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”The years in which a young person transitions from childhood to adulthood can be challenging. How should we deal with our children during the teen years?
Teenagers.
Just mentioning the word can cause anxiety for some people. Perhaps it’s because of memories of their own trip through the teen years, or perhaps it reflects experiences with their own children during that stage.
For many, those years of not being a child—but not quite being an adult either—are years of uncertainty, insecurity, learning, pushing boundaries and sometimes outright rebellion.
While adolescence has probably always been a challenging transitional time, it was faced very differently in the past. As the world has changed, the teenage experience has changed.
A better understanding of what those changes are can help us and our children better navigate this developmentally important time.
Adolescents in centuries past
Throughout much of history, adolescents were workers. In fact, children as young as 7 years old were often brought into the workforce. In both towns and farms, children worked beside their parents, doing what was necessary to support the family. As the age of industrialization spread in the 18th and 19th centuries, children began working long hours in factories.
As the standard of living rose in the developed world, educational opportunities began to change. Families were able to survive without their children’s financial contributions, so adolescents often stayed in school longer. Young people could now spend leisure time with peers, and this growing sense of freedom affected the way average teens viewed themselves and the world.
And this brought profound changes to the family.
Evolution of the teenager
It may come as a surprise to some, but prior to World War II, the term teenager was rarely used. In fact, many trace the view of adolescence as a distinct developmental stage to this time period. This newly defined stage of life, combined with a greater level of family income, resulted in other societal changes.
One of those changes in the U.S. and much of the Western world was the availability of the automobile, which provided a degree of freedom and autonomy previously unheard of. Beginning in the 1950s, teenagers suddenly became trendsetters in music, fashion, film and dance.
It became the norm for teenagers to focus on experimentation rather than labor. Teens of the 1960s and 1970s were known for rebellious attitudes and a proclivity for risky behavior that included illegal drugs, abuse of alcohol and a high rate of sexual activity. Parents faced new challenges in helping their teenage children navigate the world and avoid destructive decisions.
But over the last 20 years, the behavior of the average teenager has changed. Recent studies by psychologists like Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, have revealed profound changes in teenage behavior.
Parents, grandparents and guardians need to be certain they are modeling the kind of behavior they want to see from their teens!
According to Dr. Twenge’s research, when compared with teenagers from past decades, 17- and 18-year-olds today are slightly less likely to have tried alcohol and drugs or to have had sex. They are also waiting longer to get a driver’s license or move out of their parents’ homes. On average, they are waiting longer to get married and to have children as well.
Commenting on these findings, the BBC article “Why Teenagers Aren’t What They Used to Be” states, “By many measures, adolescence now continues until around the age of 24 to 25” (Feb. 1, 2022).
What does the modern teen face?
According to studies, the rates of sexual activity and drug and alcohol use among teens have declined since the early 2000s. Smoking has declined by nearly 70 percent among teens. Of course, all of this is good news for teen and parents!
But does this mean modern teens are choosing to refrain from all risky behaviors? Not necessarily.
A slew of studies in recent years reveal teen behaviors have changed, but not always for the better. The reality is that today’s teens have the ability to be involved in activities that didn’t exist for previous generations. The digital age has dramatically changed the fabric of adolescence and is forcing parents to worry about new challenges.
While smoking has declined across all age groups, we can’t ignore the alternative that has appeared: the e-cigarette (commonly known as vaping). Between 2011 and 2019 the use of e-cigarettes among teens rose by 1,800 percent!
With the dramatic rise in vaping, the medical community is now reporting a similar rise in lung problems, heart disease, gum inflammation, and negative impacts on brain development directly tied to use of e-cigarettes.
The more we learn, the clearer it is that e-cigarettes are not a healthy alternative to smoking.
The impact of smartphones on teens
According to an August 2019 Pew Research Center report, 95 percent of U.S. teenagers have access to a smartphone. These mobile electronic devices have single-handedly revolutionized teenage life. Social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and Snapchat—which didn’t exist a generation or two ago—now dominate the life and time of today’s teens.
The cell phone is so embedded in teenage life that an earlier (2018) Pew Research survey found 45 percent of teens say they’re online on a near constant basis! A 2018 Common Sense Media survey found that 60 percent of teens said they would rather socialize with friends online instead of face to face.
The artificial world of social media has created a heightened obsession with beauty and glamour that the average teen feels unable to attain. This has been linked to increased feelings of discouragement and depression among teens. As a result, a Science Daily study connected the unrealistic images of life shown on social media with a rise in suicides among teenage girls.
Smartphones have also contributed to automobile accidents. Studies show that a texting driver is 20 times more likely to have an accident, and yet 35 percent of teen drivers report responding to text messages when they are behind the wheel!
Access to smartphones has also increased access to pornography. It’s not an overstatement to declare pornography one of the greatest pandemics of our time. The U.S. Department of Justice recently stated: “Never before in the history of telecommunications media in the United States has so much indecent (and obscene) material been so easily accessible by so many minors in so many American homes with so few restrictions.”
Other studies reveal that 93 percent of our sons and 62 percent of our daughters have been exposed to online pornography before the age of 18, with more than half of boys and nearly a third of girls having their first exposure before they’re 13. Over a third of teenage boys reported viewing pornographic videos “too many times to count.”
This issue recently came to the forefront when musician Billie Eilish acknowledged she had viewed explicit content starting at 11 years old and had been negatively affected by it. She described her brain being “destroyed” and suffering nightmares because of it.
Considering that the digital world is only expanding, and creating new challenges as it does so, it’s worth noting that it’s never been more important for parents and teens to be grounded in the eternal standards of God.
Another new challenge associated with this is the rise of sexting, or “self porn.” Different studies show different statistics about teens who have sent nude images of themselves by text, email or app, but all of the estimates are alarming. Laws against child pornography seem to have a limited impact.
These are just some of the many challenges that teens face today.
How can a parent respond?
The world of a typical teenager suddenly seems far more complicated than in previous generations. So where does that leave parents and teens who desire to live a godly life? There are several important points for us to keep in mind.
1. God’s standards don’t change. Parents must keep in mind that no matter where societal trends might go, the solid truth of the Bible never changes! God told the prophet Malachi, “For I am the LORD, I do not change” (Malachi 3:6). And the book of Hebrews declares, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).
What was sin in the past is still sin today. Our responsibility is to understand the principles our Creator gives us in Scripture and understand how to apply them to modern challenges. Though none of the challenges cited in this article are directly mentioned in the Bible, the core principles of moral purity that they break have always been there.
Considering that the digital world is only expanding, and creating new challenges as it does so, it’s worth noting that it’s never been more important for parents and teens to be grounded in the eternal standards of God.
2. Stay connected with your children. God instructed Moses to tell the Israelites to teach their children about God’s ways “when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:7). This instruction must be a constant part of our relationship with our children. Proverbs 22:6 instructs parents to “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
But when our own lives are flooded with so much to do that we can hardly find time to stop and catch our breath, how can we possibly keep up with what our children are doing? School and a wide range of social activities are only a few of the items on their plate. Is it possible for parents to keep up with all of that?
The number one key is open communication.
It’s critical to be involved and informed about their lives, their friends, and where and what they do. Although our relationship with our children evolves over time, we must never forget we are first and foremost parents who have their best interests at heart.
If we want to provide counsel and guidance, we must know what they’re facing.
3. Set appropriate boundaries. Teenagers are almost adults, but not quite. So, they will continue to require rules and the motivation to follow them. You will naturally adjust your rules depending on the age and maturity of your teen, but it is essential to establish limits and curfews for them. There are also a wide variety of parental control apps for computers, tablets and smartphones. It would be wise to do research and eventually invest in a program that will set proper boundaries for your teen.
4. Pray for discernment and wisdom. James wrote, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him” (James 1:5). Parents of teens know how much they need wisdom to properly guide and teach their children!
5. Set the right example. In addition to taking the important steps listed above, parents, grandparents and guardians need to be certain they are modeling the kind of behavior they want to see from their teens! We should ask ourselves if we are being honest, if we are trustworthy, if we are living by the moral standards we want our teens to hold. “Do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t work with child-rearing, and it most certainly will not work with teenagers!
The teen years are something everyone must go through. The way society has viewed these years has changed over the centuries, and the influences teens face today are different from those past generations faced. But these years need not be so dreadful for teens and parents.
We all need to focus on the never-changing truths of God to form the foundation for our values and behaviors. There will be challenges, detours and difficult times, but parents can use the Bible as their guide to help their children navigate through their teenage years.”
From: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/relationships/parenting/how-to-parent-a-teenager/?
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You Can’t Give Too Much Love!
“At one time or another most parents will hear warnings of “don’t spoil your child!” It’s helpful to know the real cause of spoiling—and it isn’t love!
Sometimes relatives or acquaintances express concern that parents are giving too much to their child. The feared result is a child who is demanding, pampered and self-centered and expects everyone to cater to his or her whims.
Spoiling happens!
We parents take such admonishments seriously. We’ve all seen spoiled kids, and we know they’re no fun to be around! As well, we realize that, for all they might rake in, spoiled children do not have happy lives.
Many followed the sad (and outrageous) case of Ethan Couch and his “affluenza” defense—that his family’s wealth was responsible for his poor choices that caused the deaths of four people when he drove drunk in 2013 at the age of 16. Couch was sentenced to 10 years of probation and mandatory treatment, which he violated in 2015.
Another case in point: Steven Miner II and his sister Kathryn Miner were raised in a $1.5 million home in a wealthy Chicago suburb. But it seems they didn’t feel they were treated well enough.
In 2009, when Steven was 21 and Kathryn was 18, they filed a lawsuit against their mother for the “emotional distress” they suffered as children from her alleged abuses, such as “failing to take her daughter to a car show, telling her then-7-year-old son to buckle his seat belt or she would contact police, ‘haggling’ over the amount to spend on party dresses and calling her daughter at midnight to ask that she return home from celebrating homecoming.”
A third example would be the sons of Eli, Israel’s high priest before the nation had its first human king. Reading the description of them in 1 Samuel 2, one can’t help but imagine that they were used to getting everything they asked for.
Eli’s timid rebuke had no effect on them at all (verses 23-25), and ultimately God gave this evaluation of Eli’s parenting: “You honor your sons more than Me” (verse 29).
Overindulged
So, yes, we parents should take care not to spoil our children. But what is spoiling caused by? Is it caused by too much time, attention or love?
Is it even possible for us parents to give our children too much time, attention or love?
Child development professionals have concluded that spoiling does come from overindulging, but it is overindulging in permissiveness, low standards and lack of restraint.
Child development professionals have concluded that spoiling does come from overindulging, but it is overindulging in permissiveness, low standards and lack of restraint. It comes from parents giving children material things and privileges as a substitute for their time, attention and love.
As Laurence Steinberg Ph.D., author of The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting, writes, “I can think of plenty of children who have suffered because their parents were too busy, too selfish, or too preoccupied to attend to their needs. But I’ve never met a child who was worse off because his parents loved him too much. It is simply not possible to spoil a child with love” (2004, p. 27).
Madeline Levine Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who works with teens in prosperous Marin County, California, has written a book outlining the danger affluence poses to families. Titled The Price of Privilege, the book’s subtitle says a lot: “How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids.”
Levine writes, “Study after study shows that teens want more, not less, time with their parents, yet parents regularly overestimate the amount of time they spend with their teenagers. … Nor a son grieve for gifts not received—except, perhaps, the gift of time and love.”
Let your children know every day that you love them, that they are special to you and that you appreciate them. There’s no danger of spoiling them with love.” From: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/relationships/parenting/you-cant-give-too-much-love/?
For more foundational principles about parenting, see “Helping Our Children Grow” and “Raising Children: The Early Years.”
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From me: As I was deserted at age 4, I never knew what it was like to be loved by parents and I was sent from place to place until I got out on my own at age 15. So unfortunately, I didn’t know how to show my children that I loved them. I figured surely they knew that because I was working so hard trying to support them. Love is something that should not be quiet, it needs to be told out loud!! Thank the Lord for your parents and tell them you love them.
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Fighting the Ten Hallmarks of Cancer with Food
“The foundation of cancer prevention is plants, not pills
Transcript of YouTube: https://youtu.be/HcAN8BjPjuE
Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.
“The vast majority of cancer research is devoted to finding cures, rather than finding new ways to prevent disease.” And the results of these skewed priorities are plain to see: 2021 is the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s declaration of war on cancer, and the death tolls from the most common forms of cancer in the United States have continued unabated.
“We have been looking at the very nature of cancer in the wrong way.” Breast cancer doesn’t begin when a lump is first detected. All the common cancers like lung, colorectal, breast, and prostate (which account for the majority of deaths) have a long latency period—often 20 years or more. So, it’s not like you were healthy, and then one day you got cancer. You haven’t been healthy—you’ve had cancer growing in you for decades. Indeed, there’s a bizarre misperception that people are “healthy” until they have actual symptoms of invasive cancer. But “[t]he barn in which hay is smoldering before it bursts into flames is not a safe place.”
So, what does this professor of pharmacology recommend? Drugs, of course—chemoprevention: putting people on drugs to prevent cancer. Hey, the pharmaceutical industry spends huge amounts of money to promote chemoprevention of heart disease and strokes with statins and blood thinners. So, why shouldn’t people take drugs every day for the rest of their lives to protect against cancer? There has to be a better way.
What about using diet and nutrition to prevent and treat cancer? Okay, but what kind of cancer? There are more than 200 types of cancer. Ah, but they all share the same hallmarks. In a series of papers cited more than 40,000 times in the biomedical literature, ten hallmarks of cancer have been identified.
Increased sensitivity to growth factors; evading your body’s tumor suppressors; dodging your immune system; being able to grow forever; tumor promoting inflammation; the ability to invade and spread and hook up its own blood supply; the accumulation of DNA mutations; disarming the self-destruct mechanisms in place; and hijacking the cell’s metabolism. And yes, of course, there are classes of drugs to try to counter each one—chemotherapy agents designed to target each piece of the cancer puzzle.
Now ideally, there would be drugs able to target multiple hallmarks at the same time, but that’s not how drugs tend to work. And this is one of the major reasons why, in the context of cancer research, there are so many proponents of investigating plant foods, as they can deliver a cocktail of bioactive compounds—bioactive compounds that may target most, if not all, of the hallmarks of cancer. Here’s a sampling of compounds found in fruits and vegetables such as berries, greens, and broccoli, shown to be able to target each of the ten hallmarks of cancer––at least in a petri dish.
Moreover, they fit the characteristics of an ideal chemopreventive agent. If you were to design the perfect candidate, you’d want them to be selective for cancerous or precancerous cells while leaving normal cells alone, be side effect-free, target most types of cancers, be able to be consumed as a part of a daily diet, be conveniently available almost everywhere, and be relatively inexpensive to boot. And plants have all of these. No wonder those eating more plant-based tend to have lower cancer rates.
However, it should be understood that we’re not talking about taking supplements containing extracts or purified phytochemicals, but rather eating whole plant foods themselves; more of a food-system based approach to targeting the hallmarks of cancer.
Foods contain many thousands of substances that lead to vast numbers of possible interactions, yet much of nutritional science has long been directed towards the impact of single dietary components. Yes, this kind of ‘reductionist’ approach can reveal the role of individual nutrients or foods in the development of disease, but let’s think about what the optimal research strategy would be to study the effects of bioactive natural plant compounds on disease prevention. Instead of using isolated phytochemicals in the management of cancer, how about using whole foods, because sometimes the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, a concept known as food synergy.
Check out this study. The simultaneous inhibition of a series of cancer stages in breast cancer cells using a phytochemical super-cocktail. Two breast cancer cell lines were treated with six different plant compounds individually, and then altogether, at the level you might find in your bloodstream after eating foods like broccoli, grapes, soybeans, and turmeric. And while the compounds were ineffective individually, in combination they significantly suppressed breast cancer cell proliferation by more than 80 percent, inhibited cancer cell migration and invasion, stopped the cancer cells in their tracks, and eventually killed them all off. The plant compounds did all this without having any deleterious effects on the normal noncancerous cells used as control.
No wonder the foundation of cancer prevention, based on an update of the most extensive report on diet and cancer ever published is not pills, but plants. Cut down on alcohol, soda, meat, and processed junk, and center your diet around whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans.” From: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/fighting-the-ten-hallmarks-of-cancer-with-food/?
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