37 – Parenting Adolescents

When your children hit adolescence, you are going to have to face some facts:
· Your children are likely to increase their interest in the company and approval of peers. Your influence on their lives may seem to decrease.
· Your children will go through physical changes that are hard for them to deal with.
· Your children are racing toward an age at which God intended for them to make their own decisions. They need your continued guidance through their teen years, but you must begin to let them go. If you try to control them as they become adults, the result will be unhealthy.
Raising teenagers can be fun, but can also be very challenging. Here are some keys to the process.
· Pray a lot and leave the ultimate result to God.
· Pick your battles carefully. Your children are going to have opinions and interests that are different from yours and most of these aren’t worth fighting over. We believe that many parents enter into unnecessary conflict with their teenage children because they feel threatened by the fact that their children are expressing new opinions and don’t necessarily take the parents views at face value as they once did. You need a short list of values that cannot be compromised, but a much longer list of opinions and ideas that are open to discussion and negotiation.
· Stay involved. Because your children’s interests are changing, it will take work and attention on your part to remain a meaningful part of their lives. If you make it a priority, you can find things that the whole family enjoys doing together. If you establish a commitment to going to church together when your children are young and you have a positive attitude toward your church, you will be able to maintain this as a family activity through your child’s teenage years.
· Work to maintain trust. Your teenage children may lie to you, but they are less likely to if you have made a practice of speaking the truth to them. They are also more likely to be trustworthy if they know you trust them. When your children violate your trust, you need to work to reestablish trust. This will require forgiving them for what they did and not bringing it up in times of conflict.
For your children to maintain sexual purity, they are going to need four things from you.
· Teaching the reasons for waiting for marriage to have sex. The church can help with this, but your children need to hear it from you. They need to hear it in the informal day to day situations that Deuteronomy 6 speaks of.
· An example of marriage that they can see is worth waiting for. If you tell them that they need to wait for marriage, but the only marriages they are familiar with are plagued with conflict, it will be hard for them to see what they are waiting for. If your marriage has failed, you need to see that your children are involved in a church, or are connected with relatives, where they can see some successful marriages.
· Some boundaries and expectations. Examples of boundaries might include, not letting your children date when they are too young, not allowing them to have a member of the opposite sex alone with them in the house, etc. These limits will ultimately fail, though, if you don’t give your children the teaching and example described above. You can’t give your children enough supervision to stop them from immorality if they don’t have it in their heart to avoid it.
· Lots of prayer.
Talk About It – If you have, or will soon have, adolescent children, talk about your attitudes toward staying involved in their lives while letting them go as they grow up. What do you need to do to improve your relationships with your teenage children?