1KHO 863: Just Because You Have a Bad Day Doesn't Mean You Have a Bad Life | Dave Boden, Raising Gen Alpha

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich, I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and this is a cool situation. I am a huge fan of Leah Bodum. She wrote a book called Modern and Miss Mason. She has these incredible middle-grade biographies that she's written, and just all around an incredible person. She's got this cool sub stack. You just feel so encouraged to talk with her. And then I got a book in the mail by Dave Bodum. And I was like, huh, could it be?
And it sure is. So you are a writer as well, Dave. Welcome, I'm so glad you're here.

**Dave Boden** (1:38)
Thank you so much for having me. It is very interesting having two writers in the house. It makes for very interesting dinner table conversations. I can tell you that.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:47)
Yes, and in some ways there's a similar focus. It's a focus on having better family life. It's a focus on children. It's a focus on these growing up years. Yes, so it's very rare, I think, to have a husband and a wife that are both authors. And in this case, Leah wrote your forward.

**Dave Boden** (2:04)
Yeah, it's the first time we've ever done a project together like this. But we've always said that if you sort of cut us both through and through, we kind of bleed, empowering the next generation. That's what we feel our sense of purpose is really. So everything we do has to somehow flow out of that. So that's where you get it from Leah or me really.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:22)
Yeah, absolutely, empowering the next generation. So the book that you have written most recently, you have a lot of books, you have a book called Parallel Faith, Walking Alongside Others on Their Journey to Christ. You have Like or Follow, What Every Teenager Needs to Decide About Jesus, so a great book for teens. What You're Made For is another book you had, it's about, it's a guide to finding purpose. And then this newest one here is called Raising Gen Alpha, Helping Kids Navigate Everything from Anxiety to AI.
And Leah talks about, you know, always been the type of person since becoming an adult who enjoys being around teenagers. Some do, some don't so much. So can you talk about that part of your life, and the insight that you have because you've had so many conversations with the next generation?

**Dave Boden** (3:06)
Yeah, I think the first thing to say is that I love being around teenagers because I can remember being a teenager myself, right? And how difficult it is and challenging it is to navigate those teenage years. And having people that are willing to kind of enter your world was always very important to me. My life was profoundly impacted by youth workers and people that were willing to mentor me in my teenage years. And I suppose then you grow up and you start to think, I want to do that same thing for other people. And I think that I heard somebody talk about destiny and say, your destiny is always trying to help the person you once were. So I get a little bit stuck with that for me.
So spending a lot of time with teenagers, one of the big things I realize is that they just did not grow up in the same world as us.
And I think that it's very easy to think, well, I remember what it's like being a teenager, life was the same, but increasingly, whether you're talking to the teenagers in school that I work with or in church or talking to families and my own four kids, you start to realize that they inhabit an incredibly different world. And it's very easy for us to, I think, judge teenagers and dismiss teenagers and stereotype them. But trying to understand them, when you do enter their world, that's what makes it more interesting and exciting to be a part of it. And I think that's how you influence as well, right?