Does going to to church improve kids GPA? A new study shows that children and youth who attend church have higher grades than their peers. The surprise in the study is that it does not matter if they believe what they hear in church, it is attendance that matters.
…there I was in the spring of 2007, a mortally sick man trying on size 13 bowling shoes at a bowling hall in Åkeshov, which is located along the underground’s Green Line.
Aaolescents who valued power (trying to attain social status by controlling and dominating others) reported more violent behavior than their peers. Teenagers who valued universalism (promoting understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protecting the welfare of all people and nature) and those who valued conformity (limiting actions and urges that might violate social expectations and norms) reported less violent behavior than their peers.
Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily summarizes some interesting research on teens and lying. The research focused on the issue of when teens thought it was okay to lie to their parents or to their friends. The results are interesting: teens are much more likely to think it is okay to lie to their parents when their parents direct them to do something immoral (such as not to be friends with a person of another race) than other circumstances, but teens are much more likely to lie to their parents than to a friend
This item was prompted primarily by a desire to tell as many people as possible what a wonderful movie Juno is, but to give it a little more intellectual respectability, we included a link to Ruth Marcus’ recent column on talking to her daughters about sex. And that’s when things got complicated.
Her father signed a pledge to be the protector of her purity and to live his own life with integrity. She gave her father a gold key to her heart, and asked him to hold on to it until her wedding day, when he would hand it over to her husband. They walked down the aisle with locked arms and she laid a white rose beside a cross, sealing her commitment.
Fuller Seminary’s Youth Ministry Resource page has an article that discusses what sort of response Youth Ministers might make to a recent study that shows how profoundly a young girl’s internalized decision to see being attractive as more important than being competent can become in their lives.
The Pew Research Center has released a new study that shows a marked increase in the desire for part-time work versus full-time work in recent years. The preference for full time work has dropped for both stay-at-home moms and working moms. Fathers, on the the other hand, still prefer full-time work.
“Teen birthrates continued their 15-year decline in 2005 as adolescents increasingly got into the habit of using condoms during sexual intercourse,” writes Marc Kaufman in The Washington Post. The percentage of teens having sex is down, too.
American schools are awash in moral instruction — on sex, multiculturalism, environmental awareness and so on — and basically none of it works according to David Brooks, who offers some thoughts on why this is so.