I was reading on our friend Bill Seaver’s blog today and he had an interesting post that referenced the number of teenagers who use email as the main method of communication to friends. The results were interesting, I have to mention I was not too shocked by them. You can read his post here. From what Bill posted, only 1/5 of teenagers (ages 13 to 17) use email as the main method of communicating with friends. What’s number one you ask? I bet you can guess it. IM’ing (Instant Messaging) turned out being the preference of 1/3 of teenagers. Adults apparently were the ones who still preferred email.
So what does this have to do with anything?
Teenagers communicate differently than what we may think. I don’t think email is going away anytime soon. I still communicate with my kids (being my church kids) by using it; but honestly I find that when I instant message with the kids, they seem to have all kinds of stuff to talk about. I guess it is the whole "live" sense of instant messaging that causes them to open up.
It’s all about relationships. From what I’ve seen in youth ministry it seems that kids prefer IM’ing because it’s more like hanging out with friends… We have Internet stations in the youth house and the number one program used is MSN Messenger. I even put some other cool software on the stations, but none of it is used as much as Messenger.
If you haven’t tried the whole IM world of messaging with your teens yet… give it a shot. I have friends who use it as the main method of communicating with their youth. You would be surprised at how quick the word will get around with your teens by using messaging as well. We threw a big event over the summer and decided to use IM’ing as one of our main ways of getting the word out. We told some youth about it the day of or before the event. I was surprised at how many people showed up because of the youth Im’ing each other. Something to think about.
Have you used Instant Messaging to communicate with Youth… tell us about it > be a friend… leave a comment 
You have shared your views with us ..thanks. Keep doing it with useful and good informations like this ..looking forward…..Don Lapre Lennywebmaster@don-lapre-richards.comwww.don-lapre-richards.com
Brandon, thanks for the insightful entry.I do use IM with my students. I prefer email — they do check it, but you’re right, they don’t check it very often. My kids tend to like the interpersonal "feel" of IM
Dave,
I like your explaination "interpersonal". I think that sums it up. Thanks