When Nothing is Working

What if nothing seems to be working to encourage your teenager to head in a better direction? Perhaps you’ve applied consequences to correct their inappropriate behavior, and have progressively taken away many or all of their privileges, but they still break your rules and they still defy you.

Having a child who is struggling will wear you out.  The parents who drop off their teenagers at our Heartlight residential counseling program are at wit’s end, tired, and frazzled.  They’ve literally spent every ounce of emotional energy in a struggle that has taken place over many months. It’s not easy for any parent to leave their child in the hands of strangers, but at that point, they are desperate for solutions. >> Article continued…

Suicide Epidemic Among Teens

For a teenager to be so unbearably unhappy that he would choose to kill himself is something that is almost too painful for a parent to think about. But with the increasing prevalence of teen suicide, no parent can afford to ignore the possibility. Suicide is now the third leading cause of death for high school students.

Kids look at this world as being more and more hopeless.  And many are choosing suicide as their solution. When I was in high school — a school with 3,000 students — I never knew of any of my peers committing suicide. And even working in Young Life after college, suicide among teens was a very unusual event that we rarely heard of.

Fact is, before the 1960’s, suicide by adolescents happened only rarely; but today, nearly one in ten teens contemplates suicide, and over 500,000 attempt it each year. While suicide rates for all other ages have dropped, suicides among teens have nearly tripled. >> Article continued…

3 Ways to Connect With Your Teen

Are you connecting with your teenager or growing farther apart every day? Here are three things you can do to communicate and connect on a deeper level.

So, what do you and your teen talk about? My guess is that you discuss such items as academics, work, behaviors, privileges, sports involvement, picking the right friends, choosing the right clothes, performing chores, and obeying the rules of the house.

Now, take a minute and think about what else you talk about. Pretty short list, isn’t it?

Most of what we talk about is what they’re doing or need to do, not about what they’re thinking or what their passions and goals are in life. This imbalance can create the impression that your relationships with your teen is determined by their actions and how they perform, versus your desire to really know them.   >> Article continued…

Signs of Drug Use in Teens and Tweens

If you’ve seen an unexplainable or drastic change in your teenager’s honesty, grades, behavior, attentiveness, or friends, it may not be hormones. It could be that they are experimenting with intoxicating substances that are as close as your kitchen drawer, medicine cabinet or garage.

It used to be that older teens were most susceptible to drug experimentation, but kids today are experimenting earlier and earlier.  In fact, 10- to 14- year-olds are now the most likely to begin experimenting with one intoxicating substance or another. >> Article continued…

Prodigal Fathers

Have you ever considered the father figure in the Parable of the Prodigal to be the focus of that story, not the wayward son? After all, the word “father” is mentioned many more times than the word “son.”

A “prodigal” is defined as one who “spends extravagantly.” While the son spent his inheritance; it was the father who was the most extravagant, both with his money and with his love. It was the father who was the prodigal.

Whether or not Jesus’ parable was taken from a real life example, I imagine it wouldn’t be easy for any father to see his son live a sinful lifestyle and waste his inheritance. But there is no mention of the father bringing brute force or threats to bear to hold back his son or to bring him home, any more than God forces Himself on us. >> Article continued…

Teens Obsessed With Video Games

More than 2.5 billion video games have been sold worldwide and the industry is growing exponentially.  In fact, video game sales now surpass sales of both music and movies. For millions of kids and young adults, playing video games has become an obsession.

To give you some history, I grew up in New Orleans – not exactly the most conservative city. But when I was a kid, people weren’t allowed to play pinball games at the arcade until they were 21. That seems like a silly law today, especially since nowadays nearly every family has their own version of a pinball arcade right in their own home. I find nothing wrong with most of these games. In fact, playing them together with your teen is a great way to connect. But some kids and young adults are being consumed by them, and that’s where the problem lies. >> Article continued…

To Tell the Truth

“A lying tongue hates those it hurts, and a flattering mouth works ruin.” -­ Proverbs 26:28 

There seems to be an avalanche of dishonesty across all sectors of our society today.  And when kids see dishonesty as a strategy to get ahead — as is the focus of most reality TV shows, or as a way to gain power — as it is in the political realm, it’s natural for them to emulate that. Sadly, it’s hard to find an unimpeachably honest public figure or champion of honesty today.

Kids lie for the same reasons that adults lie…to lift themselves up, to get ahead, to destroy their competition, or to protect themselves and avoid consequences.  When they spend hours daily making up puffed-up stories about themselves on the Internet, or using cruel dishonesty to tear down their enemies or competition, the lines between the virtual world and the real world begin to fade.  Kids being dishonest in a fantasy world are likely to bring that over to the real world as well. >> Article continued…

Pull Out All the Stops to Help Your Teen

For parents, there is no worse feeling than watching your child spin out of control while nothing you do seems to make any difference.  If your teenager’s behavior is giving you feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and fear, I would like to offer you some suggestions. 

First, stop what you are doing and start a new way of thinking in regard to how you are handling the situation.  Albert Einstein defined insanity as ”Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  If your home is feeling a little “insane” these days, perhaps you need to change how it operates.  >> Article continued…

Do Adopted Kids Have More Problems?

You may have heard the news story this week – an adoptive family in Tennessee put their 7-year-old Russian-born boy on an unaccompanied one-way flight back to Russia, explaining that he had terrorized their family since coming to live with them. Now, the world is in an uproar over their seemingly heartless and careless act.

This family’s decision to abandon their child is totally unacceptable, I know.  But I also know that adoptions can go haywire.  Adopted kids may or may not have any more problems than any other group of kids, but I think they often present a different “mix” of problems.  And those problems can often be more severe, with behavior escalating to the point where a child is out of control and dangerous to himself and others around him or her.

There’s no question that typical adolescent issues like belonging, fitting-in, rejection, connection, acceptance, and peer-relationships can become particularly prominent for some adopted kids.  But there are other factors that can cause just as many problems for the child and the adoptive parents. >> Article continued…

Super Hero or Not?

None of us can see our own errors; deliver me, LORD, from (my) hidden faults! -­ Psalms 19:12 

Being a super hero works out pretty well in the movies or comic books, but when it comes to parenting, rescuing your teenager every time can lead to problems. It can spoil their ability to see the world as it truly is, and it can cause uncaring, self-centered and entitled thinking in your teenager now and throughout their lifetime.

Parents are wired to protect their children. It’s natural and it is needed in the early childhood years, but some parents continue protecting their offspring far longer than they should. Beginning in the teen years, kids need to begin feeling the impact of their own actions and to be given more responsibility for their own survival.

Counter to what some people might think, I find that the most irresponsible teens come from the most responsible parents. I call them “Super Parents.” They are so fixated on fixing problems that they fix all of their teenager’s mistakes as well. They don their cape and fly off to badger a teacher who has given their teenager a bad grade. They run faster than a steaming locomotive and bend steel bars to get their errant teen out of jail. And in everyday terms; they pick up their teen’s room, manage his money, pay his speeding tickets, wash his cloths and rush him to school when he oversleeps in the morning. >> Article continued…