Parenting doesn’t end when your child becomes a teenager. Teens are just more mobile, spend less time with you, and are more independent. Now they value and emulate peers who are as immature as they are. Even when you have laid moral and spiritual foundations in their early years, something will happen that leaves you asking, ‘What happened? Where did I go wrong?’ Adolescence happened! It’s the teenager’s brain; it’s wired that way. Their frontal lobes – the part of the brain linked to moral development, emotional reactivity, impulse control, and decision-making – aren’t fully developed yet. Their frontal lobes won’t finish growing before their twenties, and sometimes later. Meantime, what happened to all those Bible stories and your efforts to build godly beliefs into them? It’s all in there, temporarily lost in those budding lobes! They aren’t bad or ignorant, though they sometimes seem to act that way. They haven’t abandoned your teachings. The belief systems you helped them construct earlier are not erased – they have been transferred to a ‘holding file’ until their new sanity-restoring brain cells arrive. And they will! Your job is to avoid panic, pray, and allow God to work on them, love them unconditionally, and be their anchor. Stand firm, and live by your principles. Demonstrate empathy, but teach them how their decisions affect others. Help them learn self-control by letting them deal with their consequences! Be patient, supportive, and never give up on them. You have sown the seed of God’s Word into them, and ‘at just the right time [you] will reap a harvest of blessing if [you] don’t give up’ (Galatians 6:9 NLT)!

© 2024. Written by Bob and Debby Gass. Used by permission under licence from UCB International.