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Setting Aside Traditional Parenting

Ever catch yourself using the same phrases your parents did? In the heat of the moment, when your son or daughter is giving you fits, you find yourself mimicking the same stuff your parents used with you? It sounds like this …

“It’s my way or the highway!” … or …

“Read my lips! Are you listening to me?” … or …

“As long as you’re livin’ under my roof, you’ll obey my rules!”

Oh, man, you can hardly believe it when these clichés spill out of your mouth!

There’s a reason why these parental edicts have become clichés. Parents have used them for decades. But in today’s culture, forced authority doesn’t get the results we want. When we pull these tricks, our teens sometimes roll their eyes, sigh heavily and shrug us off. Wielding our position of authority rarely impresses this generation.

And what’s true in the home is also true at church. Tragically, statistics reveal that 85% of our kids are leaving church upon graduating high school. They’re not engaging in structured relationships as we once did. Something’s not working. They’re not buying into our ideals and it hurts deeply when our sons and daughters walk away from the things we hold dear.

So, what’s the answer? What are we to do? Well, let me suggest that some of the traditional tools for parenting need to be retired. We need to recalibrate our perspective and engage with our teens in a language, a tone, and a manner they can receive.

Perfection is Impossible

For starters, let’s resign some of our preconceived convictions and consider a new way. For instance, we’ve been conditioned to believe that if we employ certain tactics, our kids will emerge as responsible adults. We can’t rely on that notion anymore.

The first thing that needs to be debunked is the fairytale that families can attain perfection. Where did that come from? No family is perfect. So quit trying. It flies in the face of reality, and yet I find so many families working overtime to look, act, and be the perfect family. Relax. Deal with failures as opportunities to learn. But don’t freak out every time your teenager makes a mistake.

When we set expectations in our home too high, it’s not long before our children figure out they can’t reach our standard. Our good intentions for sinless perfection will surely backfire. When things get tough or seem outside of their ability to attain, teens will eventually withdraw, rebel, or even run away. They tap out.

Our pristine standards and our spirit of excellence may be genuine, but teens may see these ideals as an impossible goal.

If your child concludes they cannot possibly live up to your expectations, they have the option to turn to you as a resource and a source of relationship, or to turn away from you as a cause of their frustration. This is the proverbial fork in the road. They can turn toward you. Or away from you. The home can be a place of refuge or a place where impossible judgments are held against them. If the latter is the case, they will turn to an arena that is less judgmental. They usually take the road of least resistance. Typically, this arena is the prevailing culture. This could be their sympathetic friends, classmates, or even the input they get from the cynical media. When our teens turn to these communities for relief, we lose the opportunity to speak into their lives.

In children’s early years, we create a perfect world for them. Our kids respond to what we have to say. We insulate them from consequences. This would be okay, but then reality hits in middle school and high school when they realize that the world isn’t perfect. Mom, dad, you won’t always be able to insulate your kids from pain, or even from the natural consequences of their actions. Nor should you. The role of a parent is to help your child grow up. If their world is easy, they won’t need to grow up, and if they are perfect, then they don’t need a Savior.

Ultimately, it’s not what you do as a parent that counts. It’s who you are that will help guide your teen. At this critical juncture in a teen’s life, your relationship will be tested as never before. Maybe you’re right at this crossroad today. You feel like your teen is teetering on the brink of turning away or turning toward you.

Authority Can’t Be Forced

Today our teens have immediate access to information through television, social media sources and the Internet. These avenues have unquestionably tainted their perspective on authority. This is the game-changer in our culture, and parents need to accept the fact that we cannot control the barrage of influence coming from these sources into the hearts and minds of our teens.

Our teens have more information and faster ways of keeping up with what’s going on in the world than ever before, so they feel like there’s less for parents to teach them. Their reality is entirely skewed and they react to this lopsided reality through their relationship with you. Yes, you’re bearing the brunt of information overload from all these sources! As a result, children think less of the authority figures in their lives, because they believe that they know better and that their understanding of the world through the media is truer than what their parent is saying.

Again, this is why it’s imperative to persist on developing an authentic relationship with our teens built on trust. It requires time. Patience. Forbearance.

If you’re looking for creative ways to shift your parenting style toward a more productive outcome, or would just like to learn more about the changing culture and how it affects your teen, be sure to listen to a conversation we had with family coach, Tim Smith. He’s one of our guests on the next edition of Parenting Today’s Teens. The broadcast is a half-hour long, and you can find a station near you or simply download the podcast. You can also find help by getting the Parent Survival Kit from Heartlight. It’s a box that’s filled with time-tested resources for moms and dads, and it’s available at our web site: www.parentingtodaysteens.org.

If you are in the Hershey, Pa come see us at Milton Hershey School. I will be speaking the evening of Feb 16th. The event is free. Go to www.paretningtodaysteens.org for more information or call 1-866-700-3264

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mark Gregston is an author, speaker, radio host, and the founder and director of Heartlight Ministries, located in Hallsville, Texas. Call 903-668-2173. Visit www.heartlightministries.org, or to read other articles by Mark at www.markgregston.com.

Helping our Teens Make the Grade

I didn’t excel in academics while in high school. Academics just didn’t mean anything to me because I was more preoccupied by social interacting and my sport of choice, swimming. Posting good scores on my report card was for others to do; I was too busy.

After flunking out of a semester in college, I finally began to grow up and take school seriously. In fact, I actually began to flourish in college.

Then I became a dad. And when Jan and I had our two children, my whole perspective shifted. We want nothing more than to see our kids excel in school. We want them to succeed. And when they’re in grade school, middle school and high school, the only gauge for objectively measuring their success is in academics. We take their report cards very seriously, don’t we?

The Balancing Act

Our teens are faced with a balancing act every day. Every day is a performance. Not just in the classroom, but in the hallways, too. Adolescence is the season when our kids learn to build healthy relationships. Have you ever seen your son or daughter’s calendar or the number of “friends” they have on Facebook? They are hard-wired for relationship. But the balancing act gets difficult because as kids become more connected socially, they tend to become disconnected academically.

Parents, this is often where we make our biggest mistakes. When relationships overpower a child’s focus on schoolwork, we sometimes see the grades begin to slip. Incomplete assignments, poor exams, missed deadlines … these are all red flags. And for some of us, we tend to overreact.

If you have taken the time to build a relationship with your teen, then stepping in and helping your teen get back on course can help. But if the relationship has become weakened, or if it seems like your relationship with your teen is more about his academic performance than who he is—it’s a recipe for conflict. Lots of kids find themselves pushed into this corner and they decide to push away from academics altogether. The harder you push, the less your teen wants to have anything to do with you.

Once a teen loses ground in their studies, it gets harder and harder to catch up. With every grade that goes down, the student loses the knowledge that they will need to raise those grades later on. And at that point, it becomes a downward spiral.

Finding Connection

Parents, I understand that you want to engage with your teen. When you feel like there isn’t a hobby or extracurricular activity that you can use to connect with your teen, many parents turn to academics. But academics is a risky place to have as a sole connection.

Schools are designed to value academic achievement. Families are designed to value people. If these roles are switched, then we may see our teens looking to their peers to find their value as human beings.

Any encouragement for academic growth should be couched in the arena of relationship. Parents, it’s healthy to allow your teen to assume responsibility for his or her grades. It’s not up to you whether your teen graduates. It’s up to your teen. You can support them as much as you can, whether that’s through providing tutors, study materials, or just being available for questions when they come up. But, if you put too much pressure on your teen to get good grades, they can respond by becoming an underachiever (ignoring school or just getting by), or an overachiever (spending too much time on schoolwork and overemphasizing their quest to get good grades).

Our teens are already facing a lot of pressure. School puts pressure on our kids. They face pressures to fit in with other kids. They are transitioning from childhood to adulthood. They are in a heavy season for defining their identity. And they are continually assaulted with images of what our culture says is perfection.

It’s hard to be a teen right now. And our kids want to take advantage of this time to discover who they are and to be guided and molded. But sometimes, our encouragement and guidance may sound like just another pressure. As a mom or dad of a teen, we need to be very careful on how much pressure we apply to their academic performance because it might be our pressure that pushes our kids right over the edge.

So, how should we cope with their failures? This is the hard part. We naturally want to step in and rescue a child from academic failure.

Try not to shame them or chastise them if they fail. Instead, encourage them in the things they are doing well. Our role as parents is to help our kids know their role in their own life and to help them become acquainted with their God-ordained personality. We know that we have succeeded as parents if we have helped our children grow up and become independent. As hard as that is, that means breaking away from us.

On the upcoming broadcast of Parenting Today’s Teens, we’ll be talking about this subject in-depth. And from another perspective, I’ll talk to a high school guidance counselor, Wendy Mattner of Harvest Christian Academy, to hear her thoughts for moms and dads.

Healthy parents give their kids a chance to live, to succeed, to fail, in a safe environment. We provide a safety net for our kids, so that they know that they can turn to us when they fear failing. We can encourage them to do well, but if they fail we need to be ready to rely on the relationship we’ve built. A relationship built not on scores, but on each person’s inherent value.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mark Gregston is an author, speaker, radio host, and the founder and director of Heartlight, located in East Texas. Call 903-668-2173. Visit http://www.heartlightministries.org, or to read other articles by Mark, visit http://www.markgregston.com.

Teaching Purity in a Seductive Culture

Have you looked around lately? Our kids live in a dangerous generation. They are constantly bombarded by seductive imagery. Innocence is threatened at a young age. And our culture isn’t doing anything to stem the tide. In fact, it’s pulling our teens away from purity and pushing them toward promiscuity.

Over the many years at Heartlight, we have worked with hundreds of girls who struggle to maintain their integrity and personal purity. Along the way, I’ve learned a couple things worthy of passing along to you.

When everyone around a teen assumes they’re going to be sexually active, or makes fun of them if they aren’t, it creates the perfect storm for failure. In any case, our teens are set up for a private battle of choices. Many of the kids I talk to are confused about their own convictions on the issue. Over and over again they say how they wish they were still a virgin, but then admit that if they were still a virgin, they would be moving in a direction to try not to be.

Sexual Normalization

Sexuality is something that teens talk about all the time. Their banter is almost shocking. These conversations usually exemplify a teen’s craving for attention. Even though our kids are communicating like crazy over the Internet, texting, and through social media sites, they aren’t connecting. So they often resort to other ways to get noticed, such as their appearance and performance. They think they can get the connection they long for through their sexuality. And it makes sense that they think this way – television, music, and advertising all give kids the strong message that experimenting with sex is perfectly normal. It’s no longer just an invitation to sexually express themselves, but an out-right expectation. In fact, the media makes fun of virginity. But when it turns out that reality shows aren’t reality, teens become disappointed and confused.

Continuing the Conversation

Parents have a natural opportunity to connect at this point. When teens discover that a lifestyle of “appearance & performance” don’t deliver the results they want, they’ll start asking: now what? This is where having a strong relationship and ongoing conversation with your kids is helpful and many parent struggle with how to get to this place with their kids. Teens are young men and young women, not just young kids anymore, and we can’t control what they’re thinking, yet we need to have input along the way. This is a perfect opportunity to sit down with your teen and openly talk about what’s acceptable and what’s not. So, if you have been building your relationship with your teen along the way, your child may be more receptive to what you’re hoping to accomplish.

Even with good relationship-building, kids don’t always listen or follow our standard. Parents, if you see your teen acting slightly outside of the standard, it’s okay to choose your battle and say: I don’t like it, but I’ll let it go. But it’s important to clarify the standards for modesty and your expectations.

Expectations aren’t a list of rules. They’re taught in conversations, and caught with an example of your lifestyle. The parent’s role is to help prepare the child – and instead of showing our kids how to live in a zoo, we have to be teaching them how to survive in a jungle. Sometimes a child tells a parent: I don’t believe in the things you do, I don’t behave the way you do, it’s my body, I’ll do what I want. This becomes a different conversation. Instead of talking about the expectations of the household, you might have a practical conversation about the Scriptures and show how a lack of modesty can hurt relationships. Deviating from God’s plan always ends with pain and failure. We need our kids to know that God doesn’t merely say Don’t! God says, Don’t get hurt! The Scriptures are a great place to start because they show our teens their value.

Refining the Message

Kids don’t think of long term consequences, so it’s helpful for you to point out the lifetime ramifications of promiscuity. Give them practical advice and direction, such as asking the question: What would your future husband want in you? What would your future wife want in you? As your teen begins to define this for him or herself, stay engaged with them. Model the life you want for them and help them sort through their confusion. In the context of relationship, teens will see this instruction, not as judgment but as love and connection; just what they’re looking for.

You can hear us talk on this subject by listening to our radio program. It’s called, Parenting Today’s Teens. Next time, we talk with Family Coach Tim Smith. Tim will share his perspective on how important it is to approach this issue with your teen in the context of relationship.

You can hear Parenting Today’s Teens online, as a podcast, or find a radio station near you. All the information is found at www.ParentingTodaysTeens.org.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mark Gregston is an author, speaker, radio host, and the founder and director of Heartlight, a therapeutic boarding school located in East Texas. Call 903-668-2173. Visit http://www.heartlightministries.org, or to read other articles by Mark, visit http://www.markgregston.com.