Parenting Teenagers

I’m still reading the book about parenting teens: Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide to Parenting Teens. I’m still looking for the exact words to say and the exact way to behave for various situations that might come up when dealing with the teenagers living with us. Unfortunately, this book is not a step-by-step, How To book. First off I think there are just too many possible situations that can come up when dealing with teens for any one book to be able to prepare me for what to say or do for each situation. So looking for that in this book is not realistic.

What this book talks a lot about is changing our attitudes about raising teens. It says we need to have a different mindset. In the author’s experience, many parents are just trying to survive the teen years. He encourages the reader to look at the teen years as an opportunity to reach our kids for God. That takes a different kind of thinking; not survival mode but still an attitude of perseverance.

One of the chapters in the book addresses getting to know the teenagers in our lives. Part of this means remembering what it was like to be teenagers ourselves. Another part of it is looking at what the Scriptures have to say about being teenagers. Actually, Scripture doesn’t say anything about teenagers; that’s a relatively new concept in society. But the Proverbs have a lot to say about youthfulness. In part the chapter says,

“Proverbs emphasizes the value of wisdom and the importance of correction. The father of Proverbs essentially says to his son, ‘Whatever you get in life, get wisdom! It is more valuable than you will ever know.’ The importance of listening and submitting to correction is similarly emphasized. Proverbs goes so far as to say, ‘He who hates correction is stupid’ (Proverbs 12:1).”

The problem is that kids don’t see us as wise or of having knowledge worthy of their attention. Teens are not going to come begging for our wisdom yet somehow we need to be able to communicate in ways that make wisdom appealing to them. Again, this book doesn’t tell me how to do that (and that is frustrating) but it does remind me to be thinking in those terms.

Another thing about teenagers is that they tend to think in terms of legalism. They want a set of dos and don’ts to follow. But just as coming up with a list of all the possible situations that can come up with teens is impossible, coming up with a specific list of rights and wrongs is impossible. We can’t possibly come up with instructions for each situation that may come up. There are just too many possible scenarios. And, what we really want to teach our teens is to act in ways that are pleasing to God. That goes beyond a list of dos and don’ts. We need to try to avoid falling into the trap of trying to give specific instructions for every possible situation. Our teens will just say we never said anything about doing a certain behavior, so it was okay for them to do it. This is really hard to avoid in some situations.

Again, the book does not tell me how to respond in each possible situation that may come up. It emphasizes having an attitude of helping our teenagers to see things as God sees them. Again, I’m not sure how to do that, but I no longer think this book will answer that question. I think I just need to pray about each situation as it comes up and ask God to help me see it as an opportunity to minister to my teenagers. I’m left feeling frustrated but also left with a little bit of hope that there might be ways of doing things differently than I am doing them now. Maybe there’s a way to get better results.