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.