Youth Culture Today with Walt Mueller

Those of us who are followers of Jesus Christ are called to bear each others burdens. We are to pray for each other. As friends, we are to love at all times and be there for others during their times of adversity. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve spent time with Christian kids is that so many of them battle with loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Even though they are followers of Christ, their ado...

Parents, today I want to encourage you to take an active interest in those things that interest your children and teens. This is an easy one if you and your teen share the same interests. But what happens if you’re a left-brained parent raising a right-brained kid? We once heard a parent complain that his son didn’t share his love for canoeing. Consequently, he didn’t think there’d ever be anythin...

Most of us can remember those pit-in-the-stomach times we experienced as teenagers when we realized we had been left out. I remember a summer day in the neighborhood when I couldn’t find any of my friends at home. I couldn’t figure out why they were all gone until somebody spilled the beans later, telling me that they had all been invited to go to a home in another neighborhood to swim in the fami...

Sometimes the circumstances in our own lives and the stresses of raising and living with teens in today’s rapidly changing culture can become overwhelming, paralyzing, and detrimental to our spiritual and emotional wellbeing. When that happens, we’re not doing anyone any favors if we continue to spiral down out of control. If our normal support systems aren’t enough to carry us through, then it’s...

The latest report from the Pew Research Center not only helps us understand where our teens ages thirteen to seventeen are spending time online, but should light a fire under us to exercise diligence and regularity about helping our teens practice what we call digital discipleship. It’s not surprising that YouTube is hands down the most used online platforms for kids, with nine out of ten saying t...

If they would be honest with us, our kids would tell us that their feelings and emotions serve far too often as their guide for life. Not surprisingly, today’s culture encourages this kind of feeling-driven living. To be honest, being driven by feelings and emotions is not just an issue for our kids. What a shame it would be if history remembered our generation of Christian parents as people who d...

The moment I turned sixteen years-old, my top priority in life was to get my driver’s license. Armed with my brand new learner’s permit, I couldn’t get enough practice time in on the road. And when I passed my driver’s test on the first try, there was a feeling of freedom and liberation I experienced that I look back on as a major rite of passage. As I think back, I don’t remember one high school...

One of the questions we often hear from parents relates to the appropriate amount of screen time which they should allow for their kids. Generally speaking, research, surveys, and the observations of parents themselves indicate that our teens spend way too much time focused on their screens. This means that they are spending less time on what once were the normal activities of childhood, including...

As a father and now grandfather, I often think about the wise words of instruction found in Proverbs twenty-two, six. “Train up a child in the way he should go; and even when he is old he will no depart from it.” Training our children is not a once and done task. Rather, it is an ongoing project that in many ways lasts a lifetime. Neither is the training we are called to only verbal in nature. Whi...

Fifty years ago there was little or no knowledge among teenagers about eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. In today’s image-obsessed and social-media saturated world, the great majority of our kids not only stress over their appearance, but many are struggling with body dysmorphia, which is defined as a mental health condition in which you can’t stop thinking about one or m...

Even though we were once adolescents ourselves, the cloudy nature of those memories combines with a teenage world that’s very different from the one we grew up in to leave us. . . well. . . pretty clueless. We need to go out of our way to learn about the uniqueness of living and growing as a teenager in today’s world by asking good questions. . . . over and over and over again. Here are some quest...

Parents, here’s a challenge to adopt a new years resolution that has you bent on gaining weight. No, I’m not encouraging you to go against conventional new year’s resolutions and decide to eat more so that the scale in your home goes on overload. Rather, I’m encouraging you to resolve to weigh yourself down each and every day with the life-giving good weight of ingesting more and more of God’s Wor...

Parents, our God-given high calling and privilege is to raise and nurture our children in the Christian faith. Nothing is more important than that! The word “Catechesis” captures the reality of what it means to fulfill this responsibility. Catechesis is about teaching sound doctrine for sound living. In their book about catechesis, Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old Fashioned Way,...

If you were an alien landing on earth with a mission to find out what’s most valued in North American culture, you would have to write the terms body image and appearance near the top of the list in your field notebook. The pressure marketing and social media put on all of us is significant, and its even more potent for our kids. Body dysmorphia, disordered eating, and dangerous dieting habits hav...

Today, I want to pass on a message of hope for any parent who finds themselves in the midst of a struggle of some kind with their child. More of us than you know are familiar with your pain. I once had a friend tell me that whatever difficulties we face with our children should be seen as God’s curriculum for us, as God is parenting and growing us at the very same time we are parenting our childre...

These words from musician Lacey Sturm in the forward to Rut Etheridge’s book God breathed, are wonderful words about the power of Scripture. “Whenever I find truth in any place I immediately know that it is guaranteed to be a biblical principle in display. As a smart aleck atheist who met God on the day I planned to commit suicide, I was not one to take people’s word for what they said about God....

Today is Christmas day, and I want to take a minute to tell you about the greatest gift that I ever received from my parents. Yes, over the years I received many Christmas gifts from my folks. But as the glory, shine, and initial excitement over so many of those gifts has faded over the years, there is that one gift that actually has increased in value for me. I remember my dad regularly telling m...

On this Christmas Eve, I want to share with you one of my favorite Christmas scripture passages. Perhaps you can share it around your table tomorrow. In the Gospel of Luke, we are told that eight days after his birth, Jesus was brought by Mary and Joseph to Jerusalem to be circumcised. While there, they took Jesus into the temple where an upright man by the name of Simeon took the infant in his ar...

One of the great blessings of YouTube is that you and I can go to it to find out how to fix just about anything. I’ve successfully consulted YouTube to find ways to fix among other things, our washing machine, our car, and our lawnmower. Our kids can go to YouTube to learn as well, and one type of tutorial they can find relates to fake piercings, and how to use powerful little magnets to mimic act...

If you have watched the compelling Netflix series, Adolescence, you are familiar with Stephen Graham. He not only was the show’s writer, but he played the part of Eddie Miller, the father of 13-year-old murderer, Jamie Miller. In the show, Eddie was blindsided by his son’s actions. There’s no doubt that the show offers a strong message to today’s parents, that we need to be active and involved in...

When I first got started in youth ministry I was a young single man who, truth be told, thought he knew a whole more than he actually did. One of my most arrogant moves was to somehow believe that I knew more about the kids in our youth group than even their parents knew about them. And, embarrassing truth be told again, I look back and can see that my younger self had a clear sense of how to rais...

Recent research published in the Journal, Neuroscience, reports on the effects of physical activity, physical fitness, and screen time on the brain developments of adolescents. We already know that the childhood and adolescent years are marked by brain development, which is according to God’s good design. We also know that since we are created as integrated beings, what we put into our bodies coup...

Our kids are always learning from us. Our words and our example shape who they will become, a reality established by God as he has created individuals and families. This means that for better or for worse, our kids are watching, and what they see in us and from us will play a powerful role in shaping who they are. The Journal of Health Psychology is hammering this point home. They’ve found that th...

Recent research from the Journal of the American Medical Association serves to remind us of our need to be diligent in protecting our kids from experiencing trauma to their brains while playing sports. Using new imaging techniques, researchers at Columbia University have discovered that the area of the brain behind the forehead – known as the cerebral cortex – suffers the most damage from repeated...

At the start of this year’s school year, we were hearing reports about more and more schools nationwide that were taking steps to get the smartphones out of their student’s hands during the school day. This a great move that every school district should take. But there’s still concerns about how much time our kids are spending with their smartphones and social media during their out-of-school hour...