It's Friday, August 9, 2024. I'm Albert Moller and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and Events from a Christian worldview.

We're going to get pretty quickly to your questions,

but I want us to look at a few very interesting cultural indicators

that cross our screen and every once and a while come to our attention, but I want to start with something

that's a little sad on the one hand, but more heartwarming on the other.

And I think particularly may be helpful to American families, Christian families,

Christian parents, and others who work with Christian teenagers and even

college students. And it comes down to this. It is very interestingly and perhaps conveniently blamed, especially on COVID-19 in the pandemic.

But the fact is that most American teenagers and even young adults are reporting that they have a friendship

challenge.

They are missing friends.

They seem to lack a lot of the friendship structure that has been honestly so crucial to American

adolescents for so long and frankly not just American adolescents but

looking at adolescents over the span of something like human history.

And we understand that at least part of what takes place in adolescence

is a necessary, this can go off the rails of course,

but a necessary broadening of the young person's world and there are other social actors

who loom pretty large in that world. Now when it comes to American teenagers

America's Christian parents have often been more concerned that there would be too much

peer attention, there'd be too much peer concern, that friendships might in some sense compete with

the family and peer influence compete with parental influence and those

are very legitimate concerns certainly over the span of American adolescents in the 20th century and maybe even more urgent toward the end of the

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