If you’ve been working with middle schoolers for longer than 4 seconds, then you already know that some of the most confusing, emotional, exciting, and stressful things middle schoolers deal with are… the issues of love & dating.
Last school year, in our ministry, we planned to do a teaching series on love, dating, and relationships.
In this series, we wanted to make sure we were doing our very best to address our students’ biggest needs and questions. We had some ideas about what we thought they needed to hear about love and dating, of course, but we couldn’t help but wonder…
Are we really being helpful?
We weren’t sure. So we decided… if we really wanted to know what our students are wondering about love & dating… we should probably just ask them.
So we set up a really high-tech and complicated anonymous question-and-answer system.
(Just kidding. It was a Dubble Bubble bucket and some index cards. And a student labeled it with that fancy little sign when we weren’t looking.)
We let them anonymously ask anything and everything they wanted.
There were a TON of questions, so I’m going to break them up into two posts so they’re easier for us to digest.
Here’s PART 1 of what our students (5th – 8th Grade) asked…
ABOUT DATING IN MIDDLE SCHOOL
- How do you ask someone out?
- Is dating a sin?
- Does God want me to date?
- How do I know if a boy/girl likes me?
- How old should you be when you start dating?
- What’s the limit of people you should date?
- How do you say no when a boy asks you out – without being mean?
- How do I decide who I should date?
- What do I do if Justin Bieber asks me out?
- My boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t go to church or believe in God. Should I break up with them?
- Why is dating so hard to resist?
- What’s it called if I like cookies more than girls?
- Are boyfriends/girlfriends overrated?
ABOUT SELF-WORTH
- How do you know if you’re good enough for the person you like?
- Why do my friends feel like they need to be dating someone to be cool?
- What do I do if I really like a boy, but he says he will only go out with me if I kiss him?
- Sometimes I feel like I need to act a certain way, or be someone different, to get a guy/girl’s attention – is that bad?
That’s PART 1 of what our middle schoolers were wondering. Pretty precious, right? And now I’m wondering…
What conclusions would you draw from the questions our students asked? What implications do these questions have on us, as ministry leaders?
Come back tomorrow for PART 2 of these questions… and what, I think, is a pretty important reminder about the development of a middle schooler.