Amazing Article

Chap Clark, a youth ministry guru of Fuller Theological Seminary (although I don't think that that is his official title) wrote an article about parenting Mid-adolescence teenagers. It was a very well written article and echoed much of what I have been finding in the teenagers that I encounter here in our area.

Read the full article [here]

Some Highlights of the article:

1. Our conviction is that it is impossible to understand our kids, and much less parent, in today’s culture without taking into account the reality and uniqueness of a brand-new stage of the process: midadolescence. Early and late adolescence have been with us for several decades, but as they both were stretched as adolescence lengthened, they reached the point where neither could be stretched any further. Somewhere in the middle 1990s, this created a whole new developmental stage of life we call midadolescence.
2. as societies around the world have become increasingly fragmented, with everybody pushed and pulled in multiple directions, there has been a subtle yet steady erosion of our collective commitment to proactively assimilating our children and adolescents into adult society. This culture-wide lack of intentional support and guiding nurture has created an innate insecurity in the souls of our kids.
3. While high school students have the capability for abstract thinking and relationships, they feel so alone and vulnerable that they are forced into an egocentric abstraction that is the defining characteristic of midadolescence. Midadolescents are neither concrete in their thinking and reflection nor able to objectively process the multiple factors that have to be taken into account as we learn how to accept and evaluate others, warts and all.
4. Here are four faith-building strategies that can help move your child toward a growing faith even while wading through the mire of midadolescence:
1. First, encourage a personal ownership of their faith.
2. Second, do what you can to encourage them to ask hard questions of life and faith
3. third, empower your child to put their faith into action.
4. Lastly, integrate them into adult relationships in the body of Christ.

P.S. Please note that this article was written to parents not youth workers. I thought that interesting because those four strategies are things that I am trying to do as a youth worker in our youth ministry. He writes this not to youth pastors, but to parents as the primary spiritual givers of teenagers, not the church.