How involved are you with your teen?
Having trouble relating with your child? Perhaps you’ve discovered, like many parents before you, that:
Their favorite thing to do is “nothing”
Their favorite place to go is “nowhere”
Their favorite answer to every other question is “I duuno”
Most parents find it easy to connect and communicate with young children, but discover that adolescents erect barriers to black attempts at building meaningful relationships with their parents. Wiothout that relationship, you will have significantly diminished influence in every area of the life of your children.
So what can you do to keep that relationship strong when most teens want to pull away? In his book, Parenting Adolescents, Kevin Huggins, director of a two year training program for parents at The Chapel, in Akron, Ohio, offers some sound advice. He reminds us that achieving strong relationships with our adolescent children comes from working through 5 stages.
- Intellectual involvement. Becoming aware of a child’s world through non-demanding discussions. Asking about their day or what’s happening with their friends, exploring how they feel in specific relationships. It’s crucial not to push too hard or kids feel interrogated. If you don’t earn their trust, you’ll be viewed as playing psychologist.
- Material involvement. Entering a teens world through a shared experience (not bring him to yours). Take them to the park, the movies, shopping, or whatever else they like to do.
- Emotional involvement. Entering a kid’s world through shared thought and feelings. This usually happens only after you’ve invested chunks of time in a shared experience. After taking a kid to an amusement park all day, maybe for 15 minutes on the ride home you’ll get that golden conversation you desire.
- Dynamic Involvement. Becoming able to shape a kid’s deep beliefs and goals as he reveals them and invites your views.
- Prolonged involvement. Continuing in stages 1 -4 for as long as it takes for an adolescent to develop a mature walk with Christ
Many parents want the benefits of the later stages without working through stages one and two. If parents try to jump to stage 3 or 4, they will likely drive their children away. We have no greater tool for reaching our kids that to build solid relationships with them to lead them to becoming the men and women God intend for them to be.
