Preteen Parent Panel

We hosted a Parent Panel for our tweens on Sunday. It was a great close to our series called “How to Annoy your Family”, which we adapted from Simply Youth Ministry’s series.

It was such a cool thing for the parents to see Switch and participate in the discussions.

I decided to do a parent panel for a few reasons:

 

  1. It would give our students an opportunity to ask questions to parents. Questions are so important for our preteens. Here is a post about when tweens ask questions. This was important.
  2. It would give parents the opportunity to take the stage.
  3. It also gave us an opportunity to invite parents to our services for a purpose: to hear the dialogue between our panel and their students.
It was such a blast. We overviewed parenting a 5th and 6th grader and talked about a few important issues our students have been asking questions about consistently.
  • We asked how the parents felt about cell phones.
  • They explained what a 5th and 6th grade student was like in that particular stage of life.
  • We also talked about friends and what they look for in their child’s friends.
We had a few other things that we talked about but the purpose was for our students to get a candid view of parenting. It was fun. We also played a great parents vs. kids game with a few of the parents from the audience.
I think we will do the panel again, but next time we will focus on a single topic and maybe use to wrap our series.
Some topics might include:
Privacy (talked about this one a bit too as parents shared about checking texts and internet history)
Cell Phones
Bullying
Partnering with other adults
Responsibility
But great experience and the parents that were on the panel were phenomenal.
Have you ever done a parent panel in your preteen services? If so what did you think?