In 2011, I married my husband and became a step mom to his three children, and overnight I was thrown into the deep end of raising kids with little more than some babysitting experience under my belt…
Luckily, I married a genius dad who had already laid a solid foundation for us to build on as a new family, but to say it was hard would be an understatement. Our oldest was 12 at the time, and he was definitely “preteening” pretty hard. Now the “baby” of that bunch is 17, so we’ve been basically raising teens in a hyper sexualized culture for over a decade!
Connection is Key.
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. My husband taught me about prioritizing connection over correction in our early years of marriage, and I can say that in the arena of parenting sexuality, there is no greater tool! If your kids don’t even want to share the most basic details of their lives, they’re not going to want to talk about their most vulnerable areas of their lives. So, we have to make it a goal to get to the heart of each of our children and establish a relationship of trust and love that can bear the weight of vulnerability.
This is easier said than done because teenagers require a LOT of correction, too! It takes a lot of self-control to encounter their strong will or their defiance or lack to frontal lobe maturity or their sex drive without hammering them over the head with wisdom and truth. But I can say, from my experience of many failed attempts and some wins too, the priority of connection over correction is mission-critical in parenting our children through their potentially volatile years.
Typically as parents, we choose reactions of fear, control and punishment rather than responses of connection when anxiety is high. We follow our gut instincts rather than following through on an predetermined course of action. We may get the immediate result we’re looking for, but rarely will it secure our children’s hearts to a place of trust and connection with ours. Our job as parents is to play the long game. Let’s talk a little bit about three strategies for staying the course and making the ultimate win…
1) Make your plan for anxiety before you’re triggered.
The worst time to make a solid plan for weathering a storm is when you’re in the middle of the storm. In the middle of the storm, the goal is to survive! In parenting kids in their sexuality character development, we want to decide ahead of time, what behaviors, attitudes, and responses are a part of the plan and which ones are NOT. The goal is that when your son asks you an anxiety-provoking question or your daughter confesses a poor decision she made with her boyfriend, we are able to stop, breathe and stick to your plan… respond the way that first protects our connection and then brings truth, wisdom and help. For great resources on learning to protect connection, I recommend checking out Connection Codes by Dr. Glenn & Phyllis Hill.
2) Remember that our mistakes do not define us, and they don’t define our children either.
I remember when our children were really young, I believed that if we could AT LEAST keep them away from sex, drugs and alcohol, we had a shot at raising healthy and happy kids that would turn into healthy and happy adults. In reality, we can’t actually keep our kids from doing anything! Where there is a will, there IS a way, and the journey of parenting can be boiled to a long journey of realizing that we are really not in control of anyone but ourselves! That said, it was such a joy to experience God’s FAITHFULNESS in the lives of our children. As each of them navigated their own path of teenage years, they didn’t always make the choices we would have wanted them to make. But now as young adults, they are all serving God, walking in health and pursuing wholeness in every area! Isn’t it a relief to know that we don’t have to have a spotless past in order to live whole and blessed adult lives?
3) Trust that love really does cover a multitude of sins.
It’s OK that as parents we don’t always know what to do! One day when our two oldest kids were in Junior High School, I was driving home from work, stressed out about something happening with one of our kids, and I remember the Holy Spirit whispering to me, “Just admit you don’t know what you’re doing and that you’re doing your best. I don’t want anything more.” I felt like a thousand pounds was lifted off my shoulders, and since that day, I have actually added the line, “I don’t actually know what to do about this” to my tool belt! Admitting to our kids that we love them to pieces and are learning as we go is a really powerful and very disarming message. Keeping the love on (thanks, Danny Silk!) and committing to connection as we figure things out is as much as can be asked of us sometimes.
If you’ve been a parent for any length of time, or if you have BEEN parented, or if you can imagine being a parent… you know that there are peace times and there are times of strife. Emotions get high sometimes, mistakes are made, triggers are pushed, and it’s easy to let our knee jerk reactions get the best of us. But if we can practice putting down the big guns of fear, control and punishment and taking up connection instead, we’ll find ourselves acting like the parents we’ve always wanted to be… the parents our children need in this trying time of their lives.
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