In some ways, raising kids is an immersion into the divine. I don’t know about you, but the first thought that comes to my mind when I see pictures of a new little human being formed is miraculous. The second thought that comes to mind is Psalm 139:13; “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” To experience life and birth is to experience the miraculous, the divine.

And once you know that this child you’ve been given is part of the divine, there comes a sense of immense responsibility. You haven’t been given a thing, an object, to take care of or money to steward; you’ve been given a human being, a soul, to love and cherish and nurture. As Psalm 139 also says, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”

But when that child is new and small and malleable, the responsibility seems easier. After all, you’ve got some time to work into this parenting thing, this “raising them up in the Lord” thing. By the time that child hits adolescence, as a parent, you realize how quickly you’re running out of time.

The book of Ecclesiastes says, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” You are in the season of adolescent parenting; it’s a season that’s here for only a short amount of time, with an expiration date. So why is it that just when you figure out the clock is winding down on your parenting years and time is short, it seems like it’s harder than ever to pass your faith on to your teenager?

As your teen moves from dependence on you to independence, you want to direct him or her to voluntarily choose both independence from you and dependence on God. And you want all this, preferably, before age eighteen so you can have just a small vision of it to rejoice over and hang on to when your teen is out of the house. Talk about pressure.

As I said earlier, parents in general have a lot to worry about where their kids are concerned. Christian parents have an added spiritual dimension of eternal proportions. The only way, I think, to be able to manage this pressure is to remember back to that feeling you had at your teen’s birth — with your recognition of the miraculous and the divine.

Be honest; you knew when you held that baby for the first time that you were out of your league. You still are. Your child’s life, including salvation, has always been in God’s hands; it was just easier to see it back then when your son or daughter was small and cuddly, without all that adolescent attitude and teenage hormones. That precious little soul is still in there, still incubating, still being woven together by God just as surely as sinew and muscle and bone.

The above is excerpted from Chapter 10 of my new book, The Stranger in Your House.

Judy kept looking at the clock, wondering how closer Jeremy was going to cut it to curfew. For 16-year-old Jeremy, curfew was midnight on a Saturday, though moving it to the a.m. hours had been a long, hard-fought battle. The only way she’d given in to a time she continued to consider too late was because Jeremy had promised he would still be up and ready for church on Sunday. The closer he cut it to midnight, though, the harder it was for him to get up in the morning. Even when he did get up, he wasn’t the most pleasant person to be around, especially when she was trying to prepare herself spiritually to worship. Less-than-loving thoughts tended to invade her mind when she had to deal with a grumpy, grouchy, resistant teenager.

Regardless of how difficult it was, Judy determined they were all going to go to church as a family. It was what she did growing up, and it was what she wanted for her family. Church was important. Jeremy might not appreciate it now, but Judy was sure he would later. She didn’t know how she’d have survived young adulthood without God in her life. That’s when all of it had become real to her – when God had intervened and rescued her, more times than she could keep count. Judy believed, and she wanted Jeremy to believe, as well.

Sometimes, she questioned herself. Should she continue forcing him to go to church, or did that imply that having him go through the motions was good enough? Should she allow him to decide for himself and let his faith and desire to come be authentic? It was 11:52 at night, Bob was already asleep, and she found herself going over the argument again. No, she wasn’t going to let him decide because she was afraid of how often he’d decide not to go. Bob had already weighed in with his opinion on the subject – his house, his food, his rules; everyone goes to church.

More than anything, Judy wanted to see signs that Jeremy was coming closer to a decision for God himself. She didn’t want to pressure him into anything more than Sunday-morning church attendance, afraid she’d drive him away. Afraid if she did; afraid if she didn’t. Without answers, Judy did what she normally did; she prayed. She prayed and watched the clock turn over to 11:59.

Among the many other changes in your teenager’s life, they are coming into their own spiritually. For Christian parents, this spiritual emergence is an added source of joy and anxiety. It’s an added layer of anticipation and expectation. Everything else has here-and-now consequences, but spirituality, faith, and belief have hereafter consequences. Christian parents worry not only about how their kids are going to do in this world, but also about how they’re going to fare in the next. Complicating this, of course, is that teens can be even more tight-lipped about how they’re feeling spiritually than how they’re feeling sexually.

Some parents decide it’s just to hard to have The Sex Talk with their kids, so they leave it up to teachers and the middle-school health curriculum. Some parents find it just too hard to have The God Talk with their kids, so they leave it up to ministers and youth pastors. Your kids need to know and hear about sex from you, and they need to know and hear about God from you.
In some ways, faith can be even more personal than sex. Sex can be approached from a physical point of view – what, where, how – body parts, dos and don’ts. If you do X, then Y happens. It’s quantifiable, concrete, explainable in its physical formats.

Faith is something altogether different. It is not physical; it is spiritual. It is concrete, but its foundations lie in a different realm. The Message puts it this way in Hebrews 11:1: “The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see.”

As a Christian parent, you’re trying to pass off a handle to your teenager that you know is there, that you desperately want your teen to know is there, that you desperately want your teen to know is there, and that neither of you can see. This faith baton is tricky. But, like every baton pass-off, it works better if you’re actually running the race, you’ve got a firm grasp on what you want to pass on, you pace yourself to the person you’re passing off to, and you get out of the way after it’s passed.

The above is excerpted from Chapter 9 of my new book, The Stranger in Your House.

Teens can get depressed without being depressed. But even getting depressed is a challenge in their lives where you can offer guidance and support. Do any or all of the following conditions describe your teen?

• Negative feelings or behaviors lasting more than two weeks
• Loss of enjoyment in established activities
• Restlessness, fatigue, or a lack or motivation in school
• Marked increase in irritability or impatience
• Feelings of being weighed down
• Loss of physical and emotional energy
• Marked changes in appetite or weight, lapse in personal hygiene
• Social isolation from family or friends
• Taking up with a new set of friends
• impulsive thinking or rash judgments
• Inability to make decisions, concentrate, or focus
• Marked increase in frustration or anger
• Feelings of sadness and worthlessness
• Expressing feelings of stress and inability to cope
• Ongoing complaints of headaches, stomachaches, bodyaches
• Marked change in sleep patterns
• Avoidance of added privileges

Think also about the pattern to each behavior.

Have you noticed an increase or a decrease in the severity or frequency? Also, do several of these conditions tend to run together? Do you notice an increase in feelings of sadness or worthlessness when there is more social isolation? Are there fewer complaints of bodyaches when there is a more normal sleep pattern? Be aware of these conditions individually, but also consider how some of them may be linked together with your teen.

Now, I’d like you to think about the top concerns you have. What worries you the most? Why is that? Is it something you can relate to from your own adolescence? Can you determine what seems to distress your teen the most out of any on the list? What you determine to address first may not be what your teen would identify. As much as possible, follow your teen’s lead on what is the most problematic.

You should not make it a goal to “fix” your child or take over whatever difficulty he or she is going through. One of the main benefits of adolescence is learning how to being to handle adult-sized life challenges while still supported by caring adults. If you remove all of their obstacles, they will fail to develop their adult-needed muscles and will constantly be looking backward, as a child, to you to save them. Instead of looking backward, their eyes should be firmly forward, toward their future as adults.

The above is excerpted from Chapter 7 of my new book, The Stranger in Your House.

She couldn’t care less about anything; it’s as if, in an attempt to conceal everything about herself, she covers up even what interests her. In order to stay anonymous, she seems to work so hard at giving nothing of herself away. With her apathetic attitude, she’s hiding in plain sight. It didn’t used to be that way, but it definitely is now.

He’s missed another three days of school with vague complaints about not feeling well. First it’s his stomach; then it’s a headache. The only thing that seems to help is to shut himself up in his room. He doesn’t want to eat anything; he doesn’t want to do anything but listen to his iPod or be on the computer all night, which he must be since it’s impossible to wake him up in the morning.

She seems to have only two prominent emotions: anger and despair. When confronted about her anger, she just shuts down and says it doesn’t really matter anyway. She’s started making sarcastic, under-her-breath comments that are really scaring you. When you ask her to repeat them, she just shrugs, says, “Never mind,” and walks away.

He’s doing something; you know it, but you can’t put your finger on it. You keep saying you’re going to start searching his room, if he’s ever out of it, which he rarely is. He doesn’t hang around with his friends anymore, and when he does go out, it’s to meet kids whose named you don’t know. A half dozen times you’ve stood at the doorway to his room, trying to decide whether to cross over that threshold; you haven’t yet.

Everything is a big deal to her these days. Everything is a catastrophe, a disaster. Any little thing that happens mushrooms into a huge crisis with you either squarely in the way or squarely to blame. She’s always been a little dramatic, but that behavior has just gone off the proverbial deep end. It feels like she’s drowning in her own tears and she’s dragging you under with her.

He used to proudly show you his progress reports and report card. Now, it’s nearly impossible to get any intelligible response about his grades, which are in a steady, if not swift, decline. You know; you’ve gone online. When pinned down, he’s come up with a variety of excuses, non of which really seem to ring true. You’re worried because these grades count, putting future collect plans in jeopardy, to say nothing of the future itself.

She’s dropped at least fifteen pounds in the last several months. At first you were pleased, thinking she was finally dropping the last of her baby fat, but now you’re worried. She absolutely refuses to discuss it with you. Family meals have become either all-out war zones when it’s just the family or silent no-fly zones when others are present. The more you express your concern, the more weight she seems willing to lose.

It’s like his mind is made of Teflon – nothing sticks. You can tell him a million times to do something, but when you confront him about it, he looks like a deer in the headlights, befuddled by your frustration. You feel like you’ve ben transported back in time to when he was a toddler and you needed to speak clearly and slowly, making sure his eyes were on you. This, of course, doesn’t really go over well now. But you’re at a loss to explain this inability to focus. Is it just you he’s tuning out, or everything?

You could swear you smelled alcohol on her breath the other night when she came in, but she went upstairs so quickly to get ready for bed, you weren’t sure. By the time she came back down to wish you a good night, come to think of it, was kind of strange in itself, she’d taken a shower and brushed her teeth. The only things you smelled then were her usual shampoo and the mint toothpaste. By that time, it was too late, and you just let it go.

You can see it in his face, which is strange because usually his face is devoid of any emotion. That’s the problem – where is he? Where has he gone to? What is he thinking about? If he’s in trouble, why doesn’t he come to you for help? When did you become some sort of enemy, to be kept oh so carefully at arm’s length? You’ve done nothing but love him his entire life. When did that become not enough?

If any of these scenarios ring true for you and your teen, a frank, realistic discussion is probably in order. Be alert; be wise; be real as you consider what these behaviors may may or may not mean to your teen.

The above is excerpted from Chapter 7 of my new book, The Stranger in Your House. I’ll be posting more excerpts from it here in the weeks to come, but you can receive a FREE copy of the book itself between now and December 15, 2011. To participate in this book giveaway, simply share some of your own thoughts or experiences about raising teenagers – in the comments section of this or future blog posts, or on the Facebook or Twitter pages linked to below.

Teens have been described as tightly wound springs, kept at constant tension by their phase of life and physical development. Navigating adolescence is challenging, but some teens have a way of piling on additional pressures. On the one hand is the overachieving teenager who is determined to grab as much of life as possible in as short a time as possible. These teens have incredibly high expectations for themselves; they are perfectionists. Failure is not an option, and when failure happens, as it inevitably does, it is greeted as a catastrophe.

These teens have the type of schedule it takes a computer to calculate, plotted out to the minute, in order to shove in as many activities as possible. They gobble up responsibilities, tasks, and duties with abandon today, heedless to the overindulging consequences tomorrow. They cheat sleep, nutrition, relationships, peace and quiet, and a chance to recharge and reset. They are adolescent Energizer Bunnies; and, as long as they get juiced with whatever they can find or devise, they’ll just keep going and going, doing and doing, until something breaks.

That’s the worker teen. On the other side is the worrier teen. These are the teenagers who can’t seem to finish anything. They worry about everything — whether it will be good enough, whether they should have tried it in the first place, what it will mean if they can’t get it done. They constantly worry about girlfriends, boyfriends, the lack thereof, tests, how they look, what they wear, what other people think. They hesitate starting things or taking risks because they’re worried about how it will turn out. You can’t get them to make a decision to save their life. Even after a decision is made, it’s constantly reevaluated and second-guessed.

The overriding theme for both of these types of teens is anxiety. The worker teen creates a life of anxiety by demanding an extraordinarily high level of personal achievement and perfect outcomes. This state of anxiety, whether manifested in the compulsion to go-go-go or in the hesitation to wait-wait-wait, can result in an anxiety disorder. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and is a state of being anxious all the time about nothing in particular. GAD is living life tightly wound. this isn’t being worried about the test on Tuesday or what to where to the dance on Saturday. Instead, this is waking up day after day with a sense of impending disaster, without really knowing why. It’s just a sure feeling that something terribly wrong is going to happen and being worried about it, tense and alert. The symptoms of GAD include:

• Living in a state of constant worry, jumping from little thing to little thing, without any relief
• Trying to stop worrying but unable to
• Difficulty falling or staying asleep
• Feeling fatigued, sweaty, light headed, irritable, nauseated, out of breath, shaky, having trouble swallowing, getting headaches or bodyaches

GAD is a diagnosable and treatable disorder, determined by severity and duration of symptoms as well as impact on daily functioning. Overly anxious teens can be taught skills to combat persistent negative thoughts and coping strategies for mitigating worry and fear. This is a pattern of thinking or behaving that neither you nor your teen wants perpetuated into adulthood.

The above is excerpted from Chapter 6 of my new book, The Stranger in Your House. I’ll be posting more excerpts from it here in the weeks to come, but you can receive a FREE copy of the book itself between now and December 15, 2011. To participate in this book giveaway, simply share some of your own thoughts or experiences about raising teenagers – in the comments section of this or future blog posts, or on the Facebook or Twitter pages linked to below.