teenagers

Teen Challenges

/ Dennis Griffith / 3 Comments

Does this description sound familiar:

Teens are unstable emotionally. One minute they feel wonderfully happy. The next minute they feel like the world has come to an end again for the third time that day. Their lives are emotional roller coasters. Solid ground is hard to find.

As the parent of three, relatively well-adjusted, teenagers, I recognize the description. As a former teenager myself – albeit long, long, ago – I remember this to be an apt portrayal. 

This is just one paragraph from an excellent article by Tedd Tripp that appeared in CCEF‘s Journal of Biblical Counseling: Communicate With Teens.

In this article Tripp not only describes the all too common symptoms of the teenager, but he lays out the foundational issues, identifies common pitfalls that we parents fall into, and offers some insightful goals for parenting through the teen years.

What are the foundational issues? 

Tripp observes three, taken from Proverbs 1:

  1. Need for Fear of the Lord. (Proverbs 1.7)
  2. Need to Remember Parents’ Words (Proverbs 1.8)
  3. Need to Dissociate from Wickedness (Proverbs 1.10)

As parents we need to be aware that the problems of the teenage years are not one-sided.  Tripp cites five common errors.  We need to honestly assess ourselves in light of them.  To what degree am I guilty of:

1. Spy vs. Spy. 

Teens often try to get away with as much as they can. Parents often try to catch them by spying on them. Sometimes the teens try to catch the parents trying to catch them…  Tripp says it becomes “a cat and mouse game”.

2. Disengaging.

Parents give up trying to be a nurturing influence in their teens’ lives. They limit their engagement to giving curfews and consequences. The result: Teens are more influenced by their friends than by their parents.

Parents often think, They don’t care about me and what I think. One word from me and they go in the other direction anyway. Instead of being in the thick of the battle in the most important time for teens, parents give up trying to have any influence on them at all.

3. Authoritarianism vs. influence.

By authoritarianism Tripp does not mean the proper exercise of authority. Instead he is referring to the practice of being overly tough: “You can’t get away with anything with me. I’ll stay one step ahead of you. I’ll make the punishment more onerous.”

“Rather than becoming a bigger authority”, says Tripp, “we need to come alongside our teens as bigger positive influences. We need to be someone who has their ear, who shows them love, who helps them be successful in the things they want to accomplish, and who gains the right to speak to them.  We want to become people who have influence with our teens. We want them to be willing to listen to what we say. In the years from infancy to adulthood, authority diminishes, but our influence should increase.”

4. Reckless words.

Reckless words, the proverb says, “wound like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.”

5. Majoring on the minors.

Parents tend to focus on matters of taste and style. But we must carefully choose our battles. We need to focus on things that have moral significance, with biblical truths at stake.

And so what is the overarching goal? 

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Teenagers: Tendency Toward Legalism

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

Do you remember a Brady Bunch episode where Greg and his parents got into a debate about “Exact Words”?  Greg, who had been grounded from driving, when confronted about borrowing a friends wheels, insisted that his parents only instruction to him was that he was not drive the family car.    The rest of the episode is an illustration of the difficulty of livng by exact words.

What I never realized was that this episode also illustrated a more universal principle. 

According to Paul Tripp:

“Teenagers have a natural tendency toward legalism.”

What parent has not heard something like:

  • “You didn’t say I couldn’t…” or
  • “You didn’t tell me to.. today”  

I’ll have to be honest, sometimes my kids are technically correct. BUT still, …we all understand, by common sense, what should have been expected.

Such statements are merely expressions of this tendency toward legalism. 

There is no use trying to make certain we are right.  There is no sense in trying to be more clear in our instructions.  We need to recognize this for what it is: Legalism. And we need to get across to our teenagers that, in the end, legalism does no one any favors.

Our teenagers need to understand, not only the lesson Greg Brady learned in that episode, but more importantly they – and we – need to be reminded what Paul says in Galatians 3.10:

“All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law”

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This is the Second in a series of six posts elaborating on the insights Paul Tripp offers in his book Age of Opportunity.  To read the others click: Teen Tendencies & Temptations.

Teenagers: Lacking a Hunger for Wisdom

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

No one likes to be corrected, but the wise person learns to appreciate correction that comes from a reliable source. 

Proverbs 13.18 tells us:

He who ignores discipline comes to poverty and shame,
       but whoever heeds correction is honored.

This is a lesson all of us need to remind ourselves.

But according to Paul Tripp this lesson is perhaps especially appropriate for teenagers. According to Tripp, in his book, Age of Opportunity, teenagers have a “Lack of hunger for wisdom or correction.”

What Tripp is saying is: It is not only that teens generally are lacking wisdom, one of the common traits is that they don’t even look for it. They are not aware they are in need of it. 

That teens lack wisdom should easily be understood. Wisdom comes only from experience and correction. Teens have generally not lived long enough to have developed wisdom.  And sadly, even those teenagers who have experienced too much of the hard realities of this world still lack wisdom.  This is evident in that they are often the ones who are in the most trouble. Likely this is because, while teens who have had to grow up too fast have experience, they have usually not experienced necessary correction.  They have been left to their own instincts. They have not had wisdom imparted to help them assess their experiences and learn to discern right from wrong; wisdom from foolishness. 

Realizing that teenagers are in need of wisdom is a great place for parents and teachers and youth workers to begin. But, along with that knowledge, we must also remember that teenagers’ limited experience and perspective leaves them with a lack of felt need for wisdom. Put more susinctly, teens are not aware that they are in need of wisdom, so they don’t seek it, they don’t hunger for it.

So, what do I take from all this?

1. If we who work with teens want to make a positive impact we ought to remind ourselves of a few things:

  • the importance of wisdom,
  • the need for teens to develop wisdom
  • the understanding the usual teenage apathy, even antipathy, about developing wisdom   

2. Perhaps we will be diligent in our approach to:

  • Make a priority of cultivating wisdom
  • Whet the appetite for wisdom

3. Perhaps we will use the book of Proverbs as a guide and tool in our parenting and discipling. If we do, we can help the teenagers in our lives, and in our churches, develop a positive perspective to apply to their experiences.

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This is the First in a series of six posts elaborating on the insights Paul Tripp offers in his book Age of Opportunity.  To read the others click: Teen Tendencies & Temptations.

Teen Tendencies & Temptations

/ Dennis Griffith / 2 Comments

The teen years are both exciting and exasperating as young men and young women try to find themsleves and find their place in this world. 

When I think back to my own teen years I am regularly filled with a feeling wishing I could have a do-over, in every sense of that phrase.  There are some aspects of my teen years that were so exciting and memorable that, were it possible, like a fun ride at an amusement park, I’d like to do them all over, and over again.  Then there are other parts of my teen years, as I think of them, with a feeling like one gets when just receiving a bad grade on an exam, I wish I could go back and do everything all over again differently. 

I know that, while my personal experiences may be unique, almost everyone has those same sentiments about their own teen years.

What is it about those years that makes them so turbulent?

Paul Tripp, in his book, Age of Opportunity, writes:

If you were to look in your Bible concordance for all the verses about teeneagers, you would find none. The period of life we call adolescence is a fairly recent invention. Yet, at the same time, the Bible gives us wonderful descriptions of the tendencies of youth. Many of these are found in the book of Proverbs.

The first several chapters of Proverbs record a wise father giving practical life advice to his son. AS I have studied these chapters, I have found the sorts of things we will encounter with our teenagers.

What Tripp writes is in line with something I have told my own teenagers and the high school students in our church: If there is any book of the Bible written for teenagers, it is the book of Proverbs. 

Tripp outlines 6 characteristics common in teenagers that would be helpful for parents and youth workers to consider. In fact, I think they might be helpful for teenagers to consider as they try to find themsleves and find their place in this world.  Not all of these will be equally true of all adolescents, but I suspect it would be a rare teenager who does not exhibit some combination of these traits:

  1. Lack of Hunger for Wisdom or Correction
  2. Tendency toward Legalism
  3. Tendency to be Unwise in Choice of Companions
  4. Susceptibility to Tempations to Sexual Sin
  5. Absence of Eschatological (Eternal) Perspective
  6. Lack of Heart Awareness

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