One of the biggest mistakes we make as parents is basing our happiness and emotional well-being on our kids’ happiness and emotional well-being. When we do this, we’re just setting ourselves up for disappointment. We’ve learned that even though we began our parenting adventure with a wonderfully written script that included no difficulties, bumps, or bruises, God had a different script for us to live. His script wasn’t 100% percent happy like ours. While it was difficult for us, we learned that God gives us and our kids the opportunity to struggle through life so that we might grow and mature. If we were all to base our happiness on how well things were going with our kids. . . well, we’d all wind up spending time being miserable people. The Apostle Paul laid out a better way. . . in fact, it’s the right way. He writes in Romans 12, “Base your happiness on your hope in Christ. When trials come endure them patiently, steadfastly maintain the habit of prayer”

Listen to these words from detransitioner Laura Perry Smalts in a recent Salvo Magazine article: “If I had known in 2007 that God’s creation of male and female was not only good but impossible to alter, I would have saved myself a tremendous amount of pain and suffering. At the time, I would have repeated the typical cultural catchphrase that I was born this way. I believed I was a man trapped in a woman’s body and that the only way I could be myself was to transition from female to male.” Laura Perry Smalts goes on to tell her story of transition, and how she came to the realization that she had been wrong, leading to a detransition. Her words are so helpful: “God said to me, “You cannot love me and yet reject my creation. Then I heard him say, Let me tell you who you are. In that moment, my whole idea of identity shifted from what I wanted to be, to who wanting to know who I was created to be.” Thank you Laura Perry Smalts, for reminding us of where to find our identity!

Fifty years ago there was little or no knowledge among teenagers about eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. In today’s image-obsessed and social-media saturated world, the great majority of our kids not only stress over their appearance, but many are struggling with body dysmorphia, which is defined as a mental health condition in which you can’t stop thinking about one or more perceived defects or flaws in your appearance. New data from a study of thirty-nine-thousand adolescents ages fourteen to eighteen reports that the dominant factor raising the risk of self-harm, including suicide, is one’s perception regarding their weight. Our kids are being hammered by a constant diet of marketing images and social media posts which leave them feeling inadequate and less than. As Christian parents, we must affirm their standing as loved divine-image bearers, emphasizing the fact that God looks on the inside, not the outside. Our identity is not to be found in appearance.

Biola University theology professor Thaddeus J. Williams has written a great book on living in today’s culture titled, “Don’t Follow Your Heart: Boldly Breaking The Ten Commandments of Self-Worship.” Williams enlightens readers, young and old, on how to identify the cultural lies we so easily believe, all of which are cultural lies that point us in the direction of worshipping and serving ourselves, rather than worshipping and serving God. Share these timely words from Williams with your kids: “ The more you worship yourself, the less you become your self. You become a shadow, a specter, and unself. The longer and deeper you stare into the mirror, looking for answers, the more it will feel like looking at Edvard Munch’s “the Scream.” This is the strange paradox of self-worship. Why? It’s simple. You were not designed to be the center point of your own psyche. You are not God. Self-deification is a bust.” Teach your children that have been made to worship God.

I remember one of the great heartaches of my own adolescent years was a battle with face acne. I was raised in family where time and regular face-washing was seen as the remedy to something I dreamed I would one day grow out of. In today’s social-media-fueled image and appearance conscious world, teenagers have a host of preventive and treatment options at their fingertips. I recently discovered one of those remedies while making small talk with a twenty-something ticket agent at an airport. I asked her about the bright blue star sticker she displayed prominently on her cheek. “Oh!” she said without hesitation. “That’s a pimple patch!” Chances are you’ll see more of these medicated decorative accessories. Now you know what they are! Bear with me here when I suggest these patches offer us a teachable moment. From a theological perspective, we can reference these as remedies to deal with the effects of human sin and brokenness that appear even on our skin.

If they would be honest with us, our kids would tell us that their feelings and emotions serve far too often as their guide for life. Not surprisingly, today’s culture encourages this kind of feeling-driven living. To be honest, being driven by feelings and emotions is not just an issue for our kids. What a shame it would be if history remembered our generation of Christian parents as people who didn’t do anything to help their kids listen to God instead of their windblown emotions. Feelings should never eclipse God’s truth. We must walk our teens through the Scriptures to show them examples of people who allowed their emotions to eclipse the truth, and then suffered the consequences. This includes people like David with Bathsheba, Lot’s wife, and Ananias and Sapphira. One way that we can help our kids see the dangers of feelings is by walking them through the stories of our own lives by sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly regarding the feelings-based and truth-based choices we’ve made.

The title of a recent article in Atlantic magazine caught my eye. It reads, “the elite college students who can't read books to read a book in college it helps to have read a book in high school.” In the article, Rose Horowitch writes that many students no longer arrive at college, even at highly selective elite colleges, prepared to read books. In her research she found that it's not that students don't want to do the reading. It's that they don't know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to. She writes that in 1976 about 40% of high school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5% who hadn't read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped. It's reasonable to assume that one reason for the decline in reading and reading aptitude is the smartphone. One maxim that I heard years ago is this, readers are leaders and leaders are readers. Parents, we encourage you to get your kids to put down the phones and pick up a book.

I often find that when I’m with a group of parents teaching them about today’s youth culture, many wonder if their kids have any interest at all in talking about the Christian Faith, the Bible, and Jesus Christ. There’s a commonly held belief that with all the attractive things the world has to offer, kids just don’t want to have anything to do with conversations about God. But because we know that all of these other distractions offered by the world can never fulfill one’s created purpose to know God, our kids are left feeling empty. I often say that a youth culture landscape littered with brokenness is a landscape ripe for the Gospel. New research from the Barna group should be encouraging to parents who want to see their kids come to know and serve Jesus Christ. In fact, seventy-seven percent of teens are to open to having conversations about God. Should we be surprised? A child’s spiritual hunger will continue to grow if they are not filled by experiencing new life in Jesus Christ!