am spending a couple of amazing hours with about 30 great and good hearted Kingdom workers at Skyview Ranch over the next couple of days. we began yesterday walking through our observations from Barbara Strauch’s work: The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids .
mark (marko) oestreicher
this gathering is the second “conversations” that joel daniel harris has invited those of us in attendance into. last year we worked through Mark Ostreicher’s Youth Ministry 3.0. This year Joel invited Marko to join us a sojourner. the first day was amazing and very good. I’m grateful for Joel Daniel’ s heart to engage our minds in this rigorous way. An am grateful too to be part of amazing conversation with Marko’s keen intellect and most importantly his heart for the adolescent…particularly the jr high school student.
A couple of observations from day one. One revelation we pushed through early on is the idea that “adolescence” is a modern construct.
the duration of adolescence has grown. in 1904, adolescence was thought to begin at age 14.5 and end around age 16. By the 1970’s it had grown to 13-18 and in 2010 adolescence it thought to start around age 11 and end 27. there’s some fun dialogue with some some of our fellow attenders as they are close to that upper age.
interesting stuff
- the role of risk-taking
- nurture vs nature
- the quantity of change
- do we need to rethink age/grade boundaries
- partnering with parents and other voices
- the role of failure
- exuberance
- gender difference
- message the church sends kids/integration
- what’s fair to expect
- acquiesce, push or other
- hard-wiring stuff