This is a sample article featured in the September 2005 issue of Quadrant

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Tweenagers want their lives to revolve around FUN, preferably with FRIENDS - both of which they live as though they really do have capital letters! These themes underlie the majority of comments on leisure provided at the Reaching and Keeping Tweenagers seminars, where one of the activities is to ask everyone present to write something on each of three large sheets of paper around the walls. Quadrant has already looked at home and school earlier this year: the third sheet asked “Leisure, what do they like?” Leisure time is what most tweenagers live for, so perhaps it is not surprising that there were more responses in total to this question than to the other two.

FREEDOM OF CHOICE
There were 103 comments about attitudes and values, and 45% of them were about their desire to make their own choices. They would like to be able to do as they please without their parents judging them, partly as an antidote to the pressures of school and home. At this age, 10 to 14, young people are starting to establish themselves as individuals separate from their parents, and making their own choices about what to do is part of that process.
    However, freedom of choice is not only highly valued but also problematic. “I’m bored” or “there’s nothing to do” are common complaints. In fact not doing anything has a specific description, chilling out, which attracted 7 votes, close to sleeping (8) and lazing around (6).
    They not only want to choose what they do, but also what they wear and what they eat. So shopping is top of the non-sport activities, followed by a long list of other activities - lots of which include food!
>>How much choice do your young people get in what they do at church? When can they eat?!

FRIENDS
It is no surprise to anyone who knows tweenagers to discover that by far the highest score in this somewhat unscientific survey is hanging out with mates. It received almost twice as many scores as any other individual item (47, with a total of 114 for friends and relationships). One aspect of friendships is the desire to make new friends, which usually happens in the context of socialising with groups or gangs of their own age or slightly older. They are also discovering relationships with the opposite sex, an interest which develops earlier for girls than boys: one comment agreed with by 8 people was “Boys chase balls, girls chase boys”. All these - being with friends, meeting new ones, relationships with the opposite sex - are among the reasons why young people prefer weekday church activities to Sunday ones. A youth club or other midweek activity usually allows more freedom to choose what you do and with whom you do it. And the importance of friendships provides a clue to evangelism in this age group: developing relationships with a group of friends, and bringing them into Christian activities and events is likely to be more productive than working with individuals.
>> Does your church have a strategy for reaching groups of tweenage friends?

SPORT
Knowing which football team the lads in a youth group support is one very useful way to build relationships - with boys and girls! Sport in general received the most votes for leisure activities, with football top of those specified (15), followed by extreme sports (9). A wide range of other activities included swimming, bowling, snooker and skate boarding. These are all activities which can be provided by youth clubs, either on site or by way of outings. Quite a number of churches have 5-a-side football teams for this age group and compete in a local league. However, there was also a recognition that sport can be in competition with church, especially on a Sunday morning when so much youth sport now takes place.
>> Can you provide sport as part of church activities so that sport and church do not compete so much?

ELECTRONIC STUFF
In spite of the importance of friends, electronic accessories topped the list of leisure activities. This included:

* also includes Play Station, Game Boy, X Box

    A Reader’s Digest survey examined what young people do when they are home alone after school. Almost a million of 11 to 16 year olds in Britain are on their own after school for at least an hour every day. Nearly half (48%) of them admitted that their parents would be upset “if they knew some of the things I get up to when they aren’t around”. More than half watch TV (56%), 40% said they used internet chat rooms, while a government survey showed that 1 in 10 younger teenagers use the internet mainly to view pornography (a growing proportion). Home Office figures show that late afternoon is the peak time for juvenile crime, while research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that of 14 year olds who have been drunk 99% drank in unsupervised places.
>> Helping young people to apply their Christian faith so that they act responsibly at all times needs to go alongside teaching biblical truth.

Sources: Tweenagers seminars; “Your Kids Are Home, You’re Not - Now What?”, Reader’s Digest, July 2005 p 96




Tweenagers & Shopping
A major study is under way at Bristol Business School into how ‘savvy’ different members of a family are when it comes to shopping. They are looking at the differences between gender, personality, birth order, composition of the household, income, family culture and history, who shops with whom and a number of other factors. They used several qualitative and small quantitative approaches to determine the factors but these have already revealed some interesting findings among 10 to 13 year olds in a small sample of Scottish school children.
    They have developed four groups of characteristics of the most ‘savvy’ shoppers:

1. Active searchers. They look in catalogues, notice advertising, watch out for new products and look around shops for things they like.
2. Opinion leaders among peers. They search the internet for information and are the first among friends to buy a product, which they then tell their friends about.
3. Has parental respect. Their parents ask them for advice about things they are buying, and they look out for bargains.
4. Main shopping tripper. They go with their parent(s) on the main shopping expedition for the family.
 

    They also looked at what aspects of shopping for the family are most influenced by tweenagers. This Table lists the responses which were over 80%; lower ones included choice of meals whether in the home or eaten out, holidays, and even the purchase of the family car.
 

Children perceiving themselves to have influence in the purchase of ...
 

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