Guiding Your Teen Into Adulthood (Part 1 of 2)

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That's Briomagazine.com. Now with freedom always comes responsibility. So by letting go of one thing, you also lead them to their own consequences of the things that they're doing.

My favorite is always, the easy one is music. That you can give a teenager, you now have the freedom, it's up to you to make your own decision about music. What you listen to, that's between you and God.

However, if your little sister is caught on your phone listening to some of that stuff, then you're going to lose your phone for a day. You need to make sure, that's just true of any adult, you have to be held responsible for your own behavior. Insight from Dr. Ken Wilgus describing a process of parenting teenagers that he calls planned emancipation, and in other words, mom and dad, that's learning to let go.

And I wonder if you're ready for that. Well, today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, we'll explore what the end goal for your parenting should be and how you and your teen can get to that point successfully. Thanks for joining us today.

I'm John Fuller. John, we hear so often from parents who are surprised by the teen years, right? They are, yes. Didn't expect it to be quite like that. Suddenly they're facing issues they never expected, where their sweet, compassionate little child has transformed into this moody, one-syllable response mechanism. And man, you're going, what happened to that wonderful little child I had?

Somebody exchanged them. Right. And then other parents face those years with maybe more severe dread, because not only that, but it's rebellion and some other things. I think for Jean and I, we're somewhere in between. We have two wonderful sons really, but they're very normal.

And I'm happy to say that. Normal meaning they go through their moody moments. They do have one word grunt answers at times. Get your homework done? Yeah.

How was your day at school? Good. Yeah. You have that routine. And today we're going to cover some ground that's going to help empower you to empower them to be the adults they're going to need to be.

Yeah. The teen years aren't to be feared. I really have appreciated our kids when they went through the teen years, especially now that they're through the teen years for the part. Our guests do have a little different perspective on how to get through the years successfully. And I really appreciate their insights. I think a lot of listeners will be encouraged and maybe even pleasantly surprised by what they have to share with us. Well, I'm so glad to have Dr. Ken Wilgus back with us today. He's a psychologist who specializes in working with teens and their families. I like that.

Not families in their teens. And frankly, he was quite instrumental in helping Jean and I. I think we called you Dr. Wilgus and asked you a couple of very important questions. They were good questions. Oh good. Thank you. Thank you. So we can speak from that experience that Dr. Wilgus helped us get through a little bumpy patch. He's written a great book called Feeding the Mouth that Bites You. Yes, that's right.

Feeding the Mouth that Bites You. I love that title. A complete guide to parenting adolescents and launching them into the world. And he also has launched a weekly podcast with his two associates. And they're here with us today. They are.

We have Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer with us. They're two moms who are actively raising kids. They speak and know firsthand what the teen issues are that we've alluded to. I thought you were going to say they speak the teen language.

Oh, they do that too, of course. They're teen whisperers. That's it. Well, to both of you, welcome to Focus. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Now let's define that experience for the listener and the viewer on YouTube. So describe your kids. My youngest is 10.

My oldest is 19. I have four kids. I have one in elementary, one in middle school, one in high school, and one in college. So I sort of spread myself thin over all the grade levels right now.

That makes you an expert, by the way. I have seven children. My oldest is a teenager.

She just turned 14. Then I have an 11-year-old who's coming up on those preteen years, a nine-year-old, twin six-year-olds, and twin four-year-olds. So man, you have how many kids? Seven and four, 11.

Why are you here, Dr. Rojas? We're just going to talk with them. And you, of course, have three. Three, okay. And six grandchildren. And six grandchildren. So you are well qualified.

And I think we're off to the races. Let's start with a quick review of what planned emancipation is and how it works. Well, so Feeding the Mouth of Bites, you started as a parent training that's really now become almost a crusade to really get across the necessity of finding an endpoint to your parenting. And if you really want to be effective with teenagers, that's what they want to know is when is this going to be over? When will you say it's time for me to make my own decisions about this thing? Planned emancipation is simply an orderly giving over of freedom rather than it being rested out of your cold, dead hands, that they will get that freedom. But it is super important for teenagers to hear that these people who know me are saying, hey, we are now saying it's time for you to make that decision yourself.

So planned emancipation is essentially the pattern from roughly 13 until you finish high school that we as your parents are saying this is the steps that you will take, the things that you will now be in charge of more and more as we recede from taking charge of these things in your life. Now, I just want to make a pitch for Jean Daly, my wife, because she's probably given away 50 of your books, and I kind of want that super buyer discount. I've always liked Jean, yes, and she does broke. She qualifies for a set of steak knives, but. Good.

Send those, will you? Yes, it's very important. But you have a word picture that kind of illustrates how teenagers see our authority as parents. Describe that word picture. Well, you know, it's really like foreign relations, really. If you think about it, a teenager really begins to see themselves as their own person. Well, if that's the way they see it, then if you can picture your teenager like this nation state divided into different sort of sub-states of different things they have to handle, schoolwork, relationships, friendships, money, all of these things. The hard part about this analogy is that if that's your teenager, then you are occupying troops in their territory. That's how teenagers feel.

So if you think about their reaction, like how was school, fine, all that, that's the response of an occupied nation is what this feels like to many teenagers. And they really want to know when are you going to be out of this part of my life. So the school management thing, you know, when are you going to stop asking me and recognize that this is up to me, all those things. And so the goal of Planned Emancipation essentially is to begin to announce right off that we are in fact occupying these states of your life, but we are on our way out. So we are moving out of this part and this part and we are committed to leaving this sort of nation state that you are as a young adult, which is what teenagers are. We're committed to being completely out of your life and you managing this pretty much by the end of high school.

Well, the proof is in the pudding. So Ashley and Jessica, as you've applied Dr. Wilgus's approach, how has it worked? Jessica, let's start with you. Okay, well, I have young, a young teenager, you know, and so I think we might have mentioned earlier about the music thing where she is able to pick whatever music she wants, but I don't have to...

Wait, wait, wait, you gotta be kidding me. I know, I know. And it's hard because I've raised her to listen to almost exclusively Christian music. To Amy Grant. Yes, absolutely.

We were talking about this morning. So, you know, to be able to hand the reins over to her and allow her to choose is hard, but I have told her, she has a younger sister, she's not allowed to hear anything that's inappropriate and ungodly. You know, I don't want to hear that in my home and so she can put it on her earbuds or whatever else, but I'm not going to listen to it. She needs to have the responsibility and take the responsibility herself. Then I have older teens though, and I've completely let go of a lot of areas. He's 19, he's in college. You know, I don't have really much control at all in his life and I think that there's stages along the way that are intermediate of course too. So it's hard though as a parent who really wants to be involved and likes a sense of control. This is a hard way to parent.

I'm going to come back to that in just a second, but Ashley, what's been your experience deploying the get out of Dodge strategy? Well, it works. And so I think whenever you continue to use these strategies that Dr. Kim talks about, then you see the results and you see that your relationship isn't hindered, but it's growing and there's a trust that your teenager is, you know, your teenager is having a trust in you because you're recognizing them as a young adult.

And so it's just worked so well. The music was the first one for us as well, but there comes a time when we as parents need to realize that either we can hand over the reins in these areas or they're just going to do it behind our backs anyways. And it just goes so much better if we as their parents hand over that and they feel respected. Yes.

Versus them, you know, like listening to it at their friend's house or the only place that they're hiding it, you know, and then that just creates conflict. Well, that's right. And now back to you, Dr. Ken. So you, you have counseled thousands of parents. You've seen this in play in a variety of temperaments as Jessica was mentioning. Why do we fall into that trap? And you use a term actually unexamined parenting. What do you mean by that?

And how do we examine ourselves better to be more effective at the very job that we want to do? Well, in a lot of parents defense, you know, this we've had a cultural confusion for about a hundred years. Like the modern sense of adolescence is a new concept. So a lot of times we don't rethink how we parent our kids because that's how we were parented.

So current parents don't know that childhood comes to a natural end by about 13 and they just carry on with what they were doing before. I've had, I can't tell you how many parents are like, well, you know, it's the same thing my dad did and I don't know why you should do any different. I said, did you like your dad when you're 15?

No, I didn't like my dad at all. I'm like, yeah. So why would you keep doing this? So some of that is just ignorance. But the other part is, especially among Christian families, a sense of, well, but we're serious about this. So we aren't gonna just be lax and let the worldly influences come in.

We're going to do a better job. It feels like even a more righteous approach. It's what, what's so great when I listened to Ashley and Jessica, these are strong moms and hearing them get it and know that this is actively the thing we should do. Develop self-respect in our teenagers is just so exciting for me to hear that, you know, this isn't a passivity and this certainly isn't a giving up on godliness for our kids. It is in fact the opposite, increasing the effectiveness of parenting with teenagers. I think one thing you just said, Ken, that's so shocking is that basically they're young adults at 13. I just heard a bunch of people go, what? You got to be kidding me.

Do you know my 13 year old? There's no way they can't even tie their shoe, Ken. What are you talking about? I mean, come on, they can't cook. They can't do laundry. Come on, Jim, they can tie their shoe, dude. Seriously.

Okay. Because it's Velcro. But let me just say that that is the first eye popping thing that we tend as parents to underestimate what our 13, 14, 17 year olds can handle.

Right? Yeah, it's foundational. And it's, you know, I mentioned in the book and we talk about it in the podcast that one of the things that just struck me when I first started studying adolescence is that how recent our idea of adolescence were. And if you look through history, including Jesus' little tension with his mother at 12 and Paul's mentioned in Galatians 4 about the time set by the father, all through history and all around the world, everyone knew that around 13 was the end of childhood. We are the only generation about 100 years ago that forgot that.

And after World War II, which is, by the way, when the term teenager was invented, we snapped adolescence on the end of childhood and have wondered, what's the problem? How come these, they don't seem to like this? Well, they somewhere in their gut know that they are a young adult. Well, that's patronizing.

Yeah. And I think that reframing just helps you as a parent, hopefully to let go a little bit. Kim, before we get into more of the book, I do want to ask you about the formulaic parenting, because I think especially in Christian circles, we have done a lot of formula parenting that we do approach it like a math equation. If we add A plus B, we get C. And for those temperaments, that can be very difficult to wake up someday to their 15 year old telling them some terrible news. And wait a minute, the formula didn't work. Why not? Well, because it's not a formula. It never was.

That's the point. And I feel bad for parents like Jessica and Ashley's generation that parenting, you know, like my parents did a good job. I don't think they ever thought about their parenting.

They were raising kids, you know, like raising livestock, you get them and go and just sell them off. It was never this, this intense focus of how am I doing, right? It makes it much tougher. And you're right, you have parents that have read so many things. But parenting is not like math, it is like sailing, you, you know, where your goal is, and you kind of have to tack left and right, there's lots of things you're going to do wrong, and much things that you should have done that you didn't do. But all of us are that way.

And what you're aiming for is good enough. And especially as Christians, it has to include recognizing that thank God, this is not my job. Primarily. Jesus is with your teenager even more than you are. Yeah.

And and and he's he's doing okay. That's hard to participate, absorb actually. Well, it's you feel so responsible for them. But you say it's more like sailing than that math problem. I love that analogy. It gives you themselves up over.

Yeah, little things that it's it's gonna be fine if you're headed the right direction. I'm laughing because when our now 20 year old left the house for school, and Troy, our now 18 year old was 17. I remember the first day he looked at us and said, Now don't over parent me.

Just because Trent's gone. That's pretty good. Using the same language. Smart. Smart boy.

It's funny. Ashley and Jessica, let me ask you describe where the emancipation process has been most difficult for you. Ashley, let's start with you. I think Jessica and I can both agree.

Okay, wow. Because we have similar personalities and expectations in the way that we raise our family. The biggest struggle has been letting go of how they keep their room.

We are both neat and tidy moms and we keep you know, a neat and tidy house and so to give over the reins to our teenagers when they turn 13 because it's one of their first freedoms on how they keep their room or if they keep the room clean at all. But she enjoys the freedom and when it gets really bad, she'll clean it. But I've got to let go. And it's it's hard. It's a struggle.

I mean, I've sent pictures to Jessica and she has sent me pictures. Look at this. And we just encourage each other. You know, we've given that freedom and it's not a privilege. It's a freedom.

And so once you give a freedom, you don't take it back. So right. And I should mention that in all honesty, there is still a rumor that goes around my family that my sweet wife, who's had to be married to this mad scientist going through all this stuff, did very she's here, did actually bribe one of our children who shall not be named.

Would you please clean your room? But don't tell your dad. So that's what we mean by not math. Like that's so many levels of wrong. Like you can't trust to tell me all that stuff. But it did get cleaned once.

I think that's about it. And what's so great is when Ashley has already said, look, this is your place. Then you're free to say, whoa, this is gross without the defensiveness of OK, I'll clean it up.

You're not a cop about to SWAT team in. You're just commenting on this. Well, it is a erosive to their sense of self worth. Right.

And I think one of the problems, let me speak for fathers, it seems like if we don't get this right, we're mistraining them that if they can't keep their room clean, they're never going to keep a job. You know, that can right comes up a lot. Yeah. People will say that. Yeah. And so how how do we teach them the right things with this approach of emancipation? And they're not seeming to get this. Now your child, your son's 16 and the room isn't clean.

And you're going, he's never going to make it at Chick-fil-A. Good job. Yeah. Or, you know, the neuroscientists that he hopes to be.

But I mean, what are those things to think about? You did all that teaching up until 12. And I'm all about it.

If you're under 13 year old, do it, you know, the whole chart, clean your room, do it again. It's not right. I'm fine with teaching all that for children. But now that they're young adults, the thing is for them to be trained to have practice in handling their own room. And in that regard, it's almost better to think about what do they do when they stay with friends.

And they're very often quite different. Some parents are even annoyed to hear I get so tired of people saying your son is so gracious. And I'm like, yeah, that's a good thing, actually.

But they don't see it as much at home. We totally had that experience. One of Gene's girlfriends said, man, it was so awesome having your son over and spending the night because he did all the dishes.

And she was like, what? Are you sure you got that name right? Exactly. But isn't that funny? That's exactly right. And I was trying to encourage Gene. That's a great son. That's exactly right.

Even if he maybe is not willing to do it at home as much. Well, I hope our listeners and viewers are catching a little bit of encouragement from this conversation and certainly a more lighthearted approach to some of the challenging things that can come up with teenagers. Our guests are Dr. Ken Wilgus, along with Jessica Pfeiffer and Ashley Parrish. And Dr. Wilgus's book is available. We've got that at the website.

Click the episode notes or give us a call. 800-A-FAMILY. And that book again is called Feeding the Mouth That Bites You. And I don't want to drive like too hard on this cleaning the room thing, but is there room, is there space for a parent to say, you can keep your room as messy as you want, but when we have ants crawling across the floor, we're going to do something about this.

That's a little late in my book, but go ahead. I mean, seriously, is there room for boundaries here or is it just totally a no man's zone? Whatever. Well, I, that is what I would have to say is the hardest part about parenting this way is watching the consequences fall. You know, when your kid doesn't keep a clean room and they can't find their uniform for the game tonight and it's minutes before you have to leave the house, it is very stressful to just stand there and watch them scramble and freak out in front of you. You want to jump in and help. And you have to, you have to set some consequences and boundaries. And yes, if they've answered the room, the exterminator is a couple hundred dollars, babe. You're going to have to pony up. That was not a hypothetical, by the way. That happened.

We came home from vacation one time and my daughter had left a whole bunch of candy in the room and there was like a 10 foot line of ants finding the candy. And I'm thinking, got to, got to draw the line somewhere on this thing. So as we say with freedom always comes responsibility. So handling your own stuff, we want to respect that. But if your management of your stuff affects us, that's different.

Okay. So it's almost like being a landlord and you're, you have a room that we let you live in. So you can have food in your room as soon as you can afford an exterminator.

But since you probably can't, it's going to cost you a buck or 50 cents every time there's a cup plate or candy bar in your room. And most teenagers get that. They don't balk at, you know, it's a big different message between, Hey, you're messing with us versus cleanliness is next to godliness and I'm trying to teach you this thing. So those kinds of boundaries, uh, that those are really responsibilities. You, the other one that obviously goes with it is you don't want us coming in your room messing with putting clean clothes away.

So there's the washer, there's the dryer, you do your own laundry. So that falls under all of the boundaries, not so much that we're trying to teach you, but that we have the right not for your decisions to not mess with us. And that kind of moves into teen entitlement, which you address and the idea that they're, they need to learn that responsibility. And that's kind of what we're getting at here, right? That's right. Is there more to say about that, the teen entitlement and how we overplay that?

Yeah, it's different from what you might think. Cause it's what Ashley mentioned about, um, explaining the difference between, uh, we're not giving over privilege, we're giving over freedom. So part of the way to help your children to not be entitled is to, uh, make them responsible for, you know, we're not going to let you, if you're going to have a dog, you have to feed it and all that stuff.

And then we threatened that we'll give it away and we never do. But those are the things that you try to do. But with teenagers, that's different that pulling out of their life isn't so much as giving them a shot at it as long as they handle it.

It is deliberately leaving them alone. Like Ashley, I mean, Jessica mentioned, it's hard to stand by and go, wow, what are you going to do since you can't find your uniform and not step in. That kind of thing helps them to kind of be responsible.

What helps more though is when you have those mixed issues. Like I think Ashley, you had one where you like, what do you do when your daughter didn't have something she needed at school and what was the thing you told her? She had left her homework at home. And so she called me from school and I told her, I said, I will bring it to you this one time.

And I said, and from here on out, it will stay at home and you will get a zero. She's got to be prepared. And that's our job as parents is to prepare these children in training and then once they're teenagers to give them the freedoms so that when they're 18 and they graduate from high school that they're on their own because I surely don't want to be running up folders, so to speak, when they're at their job and they're 24 years old. Okay. This is critical. This may be the point of the program because I think parents so often bail out their kids continuously and especially I think Christian parents because we want them to succeed and we're going to do their homework if that's necessary.

That's absolutely the wrong thing to do, right? Well, it leaves self-respect out and you can be creative. You can also, like we would say, okay, if you forget something, we'll bring it to you.

It's a taxi fee of $2 or $5. So that's good. I like that.

Charge a little money. Right. Yes.

But it is kind of the issue, isn't it? And we think we're doing them a service or we're being good parents because it reflects well upon us that we're bailing them out. Look how good we are and we'll get that science project done.

That volcano is going to erupt on time. You know, that was one thing I think Jean and I did well. It was the science project.

We never bailed them out. I mean, we made them do that on their own and we're in a town and we're at a school where some of the parents are astronauts and physicists because they're connected. They're connected to the Air Force Academy, right? And so you get these rocket ships that actually fly and you're going, that wasn't in the rule book. And here's our little soapbox thing, you know, this little. But when you have a teenager, for example, that wants to do two sports and you're trying to say, that's not a good idea. And this teenager is like, well, you don't know. I can do whatever. Well, what options can you do to give them self-respect? Jessica, what would you do?

This happened very recently in my home. My daughter wanted to do two sports. They were concurrent and their practice times were exactly the same. So she would have to miss half the practices of each sport. And I said, you know, this is a lot. She's upper high school age. She's needing to get ready for college. She needs to make good grades the next couple of years. So I said, this is an important time for you to be buttoning down on your schoolwork and everything else. I don't know how you're going to balance all this.

She was determined to do it. So I said, okay, well, you know, if you want to do this, that's up to you. You can manage your own time.

You're old enough to handle this. Plus you can drive yourself to practice. And I don't have to manage that part, but I am not paying for two sports. You're going to have to come up with the money. I'll pay for one sport.

It can be the most expensive sport because I would have paid for a sport anyway. Uh, but the other one you're going to have to cover. So me and she was doing yard work and babysitting and everything else to make it happen. She did it. It's tough. It's not been working out very well. It's a lot of time, but, uh, it's, it is a lesson to be learned.

She, she might not do this again. And I think, I think we're getting to the point that I really want to make and that I think has been such a help to us, uh, Dr. Ken. And again, Jean has become an apologist for your great book, uh, feeding the mouth that bites you. And I, the point is this that it feels contrary to hold the kids accountable in that way. It feels like we're being mean, but in fact, we're being what they need because they need to learn that responsibility. And that's, what's so, um, absent today in parenting.

Don't you? It's really true. And it, and it's the kind of thing that, you know, there'll be parents that will pick up the book and they're like, Oh yeah, we already kind of get this.

We hadn't used the words you're doing, but we kind of get it. And then, uh, but there are some that really, it's, it almost hits them as the wrong way to do it. And that's why it's so important. I love the podcast where we have two strong moms that are very nurturing because to a nurturing mom leaving, like Jessica mentioned her daughter to have to pay for this and not bailing around, that feels worse than not. Uh, it feels unloving, but the thing you have to think about as well, but, but to bail them out is to be disrespectful and to give your young adults self-respect. You have to pull back and leave these things more to their own decision making.

So it's one or the other. You can't, uh, think about it as well, but I'm going to always go for being loving and bailing them out, uh, without thinking about, yeah, but what are you going to do to help them build self-respect? Yeah. There's so much to cover. So let's, uh, let's hold over and let's go another day and we'll cover some more territory out of the great book and your great experiences. Can we do that? Yeah, sure.

All right, let's do it well. And in the meantime, make sure you contact us here at focus on the family to get a copy of Dr. Wilgus's book, feeding the mouth that bites you. We've got copies of that. We also have a free parenting assessment that takes just a few minutes. Um, it's online and it'll help you see where you're strong in your parenting and maybe some areas to work on and maybe even let go of, uh, again, uh, our phone number is 800-AFAMILY or just click the link in the episode notes. And then also, uh, boy, if you can make a gift of any amount, we believe in the content that Dr. Ken Wilgus has in this book, feeding the mouth that bites you. We'll get it out for a gift of any amount. We'll just say thank you and send that to you.

If you can't afford it, we'll send it to you if you need it and trust that others will cover the cost of that. So just get in touch with us and uh, if you can, uh, join us in the ministry here at focus on the family and you can donate and find resources once more by clicking the link in the episode notes. And on behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for joining us today for focus on the family. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we continue the conversation and once more help you and your family thrive in Christ. You've read accounts in the Bible of how Christ impacted so many people, but we really know very little about the lives of those early followers of Jesus. The chosen, I have called you by name, imagines what life was like for those who followed Christ. Based on the widely acclaimed TV series, the chosen, this focus on the family book by bestselling author Jerry Jenkins brings color and depth to the people surrounding Christ. You can find out more at focus on the family.com slash chosen.