Youth Culture Today with Walt Mueller

Recent research coming out of Hong Kong assessed twenty-six hundred school children regarding video gaming and mental health. The research looked at what’s called binge-gaming, defined as spending at least five hours in a row playing computer games. They found binge-gaming to be associated with poor sleep, anxiety, stress, loneliness, and depression. Three in ten kids surveyed reported spending so...

Earlier this year I ran across an opinion piece written in The Sydney Australia Morning Herald by author and mother of three, Kerri Sackville. The title of the piece was quite blunt, but it does capture our need to rethink how we as parents are using social media. Sackville’s title reads, “Nobody wants to read those posts about how brilliant your kids are.” Sackville goes on to remind us that nobo...

For the last twenty or so years, educators, parents, and researchers have lamented what they believe is a decline in reading for pleasure among adults. The concern is that the increase in daily screen time, including time with TVs, computers, and smartphones, would cut away at the practice of reading. A new study published in iScience found that leisure reading, also known as reading for pleasure...

Parents, the world is full of distractions for our teens, and some can be more dangerous than they appear. While we teach them values rooted in faith, we must also be aware of the modern cultural challenges they face. One of those is gambling. Aggressive and pervasive marketing for online platforms along with social media and peer pressure are making it easier for young people to be drawn into spo...

With artificial intelligence spreading like wildfire through the digital landscape and into the lives of our kids, we would be mindful to tread carefully and set limits knowing that jumping into new technologies is sure to bring a mix of the good and the bad. In a recent article in First Things magazine, Mary Harrington offers these words: “The end of print culture is already upon us. With it’s en...

In a recent edition of the Kids Today online newsletter, correspondent Anna North asked, “What do we lose when teens don’t babysit?” In her article, North tells us how the teenage baby-sitting culture has changed over the years, with fewer and fewer teens actually baby-sitting, and fewer and fewer parents hiring teen baby-sitters. With a smaller amount of teens engaging in this once widespread rit...

Because I was a typical kid who was doing typical mischievous things in my neighborhood, one of our regular childhood after-dark activities was to play “ring and run.” You may have called that “ding-dong ditch” where you grew up. You ring a random doorbell then run and hide, leaving the homeowner befuddled as they look around to figure out who was at the door. Of course, this was long before the a...

What would you do if you were running the last cross-country race of your high school career and that race was the state championship meet? Now I’m not a cross-country runner, but I imagine that I would be racing to not only win, but to do the best I had ever done. I recently ran across the story of Kaylee Montgomery, a high school senior who set out to beat her personal best in the Arkansas state...

I recently watched a video posted by the owners of a female black labrador retriever who they took to an outdoor restaurant where they were grabbling a meal. The video showed the dog choosing to sit on a separate couch, all the way at the end, facing the opposite direction from it’s owners while acting like she didn’t want to have anything to do with them. The owners posted, “Our moody teenager wh...

As debates continue to rage regarding the effects of smartphones on the physical, spiritual, emotional, relational, and cognitive health of our kids, we need to exercise caution. One caution is this: Don’t put a smartphone in the hands of a young child. In fact, we need to be cautious about doing the same with our older kids, with many experts saying that we should wait to do so until the age of s...

A recent survey by Wired Research, asked one thousand parents of kids ages fourteen to eighteen if they thought their children were prepared to manage their finances in adulthood. The survey found that only eight percent of the parents surveyed believe their teenagers are “extremely prepared” to handle their finances in adulthood. What’s interesting is that this is a ten percent drop from last yea...

According to the Aspen Institute, the youth sports industry here in the United States is a forty billion dollar a year business. About sixty million kids are playing youth sports, with the average family spending just over a thousand dollars a year on a child’s primary sport, which is a forty six percent increase since twenty-nineteen. Sadly many parents are pushing their kids to achieve in sports...

Our current cultural climate is one that is marked by hatred and divisions. If our kids follow the lead of what they are seeing and learning on social media, they will be nurtured into something other than what Jesus commands in John fifteen twelve. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” In his book “Mere Morality”, the late theologian Lewis Smedes tells us that t...

School has been back in session for a couple of months now and you can be sure that there are a host of high schoolers thinking about where they are going to attend college. Members of SheKnows Teen Council were surveyed regarding their approach to college applications. When asked to use one word to describe how they were feeling about the application process they used a variety of words, includin...

Once again, I want to give you a little update on the slang words that are trending in today’s world of children and teens. I do this as a service so that you can overcome your chronic parental ignorance in order to understand your kids, and even use these words yourself in a fun-loving effort to embarrass your kids! The word Aura refers to someone’s cool level. At times kids will give aura points...

Late last summer, I checked off a long-standing bucket list item by spending a day at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Experiencing it for myself was awesome, and it was made even better by taking my three oldest grandsons along with me. While the baseball was good, there was much more than the games to experience. As would be expected in today’s marketing saturated wo...

Today, I want to warn you about yet another viral teenage TikTok video challenge, this one that’s been around for awhile, but has seemed to find new life resulting in some dangerous practices, hospitalizations, and even death. Social media’s Benadryl Challenge hit the news again last month when the parents of a thirteen year old girl found her hallucinating with an elevated heart rate of almost tw...

Many parents have been playing catch-up when it comes to understanding and setting boundaries around emerging technologies. One such technology is the growing prevalence of online Artificial Intelligence chatbots, a technology which we can all interact with to get answers to our questions, to create photos, and to do research, among other things. Here at CPYU, we have many concerns about AI, chatg...

The kids have been back in school for a couple of months now, which has allowed plenty of time for marketers to collect their data on the spending preferences and habits of our kids. The folks at TeenVoice tell us that this year kids were excited about shopping. Using a scale of one to five, the excitability factor averaged about three-point-six, with girls and boys being equal, and younger kids m...

The prayers we find in the Scriptures are prayers that we can pray for our children and teens. In II Thessalonians 3:5, the Apostle Paul follows up his statements on God’s faithfulness and promised protection from the evil one with this prayer: “May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.” First, Paul prays that God would “direct,” or “make straight” the...

C.S. Lewis once said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, but shouts to us in our pains.” Those words capture a truth that the Scriptures put forth from Genesis to Revelation. It seems that whenever God would do his greatest work in the lives of those he loved, he would bring about great spiritual growth and increased faith through the gift of pain. In today’s world, we are taught to avoid pain...

Parents, today I want to give you a heads-up and issue a warning which I hope motivates you to track with the latest developments in digital technology and the way in which these developments might undermine the well-being of our kids. You’re no doubt aware that Virtual Reality and the Metaverse here to stay and will be advancing quickly in the years to come. Based on the fact that online victimiz...

Because we have been made for relationships, it’s important that our kids develop healthy friendships where they learn how to relate to others, how to play together, and how to solve conflicts. The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health recently asked the parents of six to twelve year old children about their children’s friendships. Nineteen percent of parents report that...

Precocious puberty, also known as early puberty, takes place when a child’s body begins to change into an adult body too soon. In today’s world, puberty usually begins for girls around age eight, and around age nine for our boys. In recent years, there has also been research showing that in general, our kids are reaching puberty at earlier and earlier ages. There have been lots of different theori...