TEENS: Parenting teenagers means understanding technology and how is shapes their world. Expect success and failure too. It’s a part of parenting teens! These tips from Leia Joseph — a crisis counselor, high school music teacher, and mother — appeared first here on The Biblical Counseling Coalition website and is used with permission. This is part two of a 3-part series on parenting teens.–LAM
I have had the privilege of spending the last 13 years working as a music teacher and crisis counselor for teens. The following six tips represent a handful of lessons I have learned along the way. If you are the parent of a teenager or pre-teen, I pray that you find this helpful. Read part one here.
3. Technology Really Changes Everything
Technology has drastically propelled time forward as we watch culture changing at a faster pace than ever before. Parents who have fond memories from high school naturally desire for their children to have the same wonderful experiences. However, your memories of sports, student government, dating, or football games are more dissimilar to your child’s than you could probably imagine.
The mere fact that smart phones, email, and the internet didn’t exist during your childhood radically changes things. When one of my friends wanted to talk, he or she called my house on the landline. My parents could pick up the phone at any point and listen in. Other than face-to-face interaction and handwritten letters, that was the only way to interact with peers.
Fast forward to 2017 and students can interact on screens via FaceTime, Google Chat, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat, and Yik Yak simultaneously–and all in the privacy of their own bedrooms at night while their parents sleep.
Practical Help
Let your mind wander about the myriad of technology’s effects to get a better understanding of your teen’s world. It is much harder for a child to talk to parents about sexting or cyberstalking if parents don’t have even a basic understanding of how the technology works.
Aggressively seek to learn and understand apps, modes of communication, and its mountains of temptations. Then you will better understand the world through the eyes of your teenager.
Furthermore, as you begin to understand how pervasive technology is in their lives, you can then begin to help them learn a healthy stewardship, which will hopefully carry them through college and beyond.
Whether specifying a nightly time that your teen turns in his or her electronics or monitoring their usage through Covenant Eyes or some other protective accountability program, teens need your help navigating the challenges that face them as a result of technol
ogy, particularly in the area of discipline . Remember the undeveloped prefrontal cortex.
Technology is here to stay and invades your teen’s world at every turn. Click & Tweet! Taking it away or preventing usage is not a long-term option. Learn it and help your teen build a foundation of using technology for good and not for evil.
4. Expect Failure and Sucess
Teens want to know that you are their biggest fan and that you believe they can “reach for the stars.” Click & Tweet! But it’s equally important that you actively see them for who they are: a human being living in a fallen world, just like you.
Lord-willing, they will leave the world a better place, but they will also make some bad decisions and mistakes along the way. Let them fail, and expect them to fail.
Avoid a helicopter parenting mentality that always swoops in to save the day. Most success is a result of learning from past mistakes. Further, in expecting them to struggle, don’t forget that this includes sin. Don’t act shocked by sin, no matter how harmful or harmless our culture has labeled it to be. Don’t excuse it either.
The biggest roadblock to a teen’s willingness to share his or her struggles is the parent acting uncomfortable or mortified with what he or she shares.
- Begin to invite your child into your own world of struggles.
- Share why you so desperately want them to avoid sin because you know that it will ultimately destroy them.
- Let them know you understand how hard it is. Tell them you are there with them in the fight each and every day.
Sharing Hope with Your Heart,
