Indoctrination versus Education when it comes to Talking Politics at School
Recently, the “League of Women Voters” put on high school assemblies in NY encouraging students to vote “yes” on Prop 1. Dr. Ralph Kerr with the “Teaching and Learning Institute” says that crosses a line between teaching students “how” to think and not “what” to think. He discusses more this controversy in the latest installment of “Issues in Education” from Family Life News
A national health-care watchdog group is out with new statistics on the number of so-called “gender transition” procedures being done at children’s hospitals. Do No Harm analyzed public insurance records to compile the number of children and teens who were treated using hormones, puberty blockers, and surgical procedures on sexual body parts. The organization also analyzed the amount of money paid by insurance companies to cover those costs. (Public funds such as Medicaid and state and federal government grants are also used for such purposes.)
Beth Serio of Do No Harm told us nearly 2,000 underage minors in New York and Pennsylvania were recipients of such procedures in the most recent reporting period. She talks about the exponential growth in this trend, the financial and philosophical motivations for medical providers and hospitals to recommend “gender affirming care”, and the complications which can result for patients and for the society.
Three PA/NY hospital systems are listed in their national Top Ten List for millions of dollars raked in to perform sex change treatments for minors: Mount Sinai, New York University, and Penn Medicine. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, with 122 such patients, by far tops the list of providers described as what DNH describes as the “Dirty Dozen” in the United States.
These links provide more information about Do No Harm, which takes its name from the millenia-old medical motto:
This week’s guest on Family Life’s “Hometown Heroes” feature is Jenn Boyd of the “Hope Walks” ministry. It works from Pennsylvania, but provides international medical work to help relieve the physical limitations — and, just as important, the social and personal stigma — faced by many children who are born with Club Foot syndrome. Their emphasis is that a treatable condition shouldn’t keep a child from walking.
This ministry has provided treatments for more than 161,000 children in 14 nations.
Hear about how this medical mission work is transforming lives and communities. Tap the podcast player on this page. You can also go to FamilyLife.org/newspodcasts to download or share this conversation with other who you believe would be interested too. (That link also give you a subscribe option to be notified each time Mark Webster posts a new edition of his “Hometown Heroes” interviews.)
Jenn Boyd is the communications project coordinator for Hope Walks, based in York Springs, PA.
A background video is called “Hope Prays, Heals, Impacts … and Walks”. Their site also has multiple other videos online to explain the problem, the mission’s ways of healing, and the first-person stories of the families whose lives are enhanced because of a surgery which is simple and common in the U.S.
An on-air feature and podcast from Family Life News – 10/07/2024
Kids Behaving Badly
The S-A-T
Helping Rural Schools Keep Up with Technology
Dr. Ralph Kerr at the “Teaching and Learning Institute” discusses education “trends” and topics of interest that impact our public schools. Listen for “Issues in Education” on alternating Mondays on during Family Life’s newscasts and podcasts.
We take a Trolley to this week’s Staycation Destination.
The Pennsylvania Trolley Museum offers a ride into pre-automobile history. Most people think of the Land of Make-Believe in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood when they think of trolleys. However, the electrified mode of transportation was real-world big business, shaped the development of metro areas, and expanded ways people could go beyond their neighborhoods to go to work, medical appointments and social events.
Volunteer tour guide Gary Malaskovitz gives Greg Gillispie and our listeners a vision of that history, plus a ride on one of the nine fully-restored trolleys which still offer rides to the museum’s visitors (and guests of the annual Washington County Fair!). You’ll also hear from some of the children who enjoyed a simulator which allows them to drive a trolley.
In addition to what aired during our Family Life Noon Report, you also have bonus content where Malaskovitz talks more about what young families enjoy about the Trolley Museum (many are fans of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Donkey Hodie and Thomas the Tank Engine) — plus his own story, growing up and riding the trolleys of Pittsburgh.
The Pennsylvania Trolley Museum is at 1 Electric Way in Washington, Pennsylvania. During the summer, it is closed Mondays, but open on holidays. Outside of summer, the museum operates Friday through Sunday. Their website is at www.PA-trolley.org.
How parents can reduce stress and anxiety in our children and teens
“You are the parent. You will be your child’s strongest influence, and that is a mantle you really need to take up.”
Christian counselor Christopher Anderson explores how your family be a positive influence on young people who are facing social anxiety, cultural stresses, and the everday growing pains of growing up.
Some of his recommendations:
Spend intentional quality time with children (even as young as toddlers). Do meaningful activities and have meaningful conversations with your children and teens
Ask them specifically if there are any matters that are raising internal concerns for them — from school, with friends, anywhere
Choose the information intake flooding into their lives: reduce the clutter of e-device information, and increase age-appropriate emphasis on Scriptures
Real Answers is one of our Wednesday News Features from Family Life News — from our radio broadcasts, app streaming, and website downloads.
Parenting: Taking the Long View – Inside Out – 2/28/24
We want to raise our children well. Because of that, we look for instructions. That was true for parent and educational consultant Laura Spaulding.
“It seemed to be that there was always just a right way presented to you, and some of it came from the Christian culture, and some of it came from the neighborhood, and some of it came from TV,” she says.
Spaulding is the author of a January 2024 Gospel Coalition article titled Taking the Long View Revolutionized My Parenting.
Christian parents hold on to Proverbs 22:6, where we’re instructed to “train up a child in the way he should go,” so that, “when he is old, he will not depart from it. Taking that verse apart and recognizing what it really is saying: it is saying, ‘Start them this way, and it finishes this way.’ Like all the middle is so unique to each person,” she says.
Two decades into her parenting journey, Spaulding believes she’s developed some perspective.
“The chief end of parenting is not getting kids into perfect colleges so that they can find the perfect job and marry the perfect spouse, so that they could turn around and have perfect kids of their own,” she says. “The chief end of parenting, just like the chief end of life, is perfection for all eternity.”
Gospel Coalition
That’s the kind of perfection that doesn’t come from formulas. It comes from Christ. “The ‘perfection for all eternity’ comes at the end of the race. At the end of the journey. And so our job as parents is to prepare our kids for a journey. It is to get them started.”
Get to know your children well, she says, and parent them accordingly.“Put the parenting books away and instead study the child in your arms,” she says, “really paying attention to what are their unique gifts and limitations. What motivates them. What stresses them out. What lights them up.”
Proverbs 22:6, Spaulding says, is a gracious invitation for taking a long view on the development of our children. “Use what you learn about them to help them know themselves, to help them know and relate to their Creator, to help prepare them for the good works that God has prepared in advance for them to do.
Join us for our 18-minute conversation by listening to the podcast.
Read the article that inspired this conversation here.
If you’re having trouble helping your kids negotiate their emotions, you’re not alone.
“We always fall into kind of two ends of a spectrum,” says writer and Bible teacher Courtney Reissig. “We either want to protect them too much from experiencing hard things, or we don’t want them to feel or express those hard things when life happens. And we all probably know which one we fall into.”
Reissig recommends parents turn to the Psalms for help. She’s the author of the recent Gospel Coalition article “Use the Psalms to Teach Kids About Feelings.”
“Psalms speak to very real feelings and very real emotions,” she says, “and that’s helpful to us because God created us to feel things, and then He’s given us a whole book of the Bible that teaches us how to navigate those feelings and to express those feeling back to God. Many of them are prayers or songs that we sing back to God. And so we take all of our feelings and all of our emotions and then we move them towards the only one who can do anything with what we’re feeling.”
Learn more about how the Psalms can help children express and understand their emotions by listening to our 14-minute podcast. Read what Courtney Reissig is writinghere.
Inside Out – Biblical Worldview – Barna Research – 11/01/23
We develop our way of looking at the world—our worldview—before we turn 13.
Remarkably, new research finds that fewer than one in ten parents think through how to guide their children spiritually during those critical years.
Dr. George Barna directs the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University and includes these findings in his new book Raising Spiritual Champions: Nurturing Your Child’s Heart, Mind and Soul. “Everybody has a worldview. You need a worldview to get through the day,” Barna says. “So children are going to develop a worldview whether their parents are involved in it or not. That is a vacuum that has to be filled.”
If parents don’t work toward developing their children’s spiritual life, other worldviews will fill that void. “Without their parents being there to help guide them, they’re just doing the best they can to make sense of it all.” Barna offers ways to help parents to live out their roles as disciple-makers. “The first of those is to recognize that God gave them these children to raise up to be disciples,” he says. So it’s important to be intentional and not outsource this critical part of parenting.
“They have to have not only a commitment, but a plan to take in these children during those formative 12 years, and do everything they can to lead them down the right path.” That begins by knowing what beliefs you as a parent want your children to embrace. “Why? Because we do what we believe. In essence, your worldview is based on your beliefs, that then gets translated into behavior,” he says.
“The only way that you can be Christlike is to think like Jesus so that you can live like Jesus.”
Children see when stated beliefs are not reflected in behavior. “Kids don’t trust their parents anymore because their parents say one thing and do another. You want to get to your kids? Model the beliefs that you’re trying to teach them. When they see you live it out, then they’re going to say, ‘Okay, I see it. It works. My parents believe it. I’m going to run with it.’”
Underlying all of this, Dr. George Barna recommends that Christian parents bear in mind the context of all of their parenting. “Parenting is a vital battle in the spiritual war in which we live,” he says. “We have to be aware of the nature of that battle if we’re going to fight it well.”
Follow-up links for more information and inspiration:
Specific recommendations and insights for parents and families about building their faith in young, preteen children
How deep and widespread the problem is:too many children are not being nurtured in how to understand and practice their faith
Solutions in George Barna’s new bookRaising Spiritual Champions — his 60th!
