Addiction - Childrens Ministry Online

Failing as a parent

by Kenny Conley | Jun 2, 2014 | Family | 0

Are you ready for a full dose of reality?

Failure as a parent in inevitable. Stop living in a dream world, you’re not as great of a parent as you think you are. Okay, enough with the negativity.

Recently I’ve become aware of several parenting “misses.” I’ve encountered multiple people who have experienced total parenting failures, either as parents or as kids of parents. You’re probably thinking, “why is this such a surprise? Just take a walk around your block and you’ll find more parenting failures than you can count.”

No, what has raised my awareness of this issue is that in every case, the parenting disasters (or near disasters) have happened in incredibly loving, Christ-centered homes. From my limited viewpoint, I didn’t see any blatant sin or negative behaviors that would lead to these incidents, but they happened anyway.

I think that these situations are very challenging for us Christians. When stuff happens, we start to look for the cause. We try to justify what behaviors happened that caused this. We try to sniff out the dysfunction. As a result, we end up hurting rather than healing and we make the situation worse, even in our sincere efforts to “help.”

Teens, tweens and social media addiction

by Kenny Conley | Mar 3, 2014 | Family | 2

A few months ago I read an article in Wired magazine that was quite shocking. The article is based on a book, “It’s complicated, the social lives of networked teens” by Danah Boyd. We all know that teenagers are overly connected to their electronic devices. Between twitter, instagram, snapchat and texting, they seem to always be glued to their devices. We’d even go so far to say that they’re addicted to their devices.

However, that’s not the view of this book/article. They suggest that teens/tweens aren’t addicted to their social devices, they’re addicted to each other. They spend so much time on social media because they usually don’t have any other way to connect. The suggestion is that if parents gave their kids more freedom, kids would be less connected to their social devices. It’s an interesting idea and worth exploring. More than ever, we’re more protective of our kids and we have them busier that any generation before. What if our kids had more time and more freedom to be together?

Check out the full article here.

Sorry to waste your time with this post

by Kenny Conley | Sep 17, 2008 | Geek, Ideas, Random | 1

91%How Addicted to Blogging Are You? No really, there’s nothing important here. I had a few minutes before a meeting and simply came across this. Apparently I’m 91% addicted to blogging. Just one more thing for me to...