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 moment I turned sixteen years-old, my top priority in life was to get my driver’s license. Armed with my brand new learner’s permit, I couldn’t get enough practice time in on the road. And when I passed my driver’s test on the first try, there was a feeling of freedom and liberation I experienced that I look back on as a major rite of passage. As I think back, I don’t remember one high school peer who didn’t think as I did, and we all were eager to get that signifier of being one-step closer to full-fledged adulthood. But something’s changed. Researchers tell us that almost forty percent of teens delay getting their license by one or two years, and thirty percent are delaying by more than two years. What’s driving this shift? (No pun intended!). Today’s kids say they’re overscheduled and too busy, they are staying home and socializing online, and some are too depressed and anxious to drive. If your kids are holding off for any of these reasons, take steps to ease the unwarranted pressures which they find paralyzing.

One of the questions we often hear from parents relates to the appropriate amount of screen time which they should allow for their kids. Generally speaking, research, surveys, and the observations of parents themselves indicate that our teens spend way too much time focused on their screens. This means that they are spending less time on what once were the normal activities of childhood, including things like outside play, socializing with friends, and spending time with family. Researchers in Sweden are reporting that kids ages twelve to sixteen who spend excessive time engaged with their screens experience multiple negative impacts on sleep, including decreased duration of sleep, decreased quality of sleep, delayed sleep until later hours, and greater incidence of depression. Let’s be responsible parents who set and enforce strict time limits on screen time so that they will get the amount and kind of sleep for which God has made them.