“How the Children and Youth Program Strengthens Families,” Liahona, Mar. 2022, United States and Canada Section.
How the Children and Youth Program Strengthens Families
The Children and Youth program was created because your children were born into a difficult world at a unique time to engage in a great work.
Shortly before the April 2020 general conference, President Russell M. Nelson invited my wife, Kalleen, and me into his office, where he called me to be the General Young Men President. As our heads were spinning over this totally unexpected turn of events, he stood and said: “This is an important time for the youth of the Church because it’s an important time for the Church. The youth will play a critical role in this wondrous time.” He added, “You know, I have invited them into the Lord’s battalions.”
“Yes, President Nelson,” I said. “I know you have, and I know they are listening.”
“Well, it’s important that they do, because they are needed.”
I am paraphrasing only a little here, but he then went on to talk with great energy about the long-prophesied gathering that is taking place and the important work the Lord has for our youth to do. He spoke with a sense of urgency and great immediacy that they have been specifically sent to prepare for the Savior’s return.
The things President Nelson told us that day mirrored his talk to youth in June 2018. On both occasions, he spoke with the voice of a seer. He said: “My dear extraordinary youth, you were sent to earth at this precise time, the most crucial time in the history of the world, to help gather Israel. There is nothing happening on this earth right now that is more important than that. … This is the mission for which you were sent to earth.”1
President Nelson chooses his words with great precision. When you reread that talk, you will see that he did not call them into the Lord’s youth battalions; he invited them. For them, it is a choice. He did not say they were the greatest generation, only that they had the capacity to be so. That too is a choice. Those choices to lead extraordinary lives by joining in the gathering will largely find place in the Children and Youth program.2
Let’s look at five reasons why we have faith in the Children and Youth program and why we hope you will gain your own testimony of it and share it with other parents and leaders.
1. The Children and Youth program is a powerful tool for spiritual growth.
Children and Youth is a resource all about helping our children grow in faith. It was designed to be simple. It cuts across all of the activities of the Church, personifying the ideal that everything we do in the Church amounts to one work.
Children and Youth focuses on three areas:
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Gospel learning: This means fully engaging in personal and family scripture study; seminary; Sunday School; Come, Follow Me; and so on.
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Service and activities: These are often midweek or Saturday sessions, planned by the youth, when they can be together helping each other progress along the covenant path. Hiking, camping, For the Strength of Youth conferences, and local camps and conferences combine to create an active program.
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Personal development: Youth are encouraged to determine their own goals centered in their individual interests to help them prepare for life spiritually, intellectually, physically, and socially (see Luke 2:52).
President Jean B. Bingham, Relief Society General President, who helped design the program, taught how parents can help: “A parent’s most important role is to help their children to connect with heaven and develop the gospel-based value system that will help anchor them through the challenges in their life.”3
2. The Children and Youth program provides structure for families to use as they strive toward home-centered personal development.
Sister Sharon Eubank, First Counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency, summed up how Children and Youth is personalized: “We are all developing along the path in different ways. Nobody is exactly the same. The Children and Youth program acknowledges this and makes room for personal learning to grow into a deep love of Jesus Christ and His ways.”4
Our youth need the constancy of the Children and Youth program because their fast-changing world is suffering a mental health crisis, and the gospel, as applied through the disciplines of this program, provides support to sound mental and emotional health. President Bonnie H. Cordon, Young Women General President, explained, “The happiest individuals are those who engage socially and spiritually in ways which positively build others by also building themselves.”5
The personal development goal-setting activities bring balance to a youth culture that is manifestly out of balance. The benefits of setting and accomplishing diverse goals provide them with nurturing successes as they grow “in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” (Luke 2:52).
One of our mental health experts, Dr. Sheldon Martin, recently spoke with our presidency about youth and mental health. He said:
“The best way to help youth improve their mental health is by engaging them in Children and Youth because of the consistent emphasis on growth in a variety of areas.
“Children who understand the wonders of the covenant path will not be looking for off-ramps. Through Primary and Children and Youth, the covenants and the milestones will be clear to them, especially when life gets confusing.”6
In an article published in the August 2021 Liahona magazine, Dr. Martin states, “[Children and Youth is] a pattern for growth and mental and emotional wellness.”7 He concludes that it makes sense that improved mental health contributes to improved spirituality, but research is showing the reverse is also true: improving spirituality improves mental health.
3. Children and Youth provides a place for the men and women in our children’s lives to teach and prepare them for the tasks of gathering and defending Zion.
If today’s children and youth were truly born “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14), then so were you and I. Their parents and leaders were born for a time when a generation is being raised up capable of fulfilling the prophecies of the ages.
This generation has unsurpassed capacity for the task but was not born with the knowledge and skills necessary to ignite the coming regeneration of the world. They will need to acquire them from us. And we will need to acquire them together.
There would have been no sons of Helaman without mothers who surely knew and without fathers who refused, at the very cost of their lives, to violate their covenants. But those leaders, placed by providence in their sons’ paths, enabled those 2,000 and a few to decidedly march into the maelstrom of a broken and divided society and save the freedoms of their nation.
In our day, it is you and I who were born to prepare them, to wrap their wounds, and to fit their hands to the task of Zion.
President Nelson has invited our youth into the Lord’s youth battalions because, whether they elect to join the battalion or not, they are engaged in a war already. The War in Heaven did not end in heaven. It is continuing here and now, and the youth of the Church need the same defenses and weapons that defeated evil before the world was (see Revelation 12:11).
4. Your young people need you to support Children and Youth because they actually need you.
Our youth need their mothers and fathers, friends and neighbors, bishops and advisers, quorum and class presidencies, and every one of us to lend to their cause spiritual confidence and practical wisdom. Relationships with faithful members like you are often the most important faith factor in a young person’s life.
One of the most surprising and helpful things we have learned as a new presidency came to us from a multiyear Church study that asked active adults what important things happened in their youth that helped them identify as active members of the Church.
The key finding is surprising: those youth who grow up to identify within themselves as active members of the Church—as members of the crew rather than as tourists passing through—tell researchers that more important than the quality of activities, more important even than Sunday School lessons, which are very important, was the formation of positive relationships with active leaders who helped them develop a relationship with the Savior and with their Heavenly Father. It is about those second witnesses, about our young people’s ability to connect with them.
Sure, there is value in developing excellence in worthy secular pursuits, but those pursuits alone will not be enough to defend and empower them when questions of the soul go unanswered. When those moments arise, as surely they will, then their most urgent need will be to bring faith and power to the words that follow: “Through the power of the priesthood and in the name of Jesus Christ, I bless you …”
So where in the physical world are these relationships and human bonds that are built to last best created? Not surprisingly, it has been in programs like Children and Youth. Relationships are best deepened in sensory-rich, high-adventure settings; in service projects working shoulder to shoulder with leaders; in seminary and Sunday School, quorums and classes, where young people will come to respect and love their leaders and fellow Saints, who they will come to know love them and who will have helped them to lead.
Importantly, forming these critical relationships is often not connected to highly successful activities. When I was 13 or 14, my own Young Men group was bonded together with our leader on a California snow campout. As we slept in the very first snow that most of us had ever touched, it started to rain in the middle of the night, seeping into our tents, saturating our sleeping bags and clothes, leaving us all miserably freezing. Drenched and nearly hypothermic, after building a pathetic fire from wet wood that would not melt a snowflake, we eventually huddled together into a drafty crew-cab pickup truck and barely escaped with our lives as we headed home before the sun had even fully risen.
The activity was a disaster—except that the most important things that could have happened did happen. We came to know we could do hard things and that we could trust each other and our leaders. As time went on, these leaders helped us along the covenant path. When they said, “Missions matter,” missions came to matter more to us, to me.
With the Spirit of the Lord on our side, such trust and relationships can happen anywhere when the right combination clicks. They can form in an instant, but someone has to be there at the right moment, and that means they have to be there a lot, or they may miss it. They often form best in the outdoors, away from the distractions of technology and of civilization.
Weeknights at church or on Zoom are about more than the activities. They are about our youth building connections and relationships with bishops, quorum and class leaders, their own peers, and others who may come to have more spiritual influence over your children, for a time, than even their parents.
5. Children and Youth builds faith in Christ by putting youth and children on the road He travels.
At a virtual focus group with youth in California, we asked quorum and class presidents what they had observed after holding weekly presidency meetings. A 14-year-old unmuted her microphone before we even finished asking the question and said, “I feel closer to the Savior. Because when I started thinking more often about how to help my friends become closer to Him, I came closer to Him too.”
To navigate these confusing times, the world and the kingdom of God need leaders—leaders like this 14-year-old girl, who, having found joy in His service, will go on to serve and lead all of her life. Children and Youth is the Church’s leadership training program.
The Children and Youth program plants our loved ones’—and our own—feet firmly onto the covenant path. It shows us what a life on the path looks like and feels like, qualifying for covenantal blessings through promises understood and kept.
A very real danger of not enthusiastically supporting Children and Youth is the unintended message we would send to our children that the Church is a buffet where we can simply pick and choose which practices and commandments we want to follow and somehow opt out of the rest without consequence.
Elder Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles powerfully taught, “What in you is merely casualness about Christianity may, in your children, become hostility; for what you have not defended, your children may reject angrily.”8
I testify that your efforts to embrace the Children and Youth program will bless your life and the lives of your children.
From a BYU Women’s Conference talk, “Be of Good Cheer; Children and Youth Is Here,” given on April 30, 2021.