The Importance Of Ritual And Discipline For Adolescent Youth

With the number of broken homes, gangs, and negative influences on the rise, it is getting harder and harder for many youths to grow up with self- confidence, respect, and a strong moral foundation.

Statistics show that anywhere from 40%-80% of high school Christians abandon their faith within their first year of college. This is a huge problem that needs to be fixed. The youth of today and tomorrow need strong Christian leaders who are able to fortify their faith before moving away into the real world. There are three key factors that lead to this high percentage: Students are unprepared, they are in a more hostile environment, and our natural inclination to sin and fall away from God to pursue our own worldly passions. Students, who cannot effectively defend their faith, are going into a more hostile environment with less Christians and are being offered alternative world views that allow them to follow their own desires. We can’t do a lot to change their environment or human nature, but we can build up young Christians.

In fact, Census (2013) shows that in Australia, 15% of the population claimed they had no religion within 2001, this has risen to least 22% today. An influence which has been addressed is that, the wealthier nations are becoming more content and assured as they have developed progressively indifferent to religious morals. Despite wealth being a catalyst of the decline of religion in Australia, CBC News (2012) asserted that the one of the main factors for the deterioration of religion in the Western society is ‘existential security’ meaning that individuals live in a somewhat unchanging, democratic society. This has resulted to countries such as Australia alongside having a solid social security having the least religious individuals (CBC News, 2013). These concepts are generally supported in the survey findings with most respondents claim that Australians see organized religion as "out-dated" in Australia and not needed in the society. In addition to this, another factor argued to the reason why religion is declining is the age. In fact, the investigation specified earlier which showed that age thought to be a vigorous stimulus in faith in God (by National Opinion Research Center, 2017). This has been further supported to surveys claiming that “in the society that majority of people who believe in an organized religion are elderly and less teens.” This establishes that there are various other influences of decline in religion within Australia despite of the countries’ separation from religious

Children ask countless questions as they mature. Children often turn to their parents for guidance. If a parent is unable or unwilling to answer these questions, a child, left to their own devices, will look for answers from their friends, the internet, and other authority figures. In his article “I Listen to My Parents and I Wonder What They Believe,” Robert Cole explains that children have an inborn desire to build their own morals by questioning authority figures around them, especially their parents. Therefore, A parent’s guidance influences a child’s morals as he/she develops.

Young people have been a main focus in society. Since 1960 there has been an increase in youth crime which is the reason as to why there are major adult concerns (Newburn, 2013). “Government became more harsh and intrusive in dealing with young people who were seen to be a problem” (France, 2007, pg.19). Older generations perceive young people as having less morals and respect in comparison to what they did at their age (Newburn, 2013). In particular, society views the youth of today as troublemakers, lazy, untrustworthy and unreliable. There are different theories that provide an explanation between involvement in offending and different factors such as family factors and wider social factors which will be discussed below.

Throughout this essay, I am going to be looking at the topic of youth offending. I will be looking at what factors can be used as the predictors for youth offending and in particular I will be researching into how important social and cultural factors as predictors of youth offending. In order to do this, I will be looking at different sociologists theories as far as young offending is concerned and what evidence there is to support these theories. I will then conclude by discussing whether I believe social and cultural factors are important in determining youth offending.

Clearly, religion had a negative impact on Lily Sabbath, but in the real world, does religion have a positive or negative impact on children? John Bartkowski, a Mississippi State University sociologist and his colleagues asked the parents and teachers of more than 16,000 kids to rate how much self-control they believed their children showed, how often they exhibited negative or unhappy behavior and how well they respected and worked with their peers (livescience.com). The researchers then compared their answers to how often these children’s parents said they attended religious services, talked openly about religion with their child and argued about religion at home. The kids whose parents regularly attended religious services and talked openly with their kids about religion were said to have better self-discipline, social skills and learning abilities than kids with non-religious parents. The children whose parents often argued about religion were more likely to have these problems. Bartkowski noted that “Religion can hurt if faith is a source of conflict or tension in the family.” If religion has such a positive impact on children, why is there so much crime? Are crimes often connected to religious preferences?

Societies tend to view the youth as the future and hope of a nation. To a certain extent, societies observe the behaviours and potential of the young people to ‘estimate’ the political and socio-economic future of a nation. When there is what societies view as a deviance from the norm when in it comes to young people – often there is what is viewed as a ‘moral panic’. I will be looking at the ‘moral panic’ of youth crime or juvenile delinquency, the role of its ‘moral

The Cognitive Science Journal found that children who were exposed to religion have a harder time distinguishing fact from fiction. In their study, they told 66 five and six year old children stories containing both realistic and supernatural elements. Out of all of the participants the children who regularly attended church had a significantly harder time identifying the supernatural elements as fictional than those who hadn’t attended church regularly. Devout religion seems to continue to impact children into their teenage years. NBC News found that teen birth rates are higher in religious states. Mississippi ranks at the top in both teenage birth rates and conservative religious beliefs. Experts say that this is mainly due to the discouragement of contraception in religious

It’s hard to imagine children and teens having to decide between life and death, or if the choices they made were good for them. Unfortunately, there are a lot of students that worry about these things nowadays. Children now in junior high and high school are forced to choose between school, drugs, or the life of their child. In this essay, the causes of youth corruption will be analyzed and the effects such as illiteracy, drug abuse, delinquency, and teen pregnancy will be explored.

A quite popular idea is that a person's childhood has the greatest influence on their personality and their moral standards. As stated by Patrick Crispen in Criminal Minds, a child's morals are learned and set by the age of ten years old (67). Also stated in Criminal Minds, is the assumption that a sixth-grade teacher could look at a class of students and determine who will be successful, who will be a "trouble-maker", and so forth (70). This is a deeper example of how

Donahue, M. J. & Benson, P. L. (1995). “Religion and the Well-being of Adolescents” in

Educators need to understand the impact of religion on the lives of their students. According to Gallup poll data, nearly 95% of teens believe in God and 86% believe that Jesus Christ is either God or the Son of God (Gallup & Lindsay, 1999 as cited in Ream, 2003). These and other similar statistics demonstrate the importance of considering religion when dealing with young people. Ream

It is the youth who are encountering the most serious challenge to his/her faith under the impact of godless culture of modernity.

Children develop their ability to think and act morally through several stages. If they fail to reach the conventional stage, in which adolescents realize that their parents and society have rules that should be followed because they are morally right to follow, they might well engage in harmful behavior. Whereas boys tend to use formal rules to decide what is right or wrong, girls tend to take personal relationships into account.