News and Notes from the
World of Al Menconi

I thought you might be interested in what I wrote to my daughters when they went to college.  It has been 13 years (Allison) and 15 years (Annie) since they started college. I wrote each daughter a “special letter” that covered everything I felt was important. I wanted to make certain that I “expressed my heart” at least once!  And only once.  If I said it more than once, they would have considered it nagging.  And I didn’t want to nag. I'm hoping this advice to my daughters will inspire you to write to your children.  What do you want to tell them?  What life lessons have you learned that you would like to share with your children?  I'd like you to read my "advice to my daughters," and consider what you would like to say to each of your children. I decided the most important advice I could give my daughters was what Jesus taught in Mark 12:30, to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength

Chinese Study Shows Kids On Web More Than Five Hours A Day At Risk! By Tan Ee Lyn,  Reuters , 8/2/2010 MSNBC video report HONG KONG — Teenagers who spend excessive amounts of time on the Internet are one and a half times more likely to develop depression than moderate web users, a study in China has found. Researcher Lawrence Lam described some of the signs of excessive use spending at least five to more than 10 hours a day on the Web, agitation when the teens is not in front of the computer and loss of interest in social interaction. "Some spend more than 10 hours a day, they are really problematic users and they show signs and symptoms of addictive behavior ... browsing the Internet, playing games," said Lam, co-author of the paper which was published on Tuesday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. "They can't get their minds off the Internet, they feel agitated if they don't get back on after a short period of being away," the

The Courage to Be Bored Kids and Video Screens This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship president Mark Earley  July 23, 2010 Reprinted from www.BreakPoint.org   If I asked you what your teenage children are doing right now, you might not know. But the  New York Times  and the Kaiser Family Foundation have a pretty good idea. According to a recent Kaiser study, if your teenager is awake and isn't in school, he or she is staring at a screen a smart-phone, a computer, or watching television. The authors claimed to have been "shocked" by the results. Kaiser's researchers interviewed more than 2,000 kids between the ages of eight and eighteen. They found that, on average, the participants in the study spent seven and one-half hours a day using these devices! What's more, that figure understates the amount of time American kids devote to consuming media and other related activities. For instance, it does not include time spent actually talking

Why Profanity Matters by Alex McFarland,  Published in PluggedIn.com 10-11-2010 Magic Mountain, an amusement park in Southern California, is known for a roller coaster named X. Coincidentally, I was there to speak at a youth event when I overheard an   X-rated   conversation—between churched teens no less. It prompted me to address the issue from stage. I asked, "How many of you struggle with using bad language?" Many hands went up. I followed up with questions we've all probably considered at some point:   Is it wrong for a Christian to use curse words? If so, why? And what makes profanity, well, profane? Entertainment is full of swear words, sexual innuendo and scatological slang. I recently read a study of prime-time TV in which the Parents Television Council found more than 11,000 expletives—nearly twice as many as in 1998. Indeed, in our coarsening culture, some young people can't recall a time when f-bombs weren't part of "normal" discourse

Bullying Knows No Bounds The Tragedy of Tyler Clementi By: Chuck Colson in BreakPoint.Org October 5, 2010  You've no doubt heard about the tragic suicide of Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi. Clementi's college roommate secretly filmed Clementi as he was having an intimate encounter with another man. And then the roommate broadcast the encounter on the internet. Clementi ended his life by jumping off New York's George Washington Bridge. The entire nation was shocked by the level of cruelty, thoughtlessness, and irresponsibility that led to Clementi's suicide. But the sad truth is we're fallen creatures. Teenagers have always intimidated and harassed other teenagers. And now with the advent of social media-Facebook, Myspace, Twitter-young people have a new way to abuse and torment each other. It's called cyber bullying. As Kathleen Parker wrote in the Washington Post, "The emergence of social media, combined with mass access to technolog