So, this is the first post on the topic of shepherding young adults in your home. I don’t have teenagers. But God blessed my parents and I with a pretty good time together during my time as a teenie-bopper. And seeing as how we don’t have any elders that have gone through the teenage years, you get me..
My plan is to offer some thoughts and critique chapter-by-chapter of a book called, “Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide to Parenting Teens” by Paul David Tripp. You can buy the book and read it along with me offering your thoughts about the book or you can just read what I have to say about the book. I think this will be a valuable read for me and a profitable one for you, I hope, at least through my gleanings from it. if you don’t have teens, follow along anyway, as the time to prepare for that is now. As Tripp says, “They (the teen years) are the golden age of parenting, when you begin to reap all the seeds you have sown in their lives..” Indeed, we should sow and seed towards the goal right now. We should do this while the kids are young. Keep filling their little heads with truth, goodness, and beauty.
The title of the first chapter is, “Age of opportunity or season for survival?” He unpacks how crucial it is for parents to lead their children beautifully and persuasively in teaching them their identity. Here is a great little section:
“There are significant temptations of the heart that greet teenagers, calling them to believe that they cannot live without some aspect of the creation. These voices call them to believe that identity, meaning, and purpose can be found in the creature rather than the Creator.”
Teenagers need to understand that they can be content with who God is and what He has done for them. They could (as we) use a good dose of the power and grandness of God and His story. Teens can be quite self-centered. They need to be lead to think of others, in the details. They need to be servants. Listen to what Tripp has to say about the struggle of parents in this time:
“These years are hard for us because they expose the wrong thoughts and desires of our own hearts. These years are hard for us because they rip back the curtain and expose us….So, too, the teen years expose our self-righteousness, our impatience, our unforgiving spirit, our lack of servant love, the weakness of our faith, and our craving for comfort and ease.”
When the kids are little, one can get away with masking things as a parent. But, when the teen years come the real nature of the *parents* spiritual maturity is forcefully brought into review.
Parenting teens is hard because it pushes the parent to deal with himself.
But take heart. This is a good thing if one receives it from the Lord as pruning, and take the plunge.