You
Spend some time Googling articles about the most popular YouTube channels. It’ll help you understand young people and youth culture a lot better.
Your mentee
I think it would make a fascinating mentoring conversation to talk through what YouTube channels your mentee follows. What kind of videos do they watch? Do they follow the click-bait titles? How do they feel about those? Do they watch inappropriate content: sexually provocative / bullying / ‘comedy’ clips / homophobic / racist / sexist videos or even footage of war crimes ? How do they avoid it? Do they have rules? Which are harmless fun and which aren’t?
Not only may it be good for your mentee to have an adult outlet for concerns about online videos, this could also be a way of you talking through the positives that YouTube has to offer too.
Some popular Youtube channels
For girls: Zoella, Fleur de Force, Tanya Burr. These are makeup and lifestyle focussed and now have products out on the high street. ·
For boys: Alfie Days, Joe Sugg (Zoella’s brother), PewDiePie, Stampy (Minecraft focus).
Exercise
Ask your mentee what their Youtube channel would be about? It’s a good way of wrapping up the question, ‘what are you good at?’ or ‘what do you feel your calling is?’ in a way they are much more likely to understand and feel able to relate to. The questions that are helpful for working this out are:
- What do you love doing?
- What are you good at?
- What privileges and opportunities do you have?
- What problem would you like to solve?
Discuss the Youtube Channel Finder diagram with your young people found here at premieryouthwork.com/links. If you have good ideas, why not go ahead and set that Youtube channel up together!
Joel Toombs has spent more than ten years in youth work and has an MA in Christian mentoring. See grovebooks.co.uk for his booklet, Mentoring and young people.
