Loving Your Teen

Last Saturday Rob spoke from 1 John 4:7-12 on the essentiality of love as the mark of our assurance. In our Extra Point to parents, we talked about how parents can apply the call of love to parenting teens.

What makes it difficult to love our teens? Perhaps we are approaching the task as if we need some special grace that hasn’t already come to us in Christ. It’s like it somehow takes a new dimension of love to just endure the teen years. But John helps us to see that we love because he first loved us. In other words, love isn’t dispensed to us based on our situational need. God is love; to have him is to have love in its fullness – all the time.

Perhaps one way we can keep ‘love for my teens’ out of the realm of the exceptional is to see how similar it is to the other most significant, and often most challenging context we have – love for our spouse. Consider:

1. In marriage and in raising teens we tend to compare our experience with an idealized or romanticized assumption of what we should expect.

• Where do we get our ideals of marriage and family from? From comparison with somebody else? With some cultural standard? With how we grew up?
• Do you have a clear sense of biblical vision for your family that evaluates every other ideal that finds its way into the family?
  

2. In marriage and in parenting teens we tend to focus on feeling loved, not on loving others.

• Teenage immaturity involves the idea that what I feel and what I think are so overlapping as to be indistinguishable. As parents, we are mature; we should not be that way. We should battle our tendency to let feelings drive our parenting by obedience to God’s word.
• You can tell how much feelings drive our definition of love by we deal with conflict. If we truly love, we will do the hard work of peacemaking.
  

3. In marriage and in parenting teens we can assume that trust and respect are necessary for love. We can withdraw affection if we don’t receive respect, or if we don’t think we can trust our teens.

• In reality respect and trust are fruits of love, not foundations for it. Untrustworthiness and disrespectfulness are sins of character before they are sins of relationship. Love means we will address disrespect and untrustworthiness because they are sins against God and will produce bad fruit in our teen’s life. But love will not demand them – love seeks not its own.
• What would your relationship with your teen look like if you didn’t demand respect and trustworthiness as essential for your relationship?
  

4. In marriage and in parenting teens, bad past experiences can lead to judgments that define our relationship.

• Adults change very slowly, but teens are changing very fast. If we allow bad experiences of even a few weeks ago to shape our present relationship we will never keep up with what is going on in our teens. Rather than assume that our teen’s bad attitude right now is what will define them, why not address it as something that God is at work changing in them.
• What would happen if you interacted with your teen as if mercies were new every morning for them, not just for you?
  

Bottom line – Loving our teens should be familiar to us because it takes the same grace to love them as it takes to love anyone else.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. (1 John 4:7)