YPT Podcast Episode 35: Helping Parents Prepare for the Teen Years (Kristen Hatton)
Parents are often fearful and overwhelmed as their kids approach the teen years. Yes, there are new challenges and struggles. But God is faithful and the gospel really is good news. How can youth workers understand and encourage parents of teenagers through these stressful years?
What's the central message of Parenting Ahead and tell us why you wrote it?
How can youth workers help parents keep the long-range in sight?
Youth leaders sometimes see tendencies in youth that seem to be rooted in either over-parenting or under-parenting… could you explain what you mean by those terms, and how might a youth leader be able to help a parent embrace a different approach?
It could be easy for a youth pastor who’s unmarried or who either doesn’t have kids or whose kids are still very young to think they don’t have much to offer parents. How can those youth leaders have a meaningful role in the lives of the parents of students in their ministry?
What’s one way that every youth worker can encourage and support parents?
Excerpt from this episode
In our culture of instant results with an added desire for ease, it's easy to grow weary with a day in the daily struggle of parenting. Could you elaborate a little bit on that and maybe share some ways that youth workers could also help parents to keep a long-range insight?
Order Parenting Ahead, by Kristen Hatton
Parenting is exhausting, right? Every stage, as wonderful as it may be, in some ways it's also really hard.
I think especially hard is the call to shepherd our children, to discipline our children. Also, just the daily grind. I mean, whether it's meal prep, cleanup, carpooling, schoolwork, chores, all the things. I mean, it's exhausting. So it's easy to lose sight of the long range because we're just inundated the here and now.
In the book, I talk about the farmer from James 5, who's growing his crops, and yet we know that it takes patient endurance. Eventually, the farmer's going to see these crops start to come about. And so I think parenting as a farmer with that perspective. What I'm doing day in and day out matters, even if it doesn't seem like it, even if it seems like maybe we're going backwards. But all these seeds that we're planting, all these conversations with intention - it matters!
So for the youth worker, I think helping parents to not lose sight of that eternal perspective, just encouraging parents to be reminded that what they are doing does matter. But also, I think youth workers can encourage parents to parent to the heart and not just behavioral change. Because in those day in and day out moments, we don't want to take the time maybe to really parent to the heart.
But the question that needs to be asked is, do we want moral kids or do we want kids who love Jesus?
And so moral kids may do the right thing, but like the Pharisees, their hearts may be so far from the Lord. So these are the kids who look to their own goodness as an indicator of their spiritual health. I see a lot of parents doing that too. We look to our kids' obedience to think that we're doing okay as parents, but they could be so far from the Lord.
Really slowing down and seeing that it's about the heart. I want children who know they need Jesus. That's a lot of what this book is about is in our failures, in the sin, in our sin, in our kids' sin, how God is using all of that to sanctify both our children and us to bring us to see our need more deeply so that we learn to live and depend on him.
About This Episode
Kristen Hatton is a Christian counselor in Dallas, TX and the author of multiple fantastic books for teenagers. Today, we’ll talk about her latest book, Parenting Ahead: Preparing Now for the Teen Years, and about how youth workers can be encouragers to the parents in their ministry.
Instagram: RedemptiveParenting
Website: kristenhatton.com
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YPT has published an ebook that's a free download for subscribers! Youth Ministry is Theological Ministry captures the essence of Youth Pastor Theologian in one ten-chapter book, written by six different contributors from across America, Mexico, and the UK.
