Today's Parents -- #2 (Finances)

Let's take the differences between this generation of kids' parents and their parents. Item #1 (and here's the list of differences again, for your reference:)

QUOTE
There are several ways the current generation of parents is different from those who came before. Here are a few of them:
--Family finances
--Demands on time
--Priorities
--Educational backgrounds
--Attitudes about church/religion
--Alternatives
--Expectations
END QUOTE

Unless the kids you are ministering to come from the top one or two percent of the nation in terms of family income (in which case, you're wasting your time here -- the children of the Masters of the Universe exist on a different planet), their parents are POORER in terms of real income than their parents were. (You can look this up if you want to, but any reputable economist can show you the statistics to support this contention).

While organized youth soccer, for example, was not a major financial burden for the kids of a generation ago, it usually is today. Thus, families that want their kids to play it find that it chews up a larger portion of their disposable income (if any) than it did a generation ago. Ditto any other organized sports activity.

This creates an opportunity for church sports to serve as an alternative that is more family-friendly and, most importantly for squeezed families, cheaper. The risk -- and the reason the church venue may not succeed -- is that church sports are viewed as significantly inferior to for-profit youth sports, either in quality or in cachet or both.

The current generation of parents is poorer than their parents were, but they have not consciously accepted this knowledge yet (the older generation always poor-mouths and talks about how they walked to school five miles uphill in the snow both ways, so why should the less-inquiring of their children recognize that they were raised in considerably more prosperous circumstances than their parents were?) so they are particularly sensitive about being perceived to have accepted the cheaper alternative for anything.

Target your program at "the unfortunate" and you will get the least fortunate end of that population. You will completely miss the middle class. They simply do not yet realize that they, too, are unfortunate.

Today's Parents #1

There's an old saying -- an axiom, really -- in the military establishment that armies are always equipped and trained to fight the last war.

When we gear up to deal with today's parents, we are always at risk of doing exactly what generals normally do. We view the wants and needs of today's parents based on our own experience with parents of a generation ago, or, if we take an academic approach to things, based on what has been written about soccer moms and the like.

Suffice it to say that, by the time a term like "soccer mom" has reached a level of popular acceptance that a spin-off term like "hockey mom" can be a key component of a vice presidential campaign, the train has already left the station with regard to soccer moms as we understand them.

A new generation of parents is solidly in place, and it is the children of this new generation who are the beneficiaries of any church sports programs out there that are not oriented toward adults. (I'm not disparaging church-based sports programs for adults; in fact I think they are a super idea and that more churches ought to be supporting them. It's just not what this blog is about.)

There are several ways the current generation of parents is different from those who came before. Here are a few of them:
--Family finances
--Demands on time
--Priorities
--Educational backgrounds
--Attitudes about church/religion
--Alternatives
--Expectations

Over the next few posts I'll look at these differences and try to project ways they affect parental attitudes about church and kids and sports.

Today's Parents....

With this title, you're expecting what we used to call a jeremiad -- a litany of complaints, a catalog of things that are wrong, a set of dire predictions for the future -- but you would be wrong, at least a little bit wrong.

Yes, today's parents are not like the parents of a generation ago, and that generation of parents was not like their parents. In those years, the nation has come from being one in the tail end of the Great Depression, gone through some wars, had a whole lot of social and cultural and technological change -- and currently seems to be headed back into a new Great Depression. (Maybe in a few years we'll be referring to Depression I and Depression II, like we refer to the World Wars. I hope not.)

So parents today are different.

For the next few posts I am going to talk about such topics as what today's parents (seem to) want from sports programs for their kids, what they actually (IMHO) want, why they want what they want, and how church-based sports programs can address all of it.

Interestingly, these issues do NOT just affect church-based sports programs.

When families ask about college sports....

Fact is, if you are involved in youth sports at all -- whether in a school, club or church environment -- the subject of college (and college sports) is almost guaranteed to come up at least once per season.

In an earlier post, we provided some cautionary information about the possibilities of Division I college athletic scholarships, and the burdens they impose on their fortunate (?) holders.

However, for kids with only moderate talent, there's an echelon of college sports that falls between intramural and intercollegiate that you should know about -- and that's club sports.

Thanks to the New York Times for bringing us this update! It's good background information even if the question of college sports never comes up in your organization.

Genetic test for children predicting athletic success

This will be controversial, and those of us with an interest in church and kids and sports will need to think about its ramifications.

Anyway, here's the link to the NY Times article on the subject today.

More to follow....

You need to look outside the church....

I think we are going to get a little wonky for a while on this blog, for one big reason: the need to figure out sports sometimes in their larger context.

One issue is historical and quite location-specific.

In New England, the birthplace of the "Park and Rec" movement in the United States, any church sports program you create will likely be competing, directly or indirectly, with a taxpayer funded sports program in your town or city.

As I indicated, the reason is historical, and likely due to the historical importance of the Congregational Church in New England -- and their rather narrow (as they, themselves, would acknowledge today) historical view of the role of the church. You can read the history yourself; let it suffice to say that this was not exactly a tolerant and fun-loving community back in its formative days. The term "Puritan" is not pejorative today for no reason!

In this under-served area the Park and Rec movement was born and developed, beginning with the Boston Common in 1651, the Boston YMCA in 1851, the Boston Sand Gardens in 1886, and the New England Park Association in 1898. Today, every New England town but the very smallest has at least one full-time employee in the Park and Rec department whose basic job is to run recreational services for the townsfolk.

Furthermore, these services are not trivial. In 2007, the Town of Salisbury, CT, the northwest-most township in the state, and entirely rural, offered the following activities via their Recreation Department: lap swimming, strength training, paddle tennis, youth soccer, basketball, indoor walking, ice skating, clinics for lacrosse and field hockey, volleyball, aerobics, Latin dance, baseball, an Easter egg hunt, a track and field clinic, sailing, kayaking, swimming lessons, swim team, tennis lessons, sailing lessons, and lifeguard training. Other organizations in the town offer travel soccer, ice hockey, and ski jumping. The Appalachian Trail runs through the town, and the town also hosts three private boarding schools (Salisbury, Hotchkiss, and Indian Mountain) with extensive athletic facilities that are occasionally available to residents, and Lime Rock Park, the auto race course. Under separate departments in the town of Salisbury are the departments that deal with elder activities and the department that runs the Town Grove, which includes picnicking facilities, boating, swimming, et al.

The annual budget of the Salisbury Rec department is $86,736 (2006).

I suspect that over the state line in New York, the offerings are a bit skimpier.

One really needs to consider the competition -- and whether the church views the town Park and Rec department as competition or not, it very much is -- when one structures a church sports program. I'll say more about this process in future posts, but this is a good place to start.

Never assume that everybody knows

This is another of those "what was I thinking?" posts. I've been meaning to write this one for a couple of weeks.

The other day, I decided to stop by the new sporting goods store in the town next to the one in which Trinity Lime Rock (and our summer soccer program) are located. I wanted to say hello, and to pick up some inexpensive equipment to serve as a backstop sports program for any Sundays when the attendance just didn't work for soccer.

As it turns out, this is also the place where we've bought the tee-shirts that we give away to participants for the past two years. (They've done a great job for us, by the way.)

While I was paying for my purchases, I mentioned to the lady behind the register that our attendance was down this summer. We also talked about how the local soccer travel club had been able to roster only half as many teams for the fall season as they usually did -- she suggested it was probably the lousy state of the economy, gas prices, etc., which I was able to accept.

However, then she said something to the effect of "It's too bad that your program is only for Salisbury kids!".

The fact is that it is NOT just for kids who live the the same township we do, and I hastened to tell her that. Fact is, we welcome everybody, even people just passing through.

However, in our corner of New England, recreation and education are tightly controlled on a Township basis. There is a K-8 school in every one of the towns that make up our Region I. Every town has its own Recreation Department, and their own rec sports, and they absolutely do NOT accept outsiders.

Somehow I had assumed that, because we're a church, people would not impose this "township model" on us -- but obviously they have done just that.

Well, that's something to consider next year when getting the publicity out. We have to make sure that we make it clear that it does not matter what township you live in -- you are still welcome at Trinity Lime Rock summer soccer.

By the way, the lady with whom I had the conversation was delighted to hear that we were open to kids from her town. In fact, she invited us to put up posters and even pictures on their community bulletin board next summer.

However, since doing so will involve setting foot on the turf of another parish, I guess we can anticipate some blowback on this -- whether that parish has any summer programs for kids or not (it does not).

A little creativity helps....

Does this describe your church: we have a gymnasium, athletic field, church hall, or other facility that kids could use for sports, but unfortunately, all the members of our congregation are over 70 years old and cannot do the needed maintenance on it?

Well, HERE is a solution I saw today in one of the Hartford Courant blogs.

Nice thing about this one: doing community service is a great way for people to make amends to society -- why not see if there are people sentenced to community service in YOUR locale who would be able to work on maintaining your recreational facility.

(No, I'm NOT recommending that you turn operation of your recreation program over to offenders. Staffing the program is different from maintaining the facility. We'll talk more about staffing opportunities in a forthcoming post.)

First-generation Chinese-Americans

The New York Times had an article today dealing with generational differences in attitudes about the appropriateness of sports for young people.

If you have Chinese-American families -- especially first generation -- in the population you are trying to reach, you will find this article useful. I'm wondering if it will also prove to be instructive for other immigrant ethnic groups that find themselves trapped in the "seamstress/restaurant" cycle and are eager to break out.

Free.

Interesting. I did not know THIS about Little League, and I suspect that few others knew it either.

People making a buck (or a lot of bucks) off kids' sports has become pretty endemic, I'm afraid. So much so that, even though the publicity for our church summer soccer program says "free" and even though the website says "free", virtually every parent who has showed up with their offspring has asked me how much it costs and if a check is okay. Furthermore, they seem to expect to have to pay for the free tee-shirt we give each participant. (They don't, of course -- generous parishioners underwrite them.)

I suspect that many churches that offer sports for young people sometimes are tempted to consider them a revenue stream. Their logic probably runs along the lines of "Well, worship is free, but this isn't."

Let the founder of Little League -- and Jesus himself -- be your guide instead.

No space; no facility? How about jump rope?

Probably the most frequent excuse (and that's what it is, I'm afraid) I hear why churches cannot possibly have physical activity for their young people is that they do not have any room. All their outside space is taken up by parking lots (if they have any space outside their four walls to begin with), and there's just no room inside to play basketball or something along those lines.

Well, my usual rejoinder to those complaints is "ping pong" -- but an article in today's New York Times suggested another one: JUMP ROPE!.

Okay, you'll probably never be able to develop jump rope in your parish to the level the kids in New York City have taken Double Dutch, but it's definitely a low-cost sport to start with.

Also, presumably you realize that boxers traditionally jump rope for conditioning and coordination purposes -- so it works for boys as well.

Give it a try! Let us know how it works out!

Getting closer to home....

Pine Plains, NY is not in the area from which we currently draw parishioners here at Trinity Lime Rock (CT), but it is only one town away from where our Senior Warden and her husband live.

So, when I saw this headline from the Poughkeepsie, NY newspaper this morning, it seemed too close to home to neglect to post.

Yes, schools ARE cutting back athletic programs -- but not just on the interscholastic level, like Pine Plains. They are also yielding to budgetary concerns and cutting back throughout the schools. You can bet that if the Pine Plains school district is cutting back their interscholastic sports, there is little money in the budget for badminton birdies, ping pong balls, volleyball nets, or for the people who bring tools like these into the presence of the kids.

When schools -- and government in general -- falls short, there is both an opportunity and an obligation for churches to help.

Certainly not just soccer!

While we're very proud of the kids who have developed their soccer skills in our Summer Soccer program, we're now beginning to think that perhaps we're making a bit of a mistake by confining our efforts to soccer.

Likely due to the economy, we're seeing the local travel soccer team unable to fill what are normally two very popular age levels: U-12 girls and U-12 boys. There simply won't be a team for the few U-12 girls who tried out, because there's already a full team of U-14 girls. The few U-12 boys will get to play up with the U-14s, and thereby we will have a U-14 boys team.

With families pulling back on expenses like travel soccer, we also see them pulling back on activities that might lead to future expenditures on travel soccer. And, as a result, our attendance has been off this summer.

Today, I asked the kids what they thought we should do. (By the way, asking the kids is always a good idea in this kind of thing. We'll go so far as to say that if you do NOT ask the kids, you are setting yourself up for failure bigtime. But that's another post.)

The little kids didn't have much in the way of opinions. One six year old girl suggested football, and a five year old boy agreed with her.

The big kids were more forthcoming. Lacrosse (one girl said it is the fastest growing youth sport in America right now) was a popular suggestion. So was beach volleyball. So were ordinary volleyball, badminton, horseshoes, and ... soccer.

Anyway, we're floating a trial balloon on this one, both inside the parish and outside it. Namely: what do you say that we call it Summer SPORTS at Trinity Lime Rock next summer, and we do what most people want to do each Sunday?

Where do YOU think we are going to go with this?

Here's an add-on

No, this post isn't specifically about kids and sports and church. Instead, it's about having a church that's sufficiently open to the idea of sports that it can not just accept the notion that sports are good for kids, and what's good for kids is also good for church, but expand on that as well.

In the photo above, Emily DiMartino is honored during the main Sunday worship service for winning the gold medal in the 1500 meter speed walk for women age 60-69 in the US Transplant Games for 2008. Emily took the opportunity to ask the congregation to complete organ donor cards -- a great way to continue giving after one's death; what a great living illustration of the Golden Rule!

(Thanks to John Lloyd for the photo!)

NOT a loss leader

For anyone who feels that having enough space for kids to do sports is simply a matter of spending money on the undeserving, let me offer a good example of how churches can have open space that's used for sports for kids and have it make a contribution to the bottom line as well.

Here's the link.

You see, here at Trinity, we let Lime Rock Park use our field (that tomorrow morning will be occupied by kids playing soccer) for overflow parking for their racing events. As the blog post linked shows, they had a very good day today, and they compensate us on a per car basis for cars that they park in our field. They also maintain the field for us! Good people, and we are happy to have the racers and their fans as part of our extended ministry.

Try looking around your place and see where you have some space that could do double -- or triple -- duty!!

Cholestrol and Kids

Well, we're not pediatricians or scientists, but we do know a thing or two about getting kids into the habit of regular, vigorous physical exercise.

No, we're not the athletic director of a school. We run a soccer program for kids at a CHURCH!

And, we are very happy to welcome kids as young as four years old.

As the New York Times (and lots of other media as well) have pointed out recently, it's an important thing to do. Here's a permalink to the: Times editorial. Not surprisingly, the Times recommends that the schools take responsibility for this.

But, why leave this important mission to the schools? Churches -- at least some churches -- can actually do it just as well or even better. Can yours?

Thank God we are not in Greenwich!

Interesting!

I never suspected that a town in the same state where we're located would be quite so hostile to kids and sports.

Well, the citizens of the "diamond of the Gold Coast", Greenwich, CT, cannot find it within themselves to let teenagers play wiffleball on town-owned land.

Here's the permalink from the New York Times article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/nyregion/10towns.html?ex=1373428800&en=3a8a02a8cafa6c8e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Is there anything that churches (of any denomination) can do about it? They really ought to try!

When the wealthiest, most privileged kids in our nation cannot indulge in pick-up sports, there is emphatically an opportunity for churches to step into the gap.

What the competition is doing

QUOTE:
Separate is our Youth Room space which is Jr. High & High School. This is an awesome space with a climbing wall, zipline, stage built out of the side of an old school bus, pool table, foosball, arcade machine, air hockey, half court basketball, and two 42" LCD TV's with two Wii's.
END QUOTE

The above paragraph came from a description of youth programs for Junior High and High School ages in an evangelical church.

Are you clergy or lay management in a mainstream Protestant church?

Consider this as a good minimum in designing new spaces for young people. NOT more classrooms.

Exercise for teen girls prevents cancer later on

After the depressing NYTimes article about teenage girls who damage their knees (particularly) in competitive sports, I've had my eyes out for news that indicates that vigorous physical activity might have some offsetting benefits for this population.

I was glad to find a study cited that indicates that pre-menopausal cancers among women who had been physically active as teenagers are more than 25% less frequent than among women who had been sedentary as teens.

Here's the permalink to the article.

Perhaps there's a middle way that churches ought to consider -- especially for girls: something between encouraging/coercing girls to sit quietly with their hands demurely folded in their laps (this typically "churchy girl" behavior is correlated with increased frequency of cancer) and the other extreme, playing on three travel soccer teams simultaneously (this "girl jock" behavior causes increased risk of ACL tears).

The middle way is called "fun sports for teens", especially teen girls.

What's YOUR church doing about this? We would love to hear!

Good Grief! Another Episcopal Church Does Sports!

Well, after three years of thinking that our little parish church was the only church and sports game in town, so to speak, with our summer soccer program, I learned this morning that there is a parish church -- yes, a parish church in the Diocese of Connecticut, where we are -- that actually fields a cricket team.

That church is St. John's Stamford and I am glad to see they are doing this. After running through their website, however, I didn't see anything in terms of sports that they do for kids. (They do have kids in their parish; witness their Sunday school programs and their Christmas Pageant -- they just don't do sports with them.)

Now, having worked in Stamford for a few years, I can understand why St. John's does not have a soccer program. Stamford is a renascent small city on Connecticut's Gold Coast, and there are already plenty of opportunistic soccer coaches down there driving BMWs and lining their pockets. St. John's is located very close to Stamford Town Center, definitely a high-end mall. It's not your standard inner city parish. And they are also creative enough to host the Stamford Model Railroad Club in their undercroft!

But one does wonder if there isn't something, no matter how obscure, in the world of sports that a parish like St. John's could do for kids that would benefit both the young people of Stamford -- and St. John's as well.

By the way, thanks to The Coracle for this lead! At one time in my life, I found myself keeping score for cricket matches on Staten Island, so this resonated for other reasons as well. (Interesting that to keep score in cricket you don't need to know a silly mid off from a fast bowler, but that's another post.)

Girls and soccer...

The New York Times magazine section has a thoughtful article about injury rates in elite female athletes. It's long, but definitely worth reading. Here's the permalink to the article.

It seems to me that the last thing we want to do when introducing sports to church is provide yet another opportunity for girls to over-commit. There's a whole lot to say in favor of sports for kids being fun -- instead of a "do or die" phenomenon that the soccer industry has made it in many parts of the country.

People frequently ask me if I am planning on a future soccer team of Trinity Lime Rock players -- making our fun summer Sunday morning soccer into something more "serious".

My answer is an emphatic NO.

And our fourth summer of soccer starts in just a month!

More about "more about"

Here's the link to the Time magazine article...

More about girls and physical activity

We keep seeing more and more evidence of the importance of girls remaining physically active into their teens (and beyond). The linked article in Time magazine is just one example.

Significant (but understated) in this article is another point: that some kid sports are so over-orchestrated that the kids simply do not know how to play. It's true: every summer we find that the kids don't seem to be able to divide themselves up into teams and scrimmage; they seem to stand around waiting for an adult to accomplish this for them.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Preparing for What?

Occasionally, even in our really small (comparatively) church summer soccer program we find ourselves in conversations with moms and dads whose children are with us for only one reason: to get mileage, in hopes they will eventually get an athletic scholarship.

The New York Times has been running an important series about athletic scholarships, and the lives they impose on their holders, particularly in Division I NCAA colleges. It's emphatically worth reading, especially if you find yourself occasionally (or frequently) in contact with parents (or kids) with athletic scholarship aspirations.

Two things the series make clear: (1) unless you're in one of the marquee sports, like basketball or football, full scholarships are very, very uncommon. Thus, there will also be major expenses associated with college. (Some people seem unaware of this, sadly). (2) an athletic scholarship is a job, and a very demanding one.

Questions that remain (at least so far) in my mind:

(1) given that division III NCAA colleges cannot give athletic scholarships as such but that there may still be a connection between a scholarship and athletic (or musical or artistic or whatever) prowess, how do expectations at division III schools compare with the bleak picture the articles paint of scholarship athletes' lives at division I schools? (As a lacrosse player many years ago at a division III school who did not have a scholarship, I suspect this question needs to be asked today as the experience of 45 years ago probably isn't representative of today's world.)

(2) what about private secondary schools that provide pretty much undisguised athletic scholarships? (In this case, I have a special concern about kids who may find themselves playing hurt just so they can continue their education even when they may only be in 9th grade or thereabouts.)

Glad to have thoughs or input on either of these questions.

What has this got to do with church? If you are involved with church and kids and sports, you'll get into this topic sooner or later. Might as well be informed on it in advance.

Being in the world - a hint

Frequently, people planning church activities for young people are guilty of a standard church error: talking to themselves -- assuming that everyone speaks church lingo, and plans their family life around the church year and church functions.

Fact is, if you really want to be IN the world, you've got to get out of that habit -- and this particularly applies to activities for young people, most especially sports.

When we set up our summer soccer program, one of the first considerations was when spring soccer ended and when fall soccer started. (It pretty much goes without saying, I think, that no one serious about soccer is going to skip a championship game of spring soccer to attend summer "fun soccer", nor are they about to skip the first game -- or even first practices -- of fall soccer.)

Next, we worked around the "for profit" soccer camps. We had no interest in competing with them (and, when we started out, we weren't much competition anyway) because we would much prefer to be working with them. We learn from them, we share kids with them, we even share instructors with them! It's a great opportunity.

Then we focused on the fact that many families, particularly those where both parents work outside the home, plan their children's summers in February. There are practical reasons for this. It's a matter of scheduling -- if Junior is going off on some kind of international work-study program, you will want to plan your family trip to a vacation spot with the dates of that program in mind. Of course the most desirable summer programs fill up early, so families have a great incentive to commit for the summer by the end of February, and certainly no later than mid-March.

If you really want to spread your net wide, you need to at least announce, and ideally be accepting registrations for, any programs that hope to attract an audience from outside your own church.

Accept walk-ons later? Sure!!

Encourage people who attend the program to bring their friends next week? Definitely!!

But if you fail to get out to the larger community -- the world -- about a summer program that's hoping to attract outsiders before April, you're going to miss the audience that sets the trends.

Lent notwithstanding.

Transformation of purpose

I have to admit that where my head is now regarding church and kids and sports is not where it was when I started this blog.

As I recall it, back then, my objective was to dignify the Sunday School kids we already had with an activity they could call their own, and one that they could do with a minimum of adults sniping at them (or worse) when they did not behave in a suitably churchy, prissy manner.

Well, we got that pretty well done.

Evangelism -- you know, bringing in new church members (or church member families) then seemed to me to be the correct orientation for church and kids and sports. After all, this is the rationale most Evangelicals use for their "sports ministries" or "recreation ministries". Actually, I'm not surprised that I fell into that trap briefly, because all the current literature about church and kids and sports is oriented in that direction. It's a little bit like a Bowery mission: get the bums in the door with the promise of a free meal, but once they're in the mission, they still have to sit there and listen to a sermon in order to get that free meal. And sometimes that free meal was not forthcoming -- hence the expression "pie in the sky" -- as in "You'll get pie in the sky when you die."

The idea of corralling kids with the promise of soccer in order to preach at them seems dishonest at best and unchristian at least. It's not something I've ever been comfortable with, and I suspect that the fear of being preached at would be a profound negative for any program in a mainline church that combined church and kids and sports.

Where I am now is that whatever we do in terms of church and kids and sports (beside keeping the Sunday School kids entertained during their downtime) needs to be cast in the role of Outreach. You know, doing something for other people that you don't expect to be paid back for.

Interestingly, a recent post on an excellent blog called "Small Membership Churches" -- the link is http://smallepiscopalchurch.blogspot.com/ mentioned a list of books for small Episcopal churches that would be useful to them. There was a book on worship in the small church, another on evangelism, another on spiritual leadership, another on christian education, and another on administration. All these are important topics, no question about that.

Interestingly, there was no book in the series about Outreach. I don't think I'm reading too much into this when I see this as evidence that small churches are interested almost entirely in themselves.

There's a good chance that there's an excellent reason why they are small. Think of people you personally know -- are one or more of them almost entirely self-involved? If yes, are the self-involved people the ones you want to be around? Of course not!! Self-involved people are boring at best!!

It's exactly the same for self-involved churches!!

So, from now on, Church and Kids and Sports is going to focus on sports and recreation as an extraordinary opportunity for OUTREACH.

Think about it.