Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

Only 1 in 5 Teens Say They Have Meaningful Relationships with Adults

Only one in five 15-year-olds in the United States have the kind of meaningful relationships with adults beyond their family that help them succeed in life, according to a study released today by Best Buy and Search Institute. This gap interferes with their development, and suggests concrete, powerful ways that adults in schools, neighborhoods, youth organizations, and other settings can have a positive difference in young people's lives.

Adults play an important role in forming relationships with teens, listening to them and serving as positive role models -- and teens who have these relationships have a significant leg up when it comes to staying, or getting, on a path to success.

Source: Marketwatch
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/only-19-percent-of-teens-report-that-they-have-meaningful-relationships-with-adults-2010-07-15?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Regular Time With Dad Is Key to Kids' Happiness

The key to childhood happiness might be more face time with Dad. Kids who chat regularly with their father are happier than kids who don’t, according to new research.

Children who converse with their father “most days” rated themselves 87 out of 100 on a happiness scale, while those who rarely talk to their dads scored a 79. The study results, released by the Children’s Society in Great Britain, called the findings “highly significant” because research has demonstrated that a person’s well-being later in life has a lot to do with their relationship with both parents during the teen years.

Of the 1,200 children in the study, who were 11 to 15, nearly 50% said they “hardly ever” talk to their dads about important subjects, as compared with just 28% who report rarely discussing important subjects with their moms.

Source: New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/2010/06/18/2010-06-18_regular_time_with_dad_is_key_to_kids_happiness_study.html#ixzz0rbdmEG4D

Teen Boys Who Attempt Suicide More Likely to Abuse as Adults

Men who attempted suicide before age 18 are much more likely to abuse their girlfriends or wives, according to a study from the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene.

The U.S. study included 153 males from relatively high-crime neighborhoods who were assessed annually from ages 10 to 32. The men's romantic partners were added to the study when the men were aged 18 to 25. Researchers found that 58 percent of males who tried to kill themselves before age 18 went on to injure a girlfriend or wife, compared with 23 percent of males who didn't attempt suicide when they were youths.

The association between attempted suicide and later aggression toward partners remained even after the researchers controlled for a number of other factors, including aggression, depression, substance abuse and a family history of abuse. The study documented partner abuse through several types of data, including domestic violence arrest records, women's and men's accounts of injuries and live observations of couples.

The findings, published online in the journal Psychological Medicine, offer evidence of the need for intervention programs for suicidal teens, said study co-author David Kerr, an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University (OSU).

"The study began when these men were kids, before anyone knew who was going to be violent," Kerr continued. That is quite different from research that starts with violent men, or women from a domestic violence shelter, and tries to look back in time for explanations."

Source: Businessweek
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/640054.html

More School Friends May Equal Better Grades

School friends may play a major role in a teen's academic success, a new study suggests.

Students with higher grade-point averages (GPAs) had more school friends than out-of-school friends. The more school friends, the higher the GPA.

"We found that within an adolescent's friendship group, those with a higher proportion of friends who attended the same school received higher grades," Melissa R. Witkow, an assistant professor of psychology at Willamette University, said in a University of California, Los Angeles, news release. "This is partially because in-school friends are more likely to be achievement-oriented and share and support school-related activities, including studying, because they are all in the same environment."

Witkow was a UCLA graduate student when she conducted the study, which was recently published online in the Journal of Research on Adolescence.

Source: U.S. News & World Report
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/brain-and-behavior/articles/2010/06/09/more-school-friends-may--better-grades.html

Today's College Students: 40% Less Empathy

College students today show less empathy toward others compared with college students in decades before, a study from the University of Michigan says.

Sara Konrath, a researcher at the university's Institute for Social Research, looked at 72 studies that gauged empathy among 14,000 college students in the past 30 years. She found that empathy has been declining — especially since 2000.

The research finds that college students today show 40% less empathy vs. students in the 1980s and 1990s. The students are less likely to agree with statements such as "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and "I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective."

The study did not evaluate why students are less empathetic, but Konrath says one reason may be that people are having fewer face-to-face interactions, communicating instead through social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

"Empathy is best activated when you can see another person's signal for help," Konrath says.

Michigan graduate student Edward O'Brian, who helped collect data for the study, says the "explosion" in social networking has caused college students to spend less time with each other.

"You might spend your night posting on Facebook walls and sending out tweets to hundreds of your online friends, but by doing so, you're also not spending time with real people and gaining valuable interpersonal experiences," O'Brian says.

Another cause may be changing expectations about success. Since the 1980s, there has been a steady trend in people feeling more stressed about trying to "get ahead," Konrath says.

"With so much time and effort devoted to yourself so you can succeed, who has time for others?" O'Brian says.

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-06-08-empathyresearch08_st_N.htm

Multi-Generational Family Households Make a Comeback

According to a report based on the Pew Research Center's public opinion surveys and analysis of 2008 U.S. Census Bureau data, a record 49 million Americans, or 16.1% of the total U.S. population, lived in a family household that contained at least two adult generations or a grandparent and at least one other generation.

In 1940, about a quarter of the population lived in an extended family household one; by 1980, just 12% did, says the study. A range of demographic factors contributed to this decline, including the rapid growth of the nuclear-family-centered suburbs; the decline in the share of immigrants in the population; and the sharp rise in the health and economic well-being of adults ages 65 and older.

The multi-generational American family household is staging a comeback, driven in part by the job losses and home foreclosures of recent years but more so by demographic changes that have been gathering steam for decades.

Key findings about multi-generational family households and living arrangements of older adults:

• This 33% increase since 1980 in the share of all Americans living in such households represents a sharp trend reversal. From 1940 to 1980, the share of Americans living in such households had declined by more than half (from 25% in 1940 to 12% in 1980)

• The growth since 1980 in these multi-generational households is partly the result of demographic and cultural shifts, including the rising share of immigrants in the population and the rising median age of first marriage of all adults

• At a time of high unemployment and a rising foreclosures, the number of households in which multiple generations of the same family double up under the same roof has spiked significantly. From 2007 to 2008, the number of Americans living in a multi-generational family household grew by 2.6 million

One reason for the reversal in the multi-generational household trend, says the report, is the change in the median age of first marriage. The typical man now marries for the first time at age 28 and the typical women at age 26. For both genders, this is about five years older than it was in 1970. A byproduct of this cultural shift is that there are more unmarried 20-somethings in the population, many of whom consider their childhood home to be an attractive living situation, especially when a bad economy makes it difficult for them to find jobs or launch careers.

Source: Center for Media Research
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=125881

Youths' Use of Social Networking Reflects Their Face-to-Face Interactions

Simply stated, new research suggests that socially well-adapted young people with positive relationships are more likely to use social networking websites (like Facebook) to further enhance the relationships they already have. On the flip side, young people with behavior problems and difficulty making friends are more likely to use social networking in a negative, or aggressive way, or steer clear of social networking altogether.

Though parents often have concerns about letting their teens use social media Web sites like Facebook and MySpace, a new study by University of Virginia psychologists suggests that well-adapted youth with positive friendships will use these sites to further enhance the positive relationships they already have.

However, they warn, teens who have behavioral problems and difficulty making friends, or who are depressed, may be more inclined to use social media in negative and sometimes aggressive ways, or not to use such sites at all.

The study appears in the January issue of the journal Developmental Psychology.

"We're finding that the interactions young adults are having on their Facebook and MySpace pages are more similar to than different from the interactions they have in their face-to-face relationships," said U.Va. psychology professor Amori Yee Mikami, the study's lead author. "So parents of well-adjusted teens may have little to worry about regarding the way their children behave when using social media. It's likely to be similar positive behavior."

However, Mikami warns, teens with behavioral problems or who have difficulty maintaining positive friendships may be more likely to use social media sites in negative ways, just as they may behave negatively in their face-to-face relationships. Negative use of the sites would include using excessive profanity, making hostile remarks or aggressive gestures, or posting nude photographs of themselves or others. They also have fewer supportive relationships with their Facebook and MySpace friends. But this group also is less inclined to use social media at all.

Source: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100125173450.htm

Lack of Sex Attracts Teen Girls to Twilight Series

Vampires aside, it's really just a simple love story.

The reason teenage girls have fallen hard for the Twilight book and film series has to do with its portrayal of a traditional, romantic relationship, new research from the University of Missouri shows.

In the series, vampire Edward Cullen doesn't want to harm or bite his teen love interest Bella Swan, which means they can't have sex.

"With teens, we actually found that they appreciated the messages of abstinence," said Melissa Click, an assistant professor of communication who surveyed 4,000 Twilight fans, aged 11 to 70.

Click and her co-authors' research primarily addresses the reasons behind the teenage-madness for Twilight, a four-book series with two films so far.

The Missouri research found that many teen girls — who make up the core of Twilight's audience, along with a few moms — are drawn to the story about love beyond the physical.

"The media environment is saturated with teens in sexual relationships," said Click, who plans to publish the findings next spring in a collaborative book Bitten by Twilight: Youth culture, media and the vampire franchise.

"(Twilight) does provide something different for girls. I've had girls say to me, 'I'm going to wait for my Edward.' And they think that's really cool."

Source: Vancouver Sun
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/Lack+attracts+teen+girls+Twilight+series+study/2238456/story.html

Study Finds Peer Pressure Helpful for Teens

Those of us involved in youth ministry have long stressed to kids the negative influence of peer pressure. We've given kids lots of advice on how to avoid giving in to the pressures to conform and have urged them to step up to be a positive influence in the lives of their friends.

All well and good. Yet, a newly released study reveals (in the book Escaping the Endless Adolescence by Joe Allen) that peer pressure is actually good for kids. In the end, it appears, the more peer pressure kids face, the better off they are as adults. Who knew?!

According to Allen, kids who face a lot of peer pressure learn skills that are important to success in adult relationships, such as empathy, negotiation, accommodation, and the ability to agree to disagree while preserving friendship. These kids had better academic scores, healthier romantic relationships, and were less likely to have problems with drugs or alcohol.

Conversely, kids who do not experience much peer pressure, or who easily say no to peer pressure, did not fare as well in the long run in terms of developing relational skills. Academically, their GPAs were almost a full point lower than kids who felt more peer pressure.

And what about the stereotypical peer pressure to smoke, drink alcohol or take drugs? Allen says that this type of pressure occurs less than people think, and is more about peer selection than peer pressure, with kids about to engage in these at-risk behaviors selecting friends who are in a similar spot.

So, perhaps its time that we youth workers and parents ratchet down the rhetoric about peer pressure, while encouraging kids to actively engage in their friendships (so kids can hone their relational skills) and expend more energy in talking about the importance of selecting good friends.

According to every pop theory of adolescence, peer pressure is peril. Being able to resist it should be considered a sign of character strength. But a funny thing happened as Joe Allen, a professor at the University of Virginia, studied kids and peer pressure over a period of 10 years: the kids who felt more peer pressure when they were 12 or 13 were turning out better.

Notably, they had much higher-quality relationships with friends, parents, and romantic partners. Their need to fit in, in the early teens, later manifested itself as a willingness to accommodate ─ a necessary component of all reciprocal relationships. The self-conscious kid who spent seventh grade convinced that everyone was watching her learned to be attuned to subtle changes in others’ moods. Years down the road, that heightened sensitivity lead to empathy and social adeptness.

Meanwhile, those kids who did not feel much peer pressure to smoke, drink, and shoplift in seventh grade didn’t turn out to be the independent-minded stars we’d imagine. Instead, what was notable about them was that within five years they had a much lower GPA ─ almost a full grade lower. The kid who could say no to his peers turned out to be less engaged, all around, socially and academically. Basically, if he was so detached that he didn’t care what his peers thought, he probably wasn’t motivated by what his parents or society expected of him, either.

Source: Newsweek
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/09/23/teens-who-feel-more-peer-pressure-turn-out-better-not-worse.aspx

The Importance of Family Dinners

The latest research from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) once again confirms the importance of regular family dinner times in reducing teen at-risk behaviors, and improving relationships, communication and academics. Teens who have a family dinner 5 to 7 times per week see the greatest benefits in all areas.

Interestingly, according to the study, family dinners only last 35 minutes on average, which strikes me as not a huge investment of time (okay, I know there's dinner preparation and cleanup time too) for some terrific benefits!

Read the study results clicking on the source link below.

Source: CASA
http://www.casacolumbia.org/absolutenm/articlefiles/380-Importance%20of%20Family%20Dinners%20V.pdf