Here’s a new vision for children and youth programs for the mid-twenty-first century. We want to create life-affirming, vibrant programs in multigenerational values-based communities to help kids learn values and morals, to gain in cross-cultural literacy, and to become vibrant, loving human beings.
Executive summary
Our four key goals for children and youth ministries are:
1. Young people will have fun and feel they are a part of a community, and they will learn
2. Young people will gain in the cultural literacy needed in our multicultural democratic society
3. Young people will learn the skills associated with values-based communities (such as public speaking, group singing, basic leadership skills, interpersonal skills, etc.)
4. Young people will be prepared to make a decision as to whether they want to be Unitarian Universalist adults, once they are old enough to make their own decisions
What we do is not typical classroom schooling. However, we might adapt some aspects of schooling to provide adequate safety for legal minors.
Have fun and build community
Our programs for children and teens can be places where they learn to build community. By building community, we will help them combat the loneliness epidemic and the mental health epidemic engulfing our teens. We will also help them to learn how to live out their moral values with real live people.
Kids can learn how to do community by actually doing community. In this vision of programs for kids, we don’t teach theories about community, we all learn together by doing. We don’t create programs separate from the adults, we create programs that are central to an intergenerational community. Children and teens learn leadership skills that allow them to move into leadership roles. They learn caregiving skills that allow them to reach out and appropriately support other persons. They learn how to live their moral values by engaging in social justice with each other and with responsible adults — they’ll engage in social education (teaching others), social service (serving others), and direct action (reaching out to policy makers). Instead of preparing children and youth to live out their values in the future, adults engage with children and youth to live out their shared values in the here and now.
A proven way to build community among children and teens — among persons of all ages — is to have fun together. So as we reimagine our programs with kids, we’ll take fun seriously. Having fun and playing together will become central to these programs, and by extension to our entire multigenerational community. This fun might include playing together, doing theatre and music and art together, eating meals together, and so on.
When we build community together, we are all working on our social-emotional learning (SEL) in a very practical way. SEL is taught in schools in a hierarchical, top-down approach. By contrast, SEL in values-based communities like congregations is learned and practiced together, in community. Moral values are learned by direct experience.
Many of these fun activities may seem like they don’t need a schooling framework to support them. However, we may find a schooling framework is useful. We have a legal and ethical responsibility to maintain certain kinds of safety for persons under age 18. A schooling framework can provide useful support to carry out these legal and ethical responsibilities — as long as we remember that any schooling framework must be both child- and youth-centered.
Hone skills associated with values-based communities
Our children and youth programs can become places to hone practical skills used in living in community.
Some basic skills have long been associated with values-based communities like our progressive Unitarian Universalist congregations. With our commitment to democracy, our communities are natural places to teach and learn skills associated with non-profit leadership. (This is true for both kids and adults. For example, a past president of the California League of Women Voters told me that she learned how to do nonprofit leadership in her Unitarian Universalist congregation.)
We want to teach kids basic leadership skills so that beginning in middle school they can start moving into congregational leadership roles — committee members, Sunday school teachers, members of the Board of Trustees, website co-managers, and so on (and these are all roles that I’ve seen teens successfully fill in my congregation).
One of my mentors, Prof. Robert Pazmino, said that our goal should be to have a young person on every committee in the congregation — and that if we did so, we’d have to reimagine nonprofit governance in a positive way. I’ve seen this in action both in congregations, and in values-based community groups like the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, Mass. Vote a teen onto a nonprofit board of trustees, and it will invigorate the board while reminding board members that ongoing board development is a necessity for all board members (adults, too). Move a young person onto an environmental action committee, and it helps people remember that kids are the ones who are going see the worst effects of environmental disaster. Allow youth to become full voting members of your nonprofit, then either train them to navigate Robert’s Rules, or come up with a more transparent way to do democratic process. We want children and youth to have a path to full participation in all the messy details of democracy.
Progressive congregations are well placed to teach kids how to do democracy. Our Unitarian Universalist congregations have a long history of teaching interpersonal skills (knowing how to relate with family, with peers, and with persons beyond the family), and intrapersonal skills (knowing how to reflect on oneself and on one’s actions). Our congregations do more than the currently fashionable trend of “empathy education” — we also do practical interpersonal skills like making meals for people who are sick and writing cards to people who are grieving.
Progressive congregations also have a long history of educating kids in basic group singing. When people sing together (even when we don’t sing particularly well!), something known as “entrainment” happens, where heart rates synchronize, which can positively affect human social interactions. There is some evidence that singing together also improves social-emotional learning (SEL). Other lively arts have similar effects. So we’ll want to include plenty of opportunities in all our kids’ programs for full participation in various lively arts — including intergenerational arts events.
Learn the cultural and religious literacy needed in a multicultural democracy
Our programs can be places to build cross-cultural literacy. In a multicultural democracy like the United States, we have to learn how to live with people who may have very different world-views from ours.
If we’re going to understand our neighbors in our multicultural democracy, we need to know more about them than the color of their skins, what languages they speak, and the foods they eat. Religious traditions and cultural traditions are intertwined, and religious identity is a key part of many people’s cultural identity. This includes those people who claim no religious identity at all (religion can even include such “secular” commitments as your job).
Understanding how religious traditions shape us is an important part of understanding different cultures. It’s well known that most public schools in the U.S. do not adequately cover religion, in fear of violating the First Amendment injunction against state-supported religion. This means that our children and youth ministries are crucial for teaching our kids about the religions and religious identities of others. The American Academy of Religion has a set of excellent guidelines for religious literacy for gr. K-12 that can guide our teaching and learning in this area.
(P.S. Most U.S. adults also need some basic religious literacy training, so we might want to start using the American Academy of Religion religious literacy guidelines for college graduates, too.)
Prepare kids to join our progressive values-based communities, if they decide to do so as adults
We want our kids to become part of a values-based community when they leave home. We don’t want them to feel isolated and lonely — we don’t want them to become another statistic in the loneliness epidemic and mental health epidemic that we’re currently seeing in the U.S. Finally, let’s reimagine our children and youth ministries as a place where UU kids can prepare to become UU adults, when they reach the age where they are capable of making their own decisions about their religious identity.
Our progressive Unitarian Universalist tradition is quite clear that each person makes their own decision about whether they want to be a part of a religious tradition when they become an adult. Sometimes, we progressives misinterpret this part of our religious tradition. I have literally heard Unitarian Universalist adults tell kids, “Now that you’re a teenager, we expect you to go away, and not come back until you have your own kids.” And I know teenagers who interpreted this to mean, “Go away, we don’t want you.”
We want kids to be able to grow up and have a values-based community they can feel a part of. We don’t want them to feel lonely and isolated — as so many teens and young adults do in these times. And if we’re honest, we don’t want them to become part of some values-based community that is sexist, homophobic, racist, etc.
People are not born knowing how to participate in values-based communities like progressive Unitarian Universalist congregations. We have to teach them.
We need to teach some basic skills: how we govern and fund ourselves; how we manage our communities; how we coordinate with other progressive communities like ours. We also need to explore our shared values, our social justice commitments, and our hopes for how we will behave to one another.
What is this, anyway? Moral education? Faith development? Sunday school? Something else?…
Sometimes our children and youth programs look like summer camp. Sometimes they look like a children’s museum. Sometimes they look like the local children’s library. Sometimes they look like a maker space. Sometimes they look like arts programs. Sometimes they look like scouting-type programs. Sometimes they look like racial justice and social justice. Sometimes they look like worship services. Sometimes our children and youth ministries might even look like a class, as with key programs like the Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education classes.
We also encourage children and youth programs to spill over into the family, and the family to spill over into children and youth programs. We’re not trying to separate children and youth from anything. We want to get everyone involved
Is what we do schooling? It’s most definitely NOT traditional classroom schooling. Our children and youth programs don’t look like school because we don’t do testing (though we may do other kinds of assessment, often as a group), and because we avoid the factory model of schooling. At the same time, our children and youth programs may look like school because we have adult leaders, and we have special safety rules in place for persons under age 18. And our children and youth ministries often do look like the kind of schooling as envisioned by progressive thinkers like Maxine Grene (Diversity and Inclusion), and bell hooks (Teaching To Trangress).
To paraphrase John Dewey, another progressive educator, our programs are not preparation for life, our programs are immersed in life itself. We learn by doing. We learn democracy by doing democracy. We learn morals by living in community. We learn self-knowledge by exploring our own selves right here and now. We do social emotional learning in real time, in real groups of people. This is not education that’s removed from real life — this is full participation in life in this present moment.
Using the curriculum on this website
The curriculum guides on this website are designed to help you fulfill one part of this vision of children and youth programs — programs that look most like schooling, programs led by adults at a regularly scheduled time.
Your community / congregation should have solid child protection policies in place. All adults leading programs for children and teens under age 18 should follow procedures to keep kids safe from harm and safe from sexual abuse. To help remind adult leaders of their responsibilities, this website often refers such adult leaders as “teachers.”
To help new teachers, these curriculum guides usually include fully scripted lesson plans. If you’re a new teacher, a useful analogy might be thinking of curriculum guides as if they were musical scores. New teachers are like musicians who benefit from having a musical score with their part fully written out.
Experienced teachers, on the other hand, are like musicians who only need a lead sheet that shows the basic melody and harmonic structure from which they can improvise. Thus, experienced teachers may prefer to create their own lesson plan. Experienced teachers will find useful teaching resources, along with stated educational goals and objectives to help guide them as they create their own lesson plans. Teachers should pay close attention to the challenges of cross-cultural understanding, and should avoid cultural misappropriation. Teachers should be careful not to denigrate any religious or cultural tradition, whether Christianity or Yoruba traditions or Islam or anything else.
Updated 16 December 2024.