Don’t forget! The early bird deadline to register for the Campference is June 30th.

Last month, the American Psychiatric Association released the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-V. In it, they changed the diagnosis criteria for Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) which actually made it slightly easier for physicians to make a diagnosis. Previously, if the symptoms were observed before the age of 7, the diagnosis could be made. Now that age has been moved to 12.

Here’s a sample of the criteria:

1. Often does not give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, work, or other activities.
2. Often has trouble keeping attention on tasks or play activities.
3. Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly.
4. Often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace (not due to oppositional behavior or failure to understand instructions).
5. Often has trouble organizing activities.
6. Often avoids, dislikes, or doesn’t want to do things that take a lot of mental effort for a long period of time (such as schoolwork or homework).
7. Often loses things needed for tasks and activities (e.g. toys, school assignments, pencils, books, or tools).
8. Is often easily distracted.
9. Is often forgetful in daily activities.

If a child exhibits six or more of these consistently and it could be said that you have an attention deficit. (See the full criteria at the CDC website) But if you’re an adult, you now just have to exhibit five of these criteria.

What’s the impact?

Changing the age from 7 to 12 for kids, and from 6 criteria to 5 in adults, makes it easier to make an ADHD diagnosis. And, as Pieter Cohen of the Wall Street Journal points out, it sets up a whole lot more people to be prescribed various forms of amphetamine. (Forms of this drug have been abused for generations.)

He writes:

Even before DSM-5, doctors were already on track to prescribe enough stimulants this year for each American man, woman and child to receive the equivalent of 130 mg of amphetamine (about 40 five-mg pills of Adderall) and an even greater amount of the very similar drug Ritalin. In this era of excessive prescribing, we seem to have forgotten the cautionary history of amphetamines in America—a history that shows how overprescribing stimulants leads to widespread dependence and addiction.

Source

Did you catch that? 40 pills of Adderall for every person in America. That’s a lot of drugs.

What do you think? Was changing the criteria a good thing or a bad thing? 

Photo credit: Light blue by hipsxxhearts via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Last summer, I helped Jeremy Lee build a new resource called Parentministry.net. It wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t my content. I just helped him build the first version of the website and help him get it off the ground. (I start things, it’s my favorite.)

What is it?

Simply put… PM.net provides you with baseline content for developing a ministry to parents. It provides a framework of content you can build off of. It gives you emails, videos, tweets, and even outlines for parent meetings all built around a progression of content from 7-12 grade.

Why should I try it?

If you aren’t doing anything systemically with parents… meaning you aren’t actively ministering to them, you are probably just passing along information at your meetings or in communications, I think you should give this a try and see what happens. My assumption is that it’ll amplify your youth ministries effectiveness. Use it as your starting point, customize the snot out of it to represent who you and your ministry is, or just give it a whirl right out of the box.

“But Adam, I don’t have budget for ministering to parents and this costs money.”

Yup, I get that. It costs money and you’re used to not spending money to do what you do. (Or don’t do…) My suggestion would be to get together with your lead pastor and your children’s ministry person, look over the materials together, maybe take a tour of the site, and then decide if trying it is worth the money. (It’s less than you spend on VBS materials every year.)

If you aren’t doing anything at all I think it’s at least worth looking at.

Disclosure: While we weren’t paid for this blog post, PM.net is a partner at The Summit, an organization that we regularly consult with/do business with. Hopefully you can see it’s something we’re excited about… but we want to be upfront in letting you know that we have a business relationship with PM.net.

Marah’s talk at The Summit was one which caused a lot of people to take notice. Dosomething.org is a relatively new, relatively small organization which directly engages and activates more than a million teenagers. (With a goal of 10,000,000)

They do that mostly through social networking and text messaging and mostly without adult involvement. 

A Challenge

Watch this video with your student ministry team and spend some time reflecting on what Dosomething.org is doing to activate teenagers around causes they care about. We’ve provided some sample questions, but don’t be limited to these questions. Run with it and let us know what you come up with in the comments.

Questions for Reflection

1. What are your rules for getting students involved? Are your rule inhibiting anyone from getting involved?
2. Do you know the top causes for the teenagers in your life?
3. How are you making volunteering social?
4. What’s your organizations text messaging strategy for activating teenagers?
5. Marah talks about impregnating students phones to get students to talk about being a teen pregnancy, what’s a call to action you want to activate students to think about?
6. If students don’t want to be in the spotlight, how does that impact your student leadership philosophy?
7. What’s an incentive that could help motivate your students?

Follow Marah on Twitter

Register for The Summit 2013

Adam and Marko’s beard are both fans of the A&E show, Duck Dynasty. 

So when Eric Gillis, the executive director at Rome YFC offered us the chance to receive some love at an event celebrating the chapters 40 year anniversary and featuring Jase Robertson we were stoked!

We’d like to think Jase is living the Cartel Life. Or at least his beard is. 

Live near there and want to go? Click here to buy tickets.

Chances are good that as a youth worker you’ve had  conversations with students and parents about statutory rape laws, the age of consent to a sexual relationship, and what to do about it.

When I talk to youth workers, most agree, this is a grey area we don’t feel comfortable having a blanket rule for. (Whereas the law is fairly concrete, most prosecutors and law enforcement don’t seem interested in pursuing cases unless the family of one party is particularly demanding.)

In my own ministry, the furthest this ever went was for the parents of all parties to get together and talk about it. The most common response, even among really upset parents, is that parents don’t want to talk about the sex lives of their teenagers any more than they want to talk about their sex lives. So while they talk about it with their own child very little comes of it in the long run.

Where it gets interesting for us, as paid and volunteer youth workers, is that in many states our role means that we are also a mandatory reporter. So if we know that a crime has been committed, particularly one where a minor has been involved sexually, not reporting it or at least documenting it could lead us into areas of liability or even prosecution.

Talk about murky waters!

A current case, involving two female high school students, one a senior and the other a freshmen, is bringing this whole discussion into the national spotlight.

Like so many teenagers before her, Kaitlyn had sexual contact with a younger peer. She engaged in a consensual, sexual relationship with a female student who was 14 at the time, 15 today. Now, Kaitlyn faces two counts of lewd and lascivious battery, punishable by up to 15 years in prison each. Presumably, both will be questioned by prosecutors in a trial about the specifics of their physical relationship.

Source

This particular case is drawing attention primarily because of the sexual orientation of parties involved. There’s little question that the couple engaged consensually, but as Slate points out, there’s a question about whether this case is about statutory rape and the subsequent label for the high school senior as asexual predator or if this case is going forward because the alleged victim’s parents disapprove of their daughters sexual orientation. (I told you these were murky waters. I’m bringing it up because so many of us are in these murky waters on a day-to-day basis.)

With all of that said. I’m curious about your opinions as a youth worker. The poll below is anonymous. But I think it’s interesting to gauge where we are at as a tribe. After you submit your answers you’ll be able to view the results. 

Poll

An individual can pour alcohol over dry ice and inhale it directly or with a straw, or make a DIY vaporizing kit using bike pumps. The alcohol of choice is poured into a bottle, the bottle is corked, and the bicycle pump needle is poked through the top of the cork. Air is pumped into the bottle to vaporize the alcohol, and the user inhales.

Source

For those of us who have hung out with students for a while, there seems to be no end to the experimental ways people will try to get high or drunk. I remember people inhaling carbon dioxide, others huffing aerosol sprays, and others experimenting with crack because someone told them it was like cocaine but a lot safer, and of course the ever-growing abuse/acceptance of marijuana all across the country right now.

As the doctor in the video points out, inhaling hard alcohol directly into the lungs is a really, really bad idea physiologically. But that alone has never stopped anyone before.

Questions

1. Fess up. Have you tried this? What’s the draw? What are the drawbacks? The video above mentions it as a way to get drunk without the calories. Seems like a strange justification to me. 
2. Are students in your area really doing this? It’s hard to tell if this is a real trend or if this is just something that is being reported, which is thus making it a real trend. After all, TIME is the same magazine who brought us butt chugging…
3. What else would you need to know about this before educating students about it? Of course, you don’t want to teach them about something in order to combat it. But if it’s really a trend, it seems like you’d need more to go on.

Photo by Chi (in oz) via Flickr (Creative Commons)

This morning we saw that Amazon changed the price of Joel Mayward’s book, Leading Up, to $1.99.

It’s a limited time thing so if you’ve wanted to check out the book, now is your chance to do it for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Collectively, this talk took our breathe away. Marko and I didn’t know this was coming. But Gregory had all of our attention from the moment he took the stage.

More importantly than his presentation style, his talk left us with serious questions to ponder. 

1. Do we have the eyes to see teenagers on the edge?
2. When you recognize the warning signs in seemingly “normal” students, do you act?
3. What does fearless dialogue look like in your context?
4. How is interrupting hope talked about in your ministry?
5. What does a miracle look like to the marginalized among you?
6. What does it mean to surround young people with communities of reliable others?

Challenge

These would be excellent questions to process with people who care about teenagers in your ministry. Watch this video with your team and work through these questions. (Adults, student leaders, etc.)

We’d love to hear how this video has impacted your ministry. 

Join Us

This video is from The Summit 2012. We’d love to have you and your team at The Summit this November. We’re bringing together 18 brand new presenters to challenge and stir your imagination.

I recently read Joel Mayward’s book Leading Up, an excellent book for Christian leaders on leadership and influencing people around you. The book really resonated with me and by sharing some of my thoughts and own experiences, I’d like to show you why.

Who are you?

“Before leading up you have to know who you are.”

Joel writes this in the first chapter after the story on youth pastor Logan his book begins with. It seems like a cliché this statement, but there’s a deep truth in it. Joel shares his own story of how his leadership started from a place of insecure pride and how that affected his leadership.

My leadership started the same way, though I’d say it was more insecurity than pride. You see, I wasn’t at all convinced I was the right man for the job of youth pastor (or youth coordinator as I was officially called). First of all I wasn’t a man, but a woman and while our church was open to women in leadership and preaching roles, I was one of the firsts to actually make that theory a reality.

Secondly, I did not have a theological background and that’s the one that really made me insecure. I always felt I wasn’t good enough, didn’t know enough compared to others, and it affected my leadership.

At times I was afraid to give my opinion, so sure it would be shot down, than no one would take me seriously. It also made me defensive whenever I encountered criticism, even constructive and rightful feedback.

Other times I would compensate for my own insecurity by being too bold, too dominant in discussions. I’m sure others have felt intimidated by me at times, which is rather ironic because it came from feeling intimidated myself.

Humble confidence

The healthy attitude of a Christian leader is humble confidence, Joel describes and I couldn’t agree more. The expression ‘your identity in Christ’ is one that is in my opinion too easily used without ever making it practical, especially when it comes to leadership. But how Joel describes humble confidence rings true: “allowing Christ to be King, to shape our desires and ambitions instead of trying to build them ourselves.”

The list he gives with characteristics of a humbly confident leader may look like an easy one, but it will take a lifetime of leadership to realize every aspect. And so it should be, ‘level 5 leaders’ aren’t just born, they grow out of experiences combined with the right attitude.

It’s that attitude that makes all the difference. Becoming aware of your insecurity, your pride, that’s a huge first step in changing your leadership into leading up. Living from your identity in Christ is a lifetime journey, but it’s one that is the indispensable foundation under influential leadership. Without a healthy identity, there is no healthy leadership and there is no chance of leading up.