Reaching the Hearts of Teens

I embarked on a 8-weekly workshops on Reaching the Hearts of Teens purely to look at teens’ issues from the spiritual perspective. Personally, I believe no family reaches a healthy status by its own power. There is a spiritual dimension that cannot be minimized.

It was a good turn-out of parents with only one teenager among us. During the first workshop I observed a strong sense of desperation in most parents. There was fear and tension when it comes to relating to our teens. The objective of the workshops was to replace the parents’ fear with confidence and tension with trust.

Teen rebellion was referred to as relational tension by the Ezzos. Such tension is a result of our fallen humanity – it’s the absence of wisdom ruling the moment. (Proverbs 1:7, 26:12) Teenagers tend to flee from relationships, which comes out in the form of rebellion. Hormones are unquestionably at work during the teen years. They may affect the human body, but not the human heart. The ultimate source of the tension is a deficiency in the parent/teen relationship. In struggling families, teens seek independence from childhood structures of growth and development as well as unhealthy relationships (e.g. divorce) existing in the families. Defiance is fundamentally a heart issue. The bottom line is that it’s a moral choice. There is within every human a natural selfishness that makes us want to defy anyone or anything that’s going to take away our self-governance.

Some of the tests we did:

1. The health of individual family profile between parents and individual teenager. As my teens have matured to a good extent, I shared a rather healthy parent-teen relationship with them, with minor problems.

2. The Primary Love Languages of parents and teens. I found out that I treasure quality time among Encouraging Words, Acts of Service, Gift-giving & Physical Touch. My sons thrive well when they receive Encouraging Words from their parents.

I learnt much from attending the workshops which I applied rather immediately on the clients I was seeing. Personally I like the Ten-Talk Rule on seeking full attention when our teens ask for it. When they absolutely and immediately need my attention, they can say, ‘Mum, I need to talk with you, and this is a ten-talk.’ (On a scale of one to ten, ten being most urgent.)