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We raise kids, but we assist teenagers in applying what we already helped them learn into the real life.
We cannot raise teenagers anymore, in the sense that we cannot correct them on every action and teach them in every situation and so on, like we could with a younger children.
A teenager is more like a brother or a sister in Christ, who is new to the Kingdom of God, and we show them Christ’s character by our actions, our love, and our humility.
We are like Christ who taught to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:38-39), who is humble and gentle in heart (Matthew 11:28-29), who doesn’t speak back (Matthew 27:14), who says forgive them because they don’t know what they’re doing (Luke 23:34). That is our job, to show Christ to the teenagers. And all of our training/ raising will kick in.
Teens may yell at us, blame us, tell bad things to us, even offend us, but it’s the same as a new child in Christ, they do all those things as well in church. If we simply rebuke them every time and try to ‘raise them’ like we would do with a child, they will turn away from us and stop paying attention to what we say.
So what we do is we trust the Holy Spirit to work in that teenager, and that newborn Christian, we trust that Holy Spirit works on them in the time when they are done venting and just sit in the room (doing whatever they are doing there). That’s when Holy Spirit talks to them and shows them what they did wrong based on what we taught the child when we raised the child and what child read in the Bible and heard at Sunday School and from godly friends.
And then the child will understand and slowly change. And we must trust that it will happen, because Jesus will not lose anyone who was given to Him by the Father (John 6:39).
Just as we cannot train or change an adult, in the same way we cannot really train or change a teenager. We show Christ and we trust that the Holy Spirit will do the changing.
There are still multiple aspects where we still ‘train’ and ‘raise’ our teenagers, meaning the advanced things of life, not simply repeating the training of period of when they are a kid, just like we would help out a person that we are mentoring, we don’t constantly correct rebuke, but we tell stories, we tell examples from the Bible, we pray, we help find the answers in the Bible, we help find the answers with other Christians, we preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching (2 Timothy 4:2).
This is the kind of ‘raising’ the teenagers need and this is who we need to provide them.
So in summary, we raise a child, and we treat teenagers as sojourners in Christ, where we are the ones with more experience applying the principles of the Kingdom and we help the teen in the Kingdom. We look at them as younger equals, or less experienced equals.
We are assisting them in their issues, instead of being the issue that they are fighting (when they think we are slowing them down with constant corrections and lecturing about the same stuff they heard a million times).
When we show Christ in our daily life, our teenagers will not encounter bad attitude from parents, because parents are like Christ. This way teens will not be able to blame parents.
And when this time (about 13-19 years old) of learning how to apply things learned in childhood to real life completes, it will be much easier for the teenager to come back to parents as a friend, as well as a child in Christ working together. There will be a lot less trauma and complexes and issues, because we the parents did not create any, because we were showing them Christ through our lives and actions. You see how great that is?!
This is a long process of about 6-7 years (13-19 years old), so be patient. But you will save your children a lot of time, so they don’t have to recover from bad parenting well into 40s and even 50s.. and you will gain your children back much quicker, where they will come grateful for your input into their life.
May God bless you and may he give you wisdom and assistance and patience and hrace to do all this properly and slowly.