Pinoy Youth

If you have any doubt that companies and even governments are targeting young people in their information and communication campaign, you can set those doubts aside now. Even during the Economic recession in the United States, companies are still themselves how to target the youth and young adults so they could continue making these youngsters spend their money. This is a real lesson for teenagers and for young adults in the United States and in the Philippines. Be wary of advertisements telling you to spend your money. These people want you to enjoy the best they have to offer yet at the expense of you and your parents’ financial stability in these difficult times. So be really critical and careful in spending those hard earned bucks.

Twitter and Young People

Nielsen released a report lately claiming that Teens are not very fond of Twitter, the microblogging and social networking Web platform. This has important implications for those who are reaching out to young people. If young people are in Twitter, then it makes sense for these marketers to expand their presence there. Before the emergence of Twitter, Facebook is a very big thing among young people. Now that Twitter is becoming a big marketing and promotional tool, people just want to know if it’s worth establishing presence via Twitter.

According to the Nielsen report:

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Smoking is really a big issue among teenagers these days. A lot of kids feel that they can be cool and “astig” if they smoke. When I was in High School, some of my peers started experimenting with cigarettes. Perhaps they saw their fathers or some of their siblings smoking, they got curious then started smoking, too.

If there is one vice that brings nothing but woe to its user, it is smoking. Imagine, you are actually using your own money for something that burns you, literally. Apart from the seeming psychological benefit, smoking does not bring anything else but sickness to the smoker and to the people who will be unfortunate enough to inhale second-hand smoke.

Thankfully for teenagers, team sports can help teenagers avoid smoking. By becoming active team sports participants, teenagers can avoid the urge to smoke. If these same kids get exposed to too much movies, though, the positive aspects of involvement in team sports can be undermined.

image courtesy of journalletoile.com

In an article at Forbes.com, a study confirmed that too much exposure to movies presenting smoking as cool can be detrimental to teenagers, in terms of their choices to smoke or not.

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This is the transcript of my presentation at the Celebrate Family Seminar of the Greenhills Christian Fellowship on June 27, 2009.

You can download the presentation by clicking here.

The emergence of the Internet is one of the most amazing things that happened in the twentieth century. It revolutionized the way we handle and access information.

Simply put, the Internet is a network of networks, a massive interconnection of computers all over the world. It is different from the World Wide Web, which is a wide collection of interconnected documents, hypertext and hyperlinks. The Web is but one of the communication services being provided in the Internet.

Features of the Internet

Email
World Wide Web
Remote Access
Online collaboration
File sharing
Streaming media
Voice over Internet Protocol

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Ask a young Filipino if he knows someone with a mom or dad abroad and he will tell you a handful of his friends who do. Or his parents might be the ones abroad.

Around 11 million Filipinos are working abroad. This represents around 11%, of the total population of the Philippines, which is now at 89 million.

That’s a lot of people!

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Teen pregnancies seem to be becoming prevalent in our society. I’ve been to a number of youth camps and youth training institutes. I usually get invited to speak about the situation of young people in the Philippines and how we should deal with youth.

Teenage pregnancy comes up almost always. It’s a pressing issue, don’t you think?

Let’s forget for a minute about the right attitude towards sexuality and deal with the experiences of our friends, relatives, the friends of our friends, and our schoolmates.

Do you know a teenager who got pregnant out of wedlock?

When I ask this question in youth camps, almost all hands come up. Without having to use statistics and numerical values, we recognize that teen pregnancy is indeed a problem in our society. Our population is now running at 90 million. With teenagers becoming sexually active, we cannot hope to reduce our country’s rate of population growth.

Last Saturday, I encountered an interesting article entitled “Teen pregnancies in the Philippines” from the Philippine Daily Inquirer. This article was written by Dr. Rebecca B. Singson, a strong advocate of female reproductive and women’s health issues.

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