A Wake Up Call!

Students have returned to VTech on Monday hoping to bring about healing and find continued support in dealing with the incredible tragedy and loss that they endured last week. Although many of students want to go back to "normal" and begin to move on from the events of last week, it will be hard to escape the culture that they, and you and I live in.

George Barna, has some new information posted on his website this week illustrating the corrosive elements in life and culture that are eating away at the moral fabric of our youth. Barna’s studies on parenting and child development led him to offer this series of facts and observations related to the Virginia Tech situation. Barna is calling the VTech tragedy a wake up call to parents. Here are some of the trends and cultural realities facing our youth today.

1. By the time an American child is 23 years old, as was the killer in Virginia, he will have seen countless murders among the more than 30,000 acts of violence to which he is exposed through television, movies and video games.
2. By the age of 23, the average American will have viewed thousands of hours of pornographic images, which diminish the dignity and value of human life.
3. After nearly a quarter century on earth, the typical American will have listened to hundreds of hours of music that fosters anger, hatred, disrespect for authority, selfishness, and radical independence.
4. The typical worldview of a person in their early twenties promotes self-centeredness, the right to happiness and fulfillment, the importance of personal expression in all forms, the necessity of tolerating aberrant or immoral points of views, allows for disrespect of other people and use of profanity, and advances forms of generic spirituality that dismiss the validity of the Judeo-Christian faith. Largely propelled by postmodern thought, the typical worldview of young people does not facilitate respect for life, acceptance of the rule of law, or the necessity of hard work, personal sacrifice, paying the dues or contributing to the common good. Barna noted that only about 2% of today’s teenagers possess a biblical worldview that acknowledges the existence of God, Satan and sin, the availability of forgiveness and grace through Jesus Christ, and the existence of absolute moral principles provided in the Bible.
5. The average adolescent spends more than 40 hours each week digesting media, and the typical teenager in America absorbs almost 60 hours of media content each week. For better or worse, the messages received from the media represent a series of unfiltered, unchaperoned worldview lessons.
6. It appears that as many as one out of every five young people is or has been under the influence of mood-altering medications, some of whose long-term side effects are not fully understood by the medical community. Drugging children has become one of the ways in which we have coped with other issues.
7. Stress levels have been steadily rising among young children over the past couple of decades. A variety of factors have contributed to such stress, including parental acrimony and divorce, household financial troubles, media-fed expectations regarding materialism, overscheduling of children, bullying, physical abuse within the home, and excessive peer pressure.
8. One-third of the nation’s teenagers report having been in a physical fight at least once in the last year. Nearly one out of every five 9th through 12th grade students has carried a gun, knife or club in the past month.
9. Education, both in the home and outside of it, provides diminishing emphasis upon the development of character, and increasing emphasis upon meeting academic performance standards, especially through standardized testing.
10. Growing numbers of children seek to make their way through an increasingly complex life without the traditional safety net comprised of a loving and supportive family, a stable circle of supportive peers, teachers who know and help nurture the child, and a community of faith that assists in giving meaning to life and a sense of belonging.
11. Most young people admit that they feel as if they do not receive sufficient attention from their parents; do not have enough good friends whom they can count on; are unsettled about their own future; have personal spiritual perspectives but not much of a sense of spiritual community; lack role models; and do not feel that they have intrinsic value.

You can read his entire study here

These facts should sober us, I know that they sober me as a father of a 13 and 11 year old. These cultural realities provide the fertile soil and catalyst in producing other Cho's in the future. Of course not every kid who grows up in this culture is going to act out in an evil way such as committing senseless murder, but for those kids who are already psychologically fragile, these trends are very alarming. And even if our children aren't driven to commit heinous acts, these cultural realities nevertheless have a deleterious impact on our children's lives.

Also, for more posts about this subject:

A picture of my friend hugging his daughter, a VTech freshman
A quote from Tim Keller on Tragedy and Suffering
Why I don't want to remember the killer