A Faith-Based Approach to Parenting in a Changing World
Part Three of a Four-part Series
When you flashback to Junior High, what are your first thoughts? Were you the one scoring the winning touchdowns? Or were you the “walking wedgie”? Were you the most popular girl in 7th grade? Or were your acne and braces the most known thing about you? The preteen and early teenage years can often be years of struggle for both the child and the parent.
In this article, we’re going to discuss your child’s transition from childhood and elementary into middle-school, junior high, and high school, and how to navigate those waters. No doubt you’ve heard horror stories, similar to the struggles of the family in the previous article whose protected preteen son was introduced to the world of internet pornography, and other versions of seemingly “good kids gone bad”. Those transitions from “good” to “bad” don’t occur within a vacuum. They happen in the course of every day life. Likewise, those changes don’t usually result after the occurrence of just one event. They unfold day-by-day, moment-by-moment, event-by-event, one choice and consequence leading to the next.
When children move from the elementary years into the Junior High and High School Years, bullying, stress and trauma can often kick into high gear. And just by way of a reminder, in the arena of child development, resilience in children tends to refer to a child’s ability to deal with and adapt to challenging situations, such as bullying, stress, or trauma. It includes maintaining emotional health while dealing with daily setbacks and unexpected struggles. Factors that contribute to resilience in children include, but aren’t limited to, parental support, positive relationships, a sense of control, having hope, and the ability to regulate emotions. How critical these prove to be as children enter into the preteen and teen years of life!
As mentioned in the previous articles, generally speaking, any good parent’s goal is to help the child reach adulthood where they can be productive members of society. Now, I’m going to add a second goal: to have a good relationship with your adult child. So, why would that be the second goal and not, for example, that your child would adopt all your faith beliefs and practices as their own? The answer to that is simple, but it’s going to take a moment to get there.
So, let’s dig in. To get started on this idea, think back to when your child was young. When your little one was in danger, you would pick him up and move him to a safer location. As your child grows and matures, you reach a point where you can no longer physically (or emotionally, socially, intellectually, or spiritually) remove him from a dangerous situation. You must teach him to make the choice himself to move away from danger. In his book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart, Tedd Tripp explains that over time, as your child ages, your authority diminishes. Our goal and desire need to be that, over time, our influence will increase.1 When this occurs, even when you no longer get to make decisions for them, it is possible to still be able to have influence in their lives if you take appropriate steps along the way in order to maintain that influence.
This is accomplished, in part, by taking intentional, measured steps. When your child is in elementary, naturally, you limit his options for making decisions that are critical or would put him in danger, i.e., you keep him on a short leash. As he grows older, and as long as he is showing appropriate responsibility over the things you assign to him, over time you give him more choices over things that might involve a bit of risk, yet you are still deciding upon the options from which he may choose. In essence, you lengthen the leash giving him a bit more autonomy to make decisions for his life and resulting consequences, in limited situations. You give him a little more space to make decisions while still being nearby and overseeing that the options for the choices he is making are within an acceptable range of choices.
Recently a post in Admired Leadership® Field Notes entitled, What Leaders Can Learn From Great Parents, stated,
Parenting is the most common leadership role in the world.
Raising children to become happy and productive young adults is a daunting task for even the most talented parents. Of the many lessons parents want to imprint upon their children, responsibility ranks very high.
Responsible children are independent, confident, self-sufficient, and good problem-solvers. By learning how to be responsible, children also learn how to be reliable, trustworthy, and goal-directed.
No wonder instilling the value and skill of responsibility is so important to parents and children.
Extraordinary parents and parenting experts point to four critical steps for teaching children how to be responsible:
- Give the child a task or assignment they can handle.
- Accept that they are likely to misstep or misbehave.
- Express empathy, but allow them to live with the consequences of their misbehavior or error.
- Give them the same task again.
The sequence of these steps is essential.
Children learn responsibility by making mistakes and then enduring the consequences before trying the same task again. Parents who step in and interrupt any step in the process inhibit learning.
But it’s just too tempting for some parents to excuse or prevent the mistakes, thus allowing their children to avoid the consequences or remove any pressure to repeat the task. This undermines the ability of their children to learn how to value accountability and to act responsibly.2
The key is for you to superintend over the options from which your child is able to choose. He exercises his “choosing muscles” in a safe space. Parenting during these preteen and teenage years is something akin to using the bumper guards at a bowling alley. Going back to our original goal, our job as parents, is to help our child reach adulthood where he can be a productive member of society. Applying the concept of bowling to parenting our adolescent, our goal would be to get the ball (our child) to the other end of the alley (adulthood) without falling into the gutter (having to live with ongoing consequences of poor choices). While this may seem like a low bar, it is still, ultimately, a worthy goal. As he ages, we superintend his decisions and choices – limiting his options to relatively safe ones so that he practices reasoning through available choices and seeing the consequences of his choices. By limiting his choices to ones that are acceptable to you, as the parent, but still allowing him some flexibility and some options, he gets to rehearse choosing from options while staying relatively safe under your watchful care. Day by day, you will be training him to reason through situations and come to sound decisions. No doubt you’ve known of kids who have grown up in very protected environments and when they went to college and were out from under the control of parents, they chose to do everything that was prohibited while living at home. Employing this method of measured steps is a way to give him some freedom while still under your care. Moving forward, this allows you to give more and more freedom as he ages, yet still with the option of reining him in if he makes poor decisions along the way.
So how does this eventually tie in with the focus of the original topic of concern, namely, how do you raise a resilient child who adopts your faith and values as his own? Ultimately, the key to having a child who chooses to live a life of faith is for the child’s faith to transform from an extrinsically motived faith to an intrinsically motivated faith.
Your child must make the transition from this is what I believe because Mom and Dad say it is true to the point of realizing this is what I believe because I see it is real in my life and I choose to live my life this way based on what I know and because I have experienced the transforming power of God at work in my life. They have to own it before it will inform their choices and decisions. You may recall from a previous article that most kids come to their religious beliefs between the ages of 5 and 12.3 Helping them become grounded in their faith between the ages of 5 and 12 is critical. Additionally, you may recall the secularization of young adults tends to happen most often while living under the parent’s roof before the age of 18.4 This just underscores the fact that you need to be working cooperatively with your child as he matures through these preteen and teenage years, building the relationship with him. It is essential that you shepherd him through each phase while helping him responsibly grow into the freedom that he will ultimately have whether or not you help him prepare for decision-making when he reaches that stage.
When we utilize these measured steps, we are giving him the necessary space and time to experience God at work in his life as he learns, grows, reasons, and makes choices. The over-arching principle is to always parent with the relationship in mind. This must start when he’s young.
So how could these concepts help the family mentioned before who is now navigating the waters of their preteen son and internet porn? Moving forward for this family, it would definitely involve many conversations about choices and consequences. This is a perfect opportunity to make practical application about choices each of us make in life and the corresponding effect it has on our relationship with God. It could mean involving him in making choices about safeguards to put into place to protect him when he’s weak, and identifying triggers that could cause him to be vulnerable at certain times more so than at other times.
As these parents, unfortunately, discovered, you can’t completely insulate your child from all external factors and expect they will be kept safe inside a “bubble” and never experience harsh consequences of struggles in life. However, it is possible to help prepare your child to make wise choices when you aren’t there, or are no longer able to make choices for him.
If you have more interest and want to go deeper into these subjects, go to our website HopeSpillsOver.org where you will find detailed information about training under the Parenting tab. Be sure to check out Guiding Your Child’s Spiritual Journey™, Passageway™, and Transitions.™
In the final article in this series, we will delve into the transition from high school to college/work years and adulthood. We will also talk about the incredibly important role grandparents can play at every stage in the life of their grandchild. It’s never too late. Don’t give up. There’s more help coming. Stay tuned for the next installment in Raising Resilient Children Who Adopt Your Faith as Their Own: A Faith-Based Approach to Parenting in a Changing World.
- Shepherding a Child’s Heart, ©1995 by Tedd Tripp
- Admired Leadership Field Notes, https://open.substack.com/pub/admiredleadership/p/what-leaders-can-learn-from-great?r=4rz0p9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
- GreyMatter Research & Consulting, https://www.infinityconcepts.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/The-Spiritual-Journey-Downloadable.pdf
- Aaron Earls, LifeWay Research Article, https://research.lifeway.com/2023/10/04/the-next-generation-is-leaving-the-faith-earlier-than-you-realize/
