If you are a parent, you know or will soon know the crazy days of raising a teenager. I read a Christian book when my three entered the teen years that really helped me: “Adolescence in Not an Illness” by Charlie Shed. The book is no longer available as far as I can see online.
As an adult, my daughter tells me that I read too many books. Of course, she is approaching 50 and has never had any children to raise. In my defense, children do not come with “how to” instructions. I had no idea how to wade through the neck-high waters of raising a baby into adulthood, and I wanted to do it right.
I recently read an article about teen years, posted by one of my Facebook friends, that had some interesting points in it. It declared that the human brain is not fully developed until age 25 or so. That is why teens think they know it all, yet they have very little ability to make rational decisions.
They follow their emotions and crave independence and move away from parental advice that they view as control. We parents are simply attempting to maintain an organized life for the whole family, but a teen’s imagination and spontaneity causes them to keep popping out of the mold into which we try to pour them.
Our decisions from age 15 to 25 impact the rest of our life, and since we have a personal history of lessons learned from our experiences, we want to share that knowledge with our teens, which they often resent. How we share this wisdom seems to be the root of the problem between parents and their teens.
The challenge is to support their growing independence while continuing to offer parameters that provide their safety, which has been our guiding factor throughout their entire life so far. The decisions they make now are far more serious than a skinned knee or broken bone.
Prayer:
Father God, our one desire in parenthood is to find the balance between dictatorship and indifference in our attitude toward our children. Their friends and the choices they are making have more of a bearing on the course that our teens are taking than the wisdom we have learned from You over the years. We do our best as human parents, but our children often view it as control, which causes them to rebel.
Teach us how to show them the way rather than to impose restrictions that they do not appreciate. They want to figure out what they want and how to attain those goals, but we want to protect them from experiencing negative consequences from their behavior and choices. Help us to see that they do not mind if we share anecdotes from our teen years, but they resent our parameters designed to keep them safe.
Thoughts for the Day:
