NRB Chronicles 2020: No Longer Little: Parenting Tweens with Grace and Hope

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The Truth Network is brought to you by The Truth Network. So back some years ago, a local homeschool group started asking us, could you come give us some insights in being a, you know, how do you teach all these boys at home, I'm going crazy with one, how do you manage four at the time? And we started talking about that. And people started asking us, can you recommend a resource? And that led to us writing Raising Real Men. Well Raising Real Men launched us in the ministry.

We've been speaking and writing for ten years now. But what we noticed is that probably 80 or more percent of the questions that we got started with, I have this eleven year old. And they'd say, I don't know what to do, they've changed. And sometimes it was a nine year old or thirteen year old, but it was all in those tween preteen years, seemed to be providing the vast majority of the parental aunts going on.

And we realized that there wasn't really anything to address that out there. There's very few people talking about the preteens. I think because, well what we've seen talk to thousands of parents over the years, is that if you can get out of the preteen years with your relationship intact, the teen years tend to get better and better. But for an awful lot of families, an awful lot of parents find that they have strained or broken their relationship with their younger kids when they're in those middle school years when they're frankly a little bit crazy in the head and they're hard to deal with. And if you don't understand what's going on and how much you can hold those kids responsible and how much you have to just give them grace, if you can't balance that out, it's very easy to strain or damage the relationship. And then if you don't have that trust and respect in place, the teen years become a really rocky time.

So 2nd Corinthians chapter 1 says, God comforts us with the comfort that we might comfort others with the comfort that He comforted us with. So I'm guessing that all your six boys weren't like the perfect picture of what, was there a little bit along the way that gave you opportunities into insight? Well I'll tell you, the preteen years are difficult.

They were difficult with all of ours. When our oldest hit that age, I thought, what in the world? Is it me? Is it him? Is it aliens? What has happened to this kid? I started looking for help.

There was no help. It's like they climb on an emotional roller coaster and then invite you to join them. And you just can't get a ticket for that ride.

If you get on that emotional roller coaster with them, it's a disaster. And we had to learn that our parenting had to change. That the way that we interacted with our kids. I'm guessing God was involved in this.

All along. So can you kind of take me back to where I don't know what I'm doing, God, into that insight, that picture? I think really for us it was a very slow awakening.

Because when our oldest hit this time frame, it's a big period of transition. And when he hit it, we were so unprepared for what we saw. He was a very precocious student and suddenly it's like his brain went soft. And suddenly math was something that he just did intuitively and now it took him three hours to get through a single lesson. We suddenly just saw... You'd ask him to go get the car keys. And then 45 minutes later I'd say, son, son, where are the car keys? Oh, oh, oh, car keys.

Is that what that was? Where are they? Honey, they're on the microwave where they've been since before you were born.

Yeah, okay, I'll go look again. It's like the shades are up but there's nobody home. And it was like whatever happened to our precocious, compliant, super smart young nanny, suddenly it was like he was a different creature. And we really, I think we kind of muddled through with him. We really did. When the third one hit it, the third boy hit, we said, wait a minute, there is a pattern here.

I've seen this before. We've seen this before and we started to dig more into, well, what are we seeing? And realized, you know what, this is a period of thing and this is something that we need to talk about because lots of families aren't blessed with a bunch of kids to figure it out, you know? And so we started looking at the research, what's going on in their bodies and brains and then how do we apply the word of God to what we know about what's going on so that we can get through this time period discipling them and pointing them to Christ and having a relationship. So what did you find in the word of God that pointed to teenagers? You know, the passage that we keep coming back to is in 1 Corinthians 13 when the apostle Paul says, when I was a child, I thought as a child, I spoke as a child, I reasoned as a child and when I became a man, I put away childish things. What we saw there was not, you know, I thought and reasoned and spoke as a child and then I became an adolescent teenager and they put us in the back of the synagogue so we didn't get in people's way. We had a teen rabbi that took care of, you know, they don't have this holding pattern in scripture. We see there's childhood, there's adulthood, youth is in scripture, but when you see youth referenced, you also see things like Goliath was a warrior from his youth, he was in the army. You see Solomon praying, Lord, I am just a little child, I can't understand this.

He was already king. You see things like, you see a transitional period there which is referred to as youth and sometimes young youth is just a little bit out of childhood and older youth is practically independent of adulthood. We realize that's what those teen years are for our kids. We've got to be making a transition from you're one of the kids to we consider you now a young adult who still needs a lot of training and mentorship before we turn you loose. Our parenting has to transition from the way that we parent a seven year old, you can't parent a seventeen year old the same way you parent a seven year old, that we need to be preparing them for Christian adulthood and the way we do that is it has to become a time of discipline instead of do what I say because I said so, which is totally appropriate at seven. Starting in the pre-teens it has to become, sit down, let's talk about this. Tell me what you're thinking and invest in the relationship, listen to them, hear them out because the Word of God tells us that we should be slow to speak. We should listen first and then taking them to the Word of God and saying, well I hear what you're saying and I understand why you're upset but the Word of God says and we have to be subject to the Word of God even when it's hard, even when it doesn't give you that initial reward that you want.

We have to do what it says because God created us and when we do it that way we find our kids are a lot more willing to listen because if I go straight to discipline with an eleven year old, I say, son, you need to not do that, you were speaking disrespectfully to me and so you're not going to go to the church fellowship tonight. Well it's true, you can't handle the truth, that's the problem. I didn't want to go anyway, I don't have any friends. Well I'm going to take away your iPad.

Well you said I get too much screen time anyway, that's what's going to help. You're grounded for a week. I don't care, ground me for a month.

You're grounded for two months. Ground me until I'm an adult, I don't care. You see they're irrational and if we go straight to discipline they're irrational, it doesn't work but instead when we say, hey, sit down, let's talk and we invest in the relationship first, we coach them, we explain and then we speak the truth in love. We've had kids at that point say, when I say, I'm sorry son, I'm going to have to punish you because you were disrespectful. We've had the child say, you know, you're right mom, what do we need to do?

It's totally different. But that's not, it's not automatic for parents. And you know the disrespect thing, that's a common trait with teenagers and a lot of times I've found that what I had to do was like, take a breath, I'm not going to react and say, alright son, let's talk for a minute. The way that you spoke to me came across very disrespectfully, okay? Now if you have to challenge an authority, a boss, a professor, the pastor, whatever, there are ways to bring up a challenge and to ask an awkward question. Let's talk about how you want to, is that what you were trying to do? If you're just trying to show disrespect, we're going to deal with that. But I want you to understand how to do this because one day you're going to need to raise a question with somebody who doesn't love you as much as I do.

And he may fire you that afternoon if you come across the wrong way. So I want to make sure that you have the skills to communicate as a grown man one day. You know, and when you're moving into that coaching relationship, that's one of the things I'm looking forward to when they're 18, 20, 22, for them being adults and stand on their own and make discerning choices. But they're not going to know how to discern if we haven't given them practice, if we haven't coached them, if we haven't come alongside of them and say, well this is how you take principles out of the Word of God and apply them in the 21st century. And that's something that you don't do on their 18th birthday. We have five adult children, by the way.

I understand. And interestingly, one of the first interviews I did, many, probably 15, 20 years ago, when I first started doing this kind of interview, was with a couple of young men. I wish I could name them. They were twins. They wrote a book. It was phenomenally popular. It was called Do Hard Things.

I remember that book. And their preceptors, along the lines of what you were talking about, they had come upon it themselves that in order to, you know, just because you're 12 or you're 13 years old doesn't mean that you go not do something adult. And when I was sitting there thinking about when David took on Goliath, he was a kid. I mean, he was just a kid. And certainly when Mary had Jesus, I mean... She wasn't in her thirties. Right. She was young, young, young.

She was at the age my granddaughter is. What the heck? And so they were doing really hard things and obviously God equipped them to do harder things than we are requiring of... It was just an overall thought about what you guys are doing.

Unfortunately, you guys were really good. So you guys ought to take your act on the road. You already did.

That's why we're here. The book is no longer little. Hal and Melanie Young, you can get it on... You can get it on Amazon or at bookstores or at RaisingRealMen.com.

So once you get it, by all means, get it on Amazon and go back and rate it and tell them what you think of it and give them some feedback. What a courageous thing you guys are doing, putting yourself out there, helping raise kids. Thank you guys. Thank you. Thanks for having me.