Biological parents, step parents, grandparents, friends, teachers, coaches, mentors... we all have the same challenge: Our teens need our leadership and guidance through their most volatile season of life, but we'll only be influential in their lives to the degree that they feel safe around us, heard by us, and unconditionally loved by us.
Join special guest Lauren Vallotton as she unpacks her experience parenting kids through their volatile teenage years. From dealing with different cultures at school to parenting as a step-parent, the overarching goals are providing a safe place and fighting for connection. She provides both emotional and practical strategies to navigate difficult conversations and situations. No bad choice is beyond the reach of love and connection.
Our friends are blessings (and sometimes seasons) as we mature throughout life. The people that God puts in our lives are meant to bring us closer to Christ by offering compassion, fellowship, humble correction, and forgiveness. If we want to truly maintain and strengthen our friendships, we need to have an open heart and mind on how to love them better as life goes on.
Part of the challenge is that sometimes people confess but they never repent! They get addicted to the feeling that happens when we bring our sins into light and the weight of shame falls off of us. The truth is that many times the addiction to confession doesn’t result in true repentance or a turnaround in behavior. Confession is important but if you think it’s the only step to wholeness, you’re missing out on full restoration!
Screen Time Management: Control how long your teen can spend on TikTok each day. In addition, TikTok has partnered with top creators to make short videos that appear right in the app and encourage users to keep tabs on their screen time. These fun videos use the upbeat tone our users love while offering a suggestion to take a break and do something offline, like read a book.
“If they don’t have the information how are they going to make a good choice” Kristen Jenson, founder of Protect Young Minds, dives into the conversation of porn-proofing your kids and how you can educate your children/family. Everybody with a phone has a portal to porn in their pocket, and as soon as your kids have access to the internet is as soon as the conversation should begin. Kristen has amazing resources that every parent, Christian or not, should have access to. Check her out!
Kids are curious about sex. Spoiler alert: this is normal and healthy. What’s not healthy: going to porn for all the answers. In an ideal situation, a child would feel free to tell their parents about what they heard on the playground or found on the computer by accident. Often, they can be too scared to say anything, and the issue won’t be brought up. We think it’s important for parents to talk to their kids about what porn is before they see it for the first time and keep the conversation open, shame-free, honest, and loving.
Talk about pornography early. Talk about pornography often. Make sure your kids have permission to always talk to you about digital “stuff.” And that includes giving your kids permission to talk openly about pornography.
We realized that we couldn’t expect our children to express what made them uncomfortable or scared if we didn’t teach them to understand and express a broad range of feelings, especially the uncomfortable and difficult ones. Our hope is that as we create space throughout our days to talk about difficult feelings, our children will be able to more easily verbalize instances where someone makes them feel unsafe or touches them inappropriately.
As a child, you were creating habits and building these connections at a faster and stronger rate than at any other point in your life. So, the earlier and more frequently you experience things like porn, abuse, and sexuality, the more these things feel like they are part of you.
Let’s talk about sex…specifically sex AFTER kids. Because we all know there are two kinds. If you are one who’s libido continued to climb after kids, if you are one who desires it regularly and if you continually feel sexy…
During the pandemic, more kids than ever are staying in touch with friends with technology. We’ve received a significant number of parents asking us about what apps their younger kids should be using during these unusual times. We’ve been giving lots of advice and we finally documented it in this blog post where we’ve profiled three possible solutions: