Keeping Parents Connected (from camp)
ByOne of the great struggles in taking kids to camp is helping parents to feel that their child is safe AND that they have some sort of connection to what happened at camp.
The safe aspect applies to both jr. high & sr. high but mostly for jr. high and especially to those in 6th & 7th grade. For a bunch of those students a Fall weekend trip with the youth ministry will be their first real trip away from home without their parents. 9 times out of 10 the students are totally fine with this, it is the parents that start to freak out a little, and rightfully so. Parents instinctively know that it is their responsibility to keep their child safe and when their child is away from home for the first time they are wondering if they are actually doing their job. Well, the answer should be yes if the trip is with a well run youth ministry, but the parents still worry. It is not the youth workers place to simply say “suck it up” or “get over it already!” Youth workers have to realize that they are playing just as big a role in the lives of parents as they are in the lives of teens (and younger in jr. high.)
The second big aspect is that many parents will be feeling a sense of loss because their child is having new experiences that they have no knowledge of. Up until this point in a child’s life almost all of their experiences have been together, as a family, and now the teen is going off and having their own experiences totally disconnected from the family. If a youth worker truly believes that parents hold the greatest influence with teens and that it is part of the job as a youth worker to help parents leverage that influence we will help parents to connect with what their child has experienced at camp.
So, how can we easily accomplish taking care of the above two items? Technology of course!
This past weekend my youth ministry took a jr. high trip to a camp about 3.5 hours from my church. In prepping for the trip here are the steps that I took to help parents know that their kids were safe and could be connected to what was going on:
- Set up a trip Twitter account (what is twitter?)
- Create a page on my youth min’s website for updates, this was linked to from the front page.
- Embed the Twitter updates into that page with the code from http://twitter.com/badges .
- Create a TwitPic account so that photos can be posted as tweets (Twitter updates.)
- Create a 12 Seconds account so that short (12 sec.) videos can be posted as tweets.
- Activate my cell phone with Twitter, TwitPic, & 12 Seconds so all of these services could be utilized without a computer.
Once those steps are completed, I could simply snap a pic or 12 second video with my cell phone then send it off to either TwitPic or 12 Seconds and it automatically updates the youth ministry website!
I hope that isn’t too technical for you. Don’t be scared off by the jargon, just start wading into it and I’m sure you’ll find even better ways of using technology to aid in your ministry.
