the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the inheritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Perhaps the most recognizable example from history is the horrific and deplorable work in eugenics performed by Hitler’s Nazi’s. These efforts were put into effect in order to create a master or aryan race, believing that entire groups of peop...

With so much of the news focusing on the decline of adolescent mental health, Charley Lock of the New York Times recently asked dozens of young people from across the United States to share, in their own words, what type of things they do to find happiness. The answers ran the gamut from watching jellyfish videos, to falling asleep while on the phone with a friend, to going fishing alone, to wakin...

Here’s a term that I just heard that all of us must be aware of: “surveillance capitalism”. The term and the practice is one that is especially prominent in our current online digital age. Simply stated, surveillance capitalism is about monitoring people’s online behavior, including that of our kids, in order to capture data about one’s preferences and habits in order to take that data and use it...

The amount of change and questioning our kids face makes teenagers more vulnerable to stress than any other age group. Things that would never bother us as adults can be devastating to a teenager. The stuff we might write off can be monumentally difficult for them to handle or overcome. When you’ve seen a teenager stress out over a “wardrobe crisis,” mediocre test grade that has no bearing on eter...