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.