Carole Adlard began Healthy Visions as a counseling program for pregnant teens but quickly realized students needed more.

CAROLE ADLARD (Founder, Healthy Visions): One of the facts that broke my heart was seeing so many students who felt hopeless. They were in bad home situations, they were being bullied in schools, they had been sexually abused. You could see the lack of light in their eyes, and we wanted to offer them hope.

RUSSELL PROCTOR: Day 1 I talk about healthy self-image. With girls it’s much more about body image: Hey, listen, you don’t have to be a size 2. You’re a beautiful girl no matter what size you are, no matter how much make-up you wear. And then I try to teach the guys what it means to be a man, because our society kind of teaches, okay, men need to hook up with girls, men need to drink. Day 2 we talk about Facebook, technology, cell phones, how to be smart with that stuff. Day 3 we talk about sex, the physical side, how people are connected, how STDs spread, kind of the nuts and bolts of sex….

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You are not special. You are not exceptional.

Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you”¦ you’re nothing special.
Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman! [Editor’s upgrade: Or The Swellesley Report!] And now you’ve conquered high school”¦ and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building”¦

But do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not.

The empirical evidence is everywhere, numbers even an English teacher can’t ignore….

Read it all or you can watch it all on video there instead.

The house lights go down. Spinning, multicolored lights sweep the auditorium. A rock band launches into a rousing opening song. “Ignore everyone else, this time is just about you and Jesus,” proclaims the lead singer. The music changes to a slow dance tune, and the people sing about falling in love with Jesus. A guitarist sporting skinny jeans and a soul patch closes the worship set with a prayer, beginning, “Hey God ”¦” The spotlight then falls on the speaker, who tells entertaining stories, cracks a few jokes, and assures everyone that “God is not mad at you. He loves you unconditionally.”

After worship, some members of the church sign up for the next mission trip, while others decide to join a small group where they can receive support on their faith journey. If you ask the people here why they go to church or what they value about their faith, they’ll say something like, “Having faith helps me deal with my problems.”

Fifty or sixty years ago, these now-commonplace elements of American church life were regularly found in youth groups but rarely in worship services and adult activities. What happened? Beginning in the 1930s and ’40s, Christian teenagers and youth leaders staged a quiet revolution in American church life that led to what can properly be called the juvenilization of American Christianity. Juvenilization is the process by which the religious beliefs, practices, and developmental characteristics of adolescents become accepted as appropriate for adults. It began with the praiseworthy goal of adapting the faith to appeal to the young, which in fact revitalized American Christianity. But it has sometimes ended with both youth and adults embracing immature versions of the faith. In any case, white evangelicals led the way.

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Saying he was sending a message of deterrence to Massachusetts drivers, District Court Judge Stephen Abany today imposed maximum sentences on Haverhill teen Aaron Deveau for causing a fatal crash by texting while driving.

The judge sentenced Deveau, who was 17 at the time of the crash, to concurrent sentences of 2½-years on a charge of motor vehicle homicide and 2 years for a charge of negligent operation of a motor vehicle causing serious injury while texting.

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The PACHA resolution states that only programs with the best scientific information be funded, and that the government should uphold the rights of young people to have access to information in order to make healthy and responsible decisions about their sexual health.

The UCC officials issued objections in their Friday endorsement, however, specifically $5 million in abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.

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What would it be like if you were 10 years old and composed a piece of music that was played by the New York Philharmonic? For a few New York City school kids, including one fifth-grader, it’s a dream come true, thanks to the orchestra’s Very Young Composers program.

Composer Jon Deak, who played bass with the New York Philharmonic for more than 40 years, says the idea for Very Young Composers came when he and conductor Marin Alsop visited an elementary school in Brooklyn several years ago.

“As we were going in, I saw all the children’s art on the walls, which was so superior,” Deak says. “I said, ‘That’s it, Marin! We’ve got to get kids to compose music on the level of this art right here, because look: Doesn’t that look like a Picasso? Doesn’t that look like a Paul Klee?'”

I caught this one yesterday morning running errands and it brought tears to my eyes. Read (or much better listen to) it all–KSH.

He wakes up in the middle of the night at this time of year ”” bothered, sleepless. Tom Didone has gone to dozens of traffic fatalities that involve teenagers, arriving at scenes of shattering wreckage and telltale skid lines.

He is always struck by the senselessness of what he sees….

“It only takes a second to take a life,” Didone told several hundred high school students in Burtonsville one day this month, hours before their prom.

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While most teenagers get ready to head to the beach or enjoy some other form of relaxation to celebrate Memorial Day, 13-year-old Colt Drew of Goose Creek has a heavier weight on his shoulders today.

He will put on his honor guard uniform, head to the James Island American Legion and play Taps at a Memorial Day service.

“He does an excellent job,” said David Coates Jr., a member of the honor guard based at the Goose Creek American Legion.

Coates recruited Colt because there’s a shortage of Taps players for military funerals and services, especially in the Lowcountry, with its heavy military population. Colt, who is home-schooled, is an accomplished trumpet player, and both his parents, Debbie and Mike Drew, were in the Navy.

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….The Supreme Court is now expected to use the Miller case to determine whether states are required to consider giving juveniles a second chance, no matter what they did. And each side is giving up a little in this case. Alabama is not arguing that all juvenile murderers should be ineligible for parole, only those who commit the worst crimes””crimes that would bring a death sentence if the defendant were an adult.

Evan Miller is represented by the Equal Justice Initiative and its founder and executive director, Bryan Stevenson, and Stevenson isn’t asking anyone actually be given parole, only that when offenders are so young that at some point far down the road, they at least be allowed to demonstrate they are entitled to be set free.

BRYAN STEVENSON (Equal Justice Initiative): I think everyone is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done, and I think that policy makers can make decisions about how to punish them. But I think children are uniquely more than their worst act; they have quintessential qualities and characteristics that a decent society, a maturing society, an evolved society, we believe, is constitutionally obligated to recognize and protect.

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When Sally tells Jimmy that he’s going to hell for believing in a false religion, is that Sally exercising her First Amendment right to free expression, or is that Billy getting bullied?

A broad coalition of educators and religious groups ”“ from the National Association of Evangelicals to the National School Boards Association ”“ on Tuesday (May 22) endorsed a new pamphlet to help teachers tackle such thorny questions.

Authored chiefly by the American Jewish Committee, “Harassment, Bullying and Free Expression: Guidelines for Free and Safe Public Schools,” contains 11 pages of advice on balancing school safety and religious freedom.

Read it all and see what you make of the guidelines themselves.

Heritage Keepers, an abstinence-based sex education curriculum offered by Heritage Community Services in Charleston, S.C., has been approved by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services after a study found it effective in delaying sexual initiation among youth.

The study involved 2,215 students in grades 7-9 and demonstrated that those receiving the Heritage Keepers curriculum were significantly less likely to become sexually active at the 12 month follow-up than those in a comparison group.

For those in the comparison group, sexual experience increased from 29.2 percent to 43.2 percent, compared to an increase from 29.1 percent to 33.7 percent among those who participated in Heritage Keepers.

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Going to a U.S. high school and learning to learn like Americans are what increasing numbers of students in China are hoping to do in order to improve their chances of getting into an American college, CCHS says. As an evangelical private high school with experience teaching students from China, CCHS has been taking in more of these overseas students and is starting to refer others to like-minded Christian high schools in the U.S.

Foreign students like Mr. [Tom] Zhou now make up about a third of the 217-person student body at CCHS, the U.S.’s oldest accredited school founded by and catering to evangelical Christians from China, according to superintendent Robin Sun Hom. The school also has students from Taiwan and even one Mandarin speaker from Venezuela.

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Last weekend, the ballyhooed documentary Bully opened in Dallas. A few weeks earlier, a less elaborate film on the same topic premiered in every third-period classroom at Richardson High School.

The school video tells a secret kept for 20 years ”” about a desperately unhappy teen and one night with a pistol. It’s a secret that has inspired some students to reach outside themselves in ways they might have never considered.

While experts say any one event is just a drop in the bucket in the effort to mold a school’s culture, there’s some evidence that this kind of video may be a larger drop.

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Teen births are at their lowest level in almost 70 years, federal data report today. Birthrates for ages 15-19 in all racial and ethnic groups are lower than ever reported.

“Young people are being more careful,” says Sarah Brown, CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. She attributes the declines to less sex and increased use of contraception.

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Archbishop Aspinall told gatherers at St John’s Cathedral in central Brisbane that it “feels like darkness has engulfed the world”, using social media as an example.

“It turns ingenious technology with amazing potential for good into a weapon for bullying, brutality and destruction,” he said.

“Some of our young people are taking their own lives to escape the pain and others take a sinister delight in violence on YouTube grievously mistaking it for entertainment.”

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With five weeks’ passage, the fateful encounter between a black youth who wanted to go to college and a Hispanic man who wanted to be a judge has polarized the nation.

And, now this modest central Florida community finds its name being mentioned with Selma and Birmingham on a civil rights list held sacred in black American culture, while across the country, the parsing of the case has become cacophonic and political, punctuated by pleas for tolerance, words of hatred, and spins from the left and right.

Read it all and also note The Events Leading to the Shooting of Trayvon Martin.

In the late 1980s, Marcia Herman-Giddens, then a physician’s associate in the pediatric department of the Duke University Medical Center, started noticing that an awful lot of 8- and 9-year-olds in her clinic had sprouted pubic hair and breasts. The medical wisdom, at that time, based on a landmark 1960 study of institutionalized British children, was that puberty began, on average, for girls at age 11. But that was not what Herman-Giddens was seeing. So she started collecting data, eventually leading a study with the American Academy of Pediatrics that sampled 17,000 girls, finding that among white girls, the average age of breast budding was 9.96. Among black girls, it was 8.87.

When Herman-Giddens published these numbers, in 1997 in Pediatrics, she set off a social and endocrinological firestorm. “I had no idea it would be so huge,” Herman-Giddens told me recently….

Now most researchers seem to agree on one thing: Breast budding in girls is starting earlier. The debate has shifted to what this means. Puberty, in girls, involves three events: the growth of breasts, the growth of pubic hair and a first period. Typically the changes unfold in that order, and the proc­ess takes about two years. But the data show a confounding pattern. While studies have shown that the average age of breast budding has fallen significantly since the 1970s, the average age of first period, or menarche, has remained fairly constant, dropping to only 12.5 from 12.8 years. Why would puberty be starting earlier yet ending more or less at the same time?

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A new longitudinal study of 500 youth group graduates may provide some answers. Conducted by the Fuller Youth Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary, the study followed the graduates through their years in college or vocational school. The results are compiled in a book, “Sticky Faith: Everyday ideas to build lasting faith in your kids” (Zondervan).

Some of the suggestions aren’t surprising (for instance, the level of church involvement by parents plays a key role in a teen maintaining their faith walk). Other suggestions, though, may surprise Christian leaders.

Baptist Press asked Sticky Faith co-author Kara E. Powell — executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute — about the research….

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[Many of the frequent quotes on hears among Methodists these days] …in some way, [are] responses to the question, “Can young people save the Church?”

Whether vocalized or not, this question permeates United Methodist dialogue about membership decline, denominational vitality and the state of young people in an ever-changing world. Many of our conversations about these topics are well-intentioned attempts to answer this question.

But the question of whether or not young people can save the Church is not effective, because it is based on inaccurate assumptions about young people and membership decline.

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Judges have convicted a Congolese warlord of snatching children from the street and turning them into killers.

The ruling is the International Criminal Court’s first judgment 10 years after it was established in The Hague as the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal.

Thomas Lubanga did not react as presiding Judge Adrian Fulford read out the verdicts Wednesday. He now faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment….

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Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo said he is delighted to have first-hand papal approval for changing the order by which children in his diocese receive the sacraments.

“I was very surprised in what the Pope said to me, in terms of how happy he was that the sacraments of initiation have been restored to their proper order of baptism, confirmation then first Eucharist,” said Bishop Aquila, after meeting Pope Benedict on March 8.

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[The] Greece youth unemployment rate has risen to 51.1%. It was 39% in 2010, 28.9% in 2009, 26.3% in 2008, 24.5% in 2007

–Alberto Nardelli as cited in this morning’s Telegraph.

Two adults died in a shooting at a high school in Jacksonville, Florida, a fire department official said on Tuesday.

The shooting occurred at the Episcopal High School shortly after 1 p.m., said Tom Francis, a spokesman for the Jacksonville Fire Department.

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Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang, they say, adding that young women use these embellishments in much more sophisticated ways than people tend to realize.

“A lot of these really flamboyant things you hear are cute, and girls are supposed to be cute,” said Penny Eckert, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. “But they’re not just using them because they’re girls. They’re using them to achieve some kind of interactional and stylistic end.”

The latest linguistic curiosity to emerge from the petri dish of girl culture gained a burst of public recognition in December, when researchers from Long Island University published a paper about it in The Journal of Voice. Working with what they acknowledged was a very small sample ”” recorded speech from 34 women ages 18 to 25 ”” the professors said they had found evidence of a new trend among female college students: a guttural fluttering of the vocal cords they called “vocal fry.”

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The law recognises the emotional and physical dangers of under-age sex (which is why it has drawn the line of consent in the sand) and often upholds it, although the circumstances in which it takes action are unpredictable, and vary in different parts of Britain. The health services recognise, equally, that teenagers will often ignore the law, and provide practical help and advice to prevent them from the worst consequences of their choices, such as pregnancy or disease. Of course, the coexistence of these two approaches involves some element of doublethink, but sometimes a little of this is necessary to minimise damage.

There is a point, however, at which doublethink actually becomes so extreme as to become part of the problem: that is where we are now, as the state colludes in pumping young teenagers full of hormones while keeping their parents in ignorance of the fact. When the Conservative MP Nadine Dorries proposed running compulsory abstinence lessons for 13- to 16-year-old girls, in tandem with practical sex education ”“ which would suggest that, in line with the law, it would be good to hold off for a bit ”“ she was howled down and caricatured as a religious reactionary. Should a 13-year-old who is having consensual sex with her 18-year-old boyfriend seek a contraceptive implant, she can be piously congratulated for taking “adult decisions on her sexuality” ”“ in preparation for an act deemed so potentially damaging to her that it could land him in jail. Confused? I am. Is it any wonder they are?

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Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys….

Female adolescence is ”” universally ”” an emotionally and psychologically intense period. It is during this time that girls become aware of the emergence of womanhood, with both the great joy and promise that come with it, and also the threat of danger. Much on their minds is their new potential for childbearing, an event that for most of human history has been fraught with physical peril. Furthermore, their emergence as sexual creatures brings with it heady excitement and increased physical vulnerability. They are also sharply aware that soon they will have to leave home forever, and at the very moment when they are most keenly desirous of its comforts and protections.

What girls need during this time is a stable and supportive space in which to work out all of this drama. In many respects a teenage girl’s home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist….

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…a tragedy in Lewis’ life — the death of his mother from cancer while he was still a teenager — spurred a period of introspection, what Lewis called “the dark nights of my soul.”

After reading many books on religion — “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis being a particular influence — talking with friends and studying Bible Scripture to find the true meaning behind the words, Lewis had what he called “an intense conversion experience in college.”

“Even though I thought Scripture was dumb, it started compelling me more and more as I read,” he said. “Faith didn’t emerge until I began to take my life seriously.”

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(Please note the content of this post is unlikely to be suited to some blog readers–KSH).

Gemma Barker, from Middlesex, wore boy’s clothes and gave herself three false identities so she could have sexual encounters with her 15- and 16-year-old friends, the Daily Mail reported.
Prosecutor Ruby Selva told Guildford Crown Court Barker set up Facebook profiles for her different personas and had individual dress styles for them.
She completely fooled her friends and their families by posing as Aaron Lampard, Connor McCormack and Luke Jones, the court heard.

Read it all and you can you can find the Daily Mail article there.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Everything’s going digital these days ”” including cheating….

“There’s an epidemic of cheating,” says Robert Bramucci, vice chancellor for technology and learning services at South Orange Community College District in Mission Viejo, Calif. “We’re not catching them. We’re not even sure it’s going on.”

Several security-related companies, such as Spycheatstuff.com, will even overnight-mail a kit that turns a cellphone or iPod into a hands-free personal cheating device, featuring tiny wireless earbuds, that allows a test-taker to discreetly “phone a friend” during a test and get answers remotely without putting down the pencil.

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Girls are starting sex at ever younger ages ”“ but boys, it seems, are not.

The trend, revealed in the annual Health Survey for England 2010, published yesterday, triggered claims about the “pornification” of British culture.

The survey found more than one in four women (27 per cent) aged 16 to 24 said they’d had sex before the age of 16 ”“ the legal age for consent ”“ compared with just over one in five men (22 per cent).

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