Throughout this article, ‘family’ will be used as an attempt to capture the differing family situations that young people come from; this may include biological parent(s), adoptive parents, foster parents and those identified by young people as significant carers in their lives.
Contact
What kind of contact do we manage with families? Is it limited to the polite chat, chasing up signatures and sometimes the phone call if a young person has got in trouble? Apart from these things, engagement with families can often be limited.
How much face time do you get with young people? Maybe six hours a week, with your attention divided among the group you work with plus an occasional one-to-one. It brings into question how much influence we really have in young people’s lives. The family gets to spend much, much more time with their children over the course of a week. The contact from a youth worker may last seven years between the ages of 11-18; families will be there for a lifetime. Building trusted and valued relationships with young people is important, but we also need to recognise that our role in the lives of young people is brief. We have a responsibility to identify and encourage more enduring relationships, especially in the family setting.
In the context of the church community there can be lots of natural opportunities to engage with the families of the young people we work with. It’s most likely that families will be supportive of the work you do and there will be lots of opportunities to talk about what you’re up to in various groups. Working with young people outside the church means those natural forums are less available and therefore require more effort in order to build those relationships.
Ed Hodge leads a missional project on the Ty-Sign estate in Risca, South Wales. The team moved onto the estate during the summer of 2015 and are working on partnerships with local churches:
“There is a community cafe in our neighbourhood that used to be run by the council. Unfortunately, due to budgets being cut, the café was to close, so the church took it on to run as a project. The café is near the local school and so after they drop their kids off, many of the local mums would stop by.
Last year, during a spell of bad weather, the café was getting problems with damp. It got so bad at one point that water was running down the inside of the walls. We tried calling the council but they weren’t any help. We realised that there was a council meeting two weeks later and we planned to go along and add our issue into ‘any other business’. Before the meeting we had our project reviewed by a team from another Streetspace project in Weston-Super-Mare. After hearing our story they suggested that we bring some of the mums from the café along to the meeting. They were keen to go but they also wanted to raise another problem; one of their sons had ripped his trousers at the local skate park, which had fallen out of repair and become dangerous.”
Are our remits bigger than young people?
As people who work with young people, our job title shapes our focus. Like many other roles, youth workers become specialists, through engaging with the current theories, going to conferences and subscribing to magazines. But this specialism can often narrow our focus so much that we lose sight of the bigger picture. Whether our work is focused on a church, out in the community or a mixture of the two, our goal could by summed up as ‘the transformation of young people’. The question we should ask ourselves is not how we might do this, but what role we might take.
Adolescence is a process of young people coming out from the protection and influence of family to explore the world on their own terms. No one is expected to negotiate these potentially difficult and confusing times without support. In their early teens, when facing something that challenges them, young people will often with draw to the comfort and security of the family they know. In later adolescence, young people may turn to their peers and other support structures, such as youth workers, to help them navigate their own path. (Young people from more chaotic backgrounds may have formed different strategies to deal with challenges; this is especially true when the family is not believed to be a secure place.) However young people find their reassurance, youth workers need to both support young people directly and support others who also take a supporting role, including families.
“We have a responsibility to identify and encourage more enduring relationships”
Here’s more of Ed’s story: “Three mums came along to the meeting with us. When it was time for our bit they were far more vocal and forceful on the issue than we might have been ourselves. The councilors listened and agreed that changes needed to be made. We now have a much better connection with these mums and they are already talking with us about other changes they want to see in the community.
Eventually we want young people involved with making changes in community. We feel that having parents model community participation is a great start. We want young people to feel empowered to make the changes they want to see in the community. We are one influence in their lives, but by doing good community work we may be able to affect more change than by only working with them directly.”
Families have always had a strong, if not the strongest, influence on children. A number of times in Acts (16:15,32) the disciples baptised people into the faith, households at a time. In Roman society a household would have included the nuclear family, extended family as well as servants and slaves. Back then belief was a family affair, rather than the individual system of beliefs as is understood in contemporary societies. Today we increasingly try to give young people their own choices. As they move from being dependents on families to taking more control in their own lives, families still remain important. Engaging with families means that you build a bigger picture of the life of that young person. Spending time with families means you can begin to notice opinions, values and beliefs which are passed on, both positive and negative ones. Whether they are part of the church community or not, having good relationships with families can bring about wider transformation to young people, families and the communities they all inhabit.
Experiment Yourself
Communicate
Be deliberate and make the time to build relationships with families. Families within the church community can be very supportive if you let them. Often they want to know what you’re up to, especially if you run Bible studies and discipleship groups away from the parts of church they connect with. Send them your plan for the term or half term, provide them with topics and questions to engage their own children to help them explore the sessions further. Include requests for prayers for you and your work to make them feel a part of what’s going on.
Invite them to get involved
Families should be the greatest supporters of the work you do, so create ways for them to get involved. This needs to be done with care: close links with families have the potential to change the trusted relationship you’ve built with young people. Always give young people the first choice of whether or not a family member should be involved and in what capacity. Roles such as being part of the management committee, fundraising and regularly praying for the group don’t have to have much direct impact with individual young people. However, having a family member volunteer either regularly or for an event such as Soul Survivor may change the group dynamics, so be wise.
Home time
Take every opportunity to visit young people in their homes, if appropriate. In most cases it can be a great moment to see another side to young people and, if they’re willing, to share more of their lives with you. However, be aware that postmodern young people are more likely to live more fractured lives. They are able to hold onto fluid identities, meaning they can express different identities at home, at school and in a youth group. A young person at home might identify closely as Somali due to the heritage of their family, but at school that identity is felt less keenly with their English class mates and coming along to the youth group with another bunch of friends means they may engage more with the skater crowd. As such, treat every invitation home as a privilege and be sensitive. Be aware that young people are still working out their identity so the young person at home might not be the young person you recognise from youth club.
Big up
Praise young people to their parents. Whenever there is a chance to meet or talk to a parent, make an effort to tell the parents why they are a valued member of the group. Even in situations when you have to call home because of their behaviour, still praise them and show how you see them in a different way than just how they have behaved.
