One difference between parenting littles and teens is knowing what to say. Littles erupt with questions and deeply desire for their beloved grown-ups to answer them. Teens seem to deeply desire you are there when they need you, but mostly hope you stay quiet. During the teenage years, the eruption of questioning reverses from the young to the old, but the old quickly realize, unlike the young, that questions must be rationed. I find a reasonable average of questions to be 3-5, depending on when they last ate.
I am convinced every parent of teenagers only pretends to know what she or he is doing. When I hear a recommendation of a book for teenage parents, I want to hope to find just the right wisdom in that book, but most parenting books seem to me to be aspirational. Raising teenagers is freaking hard and no book has easy answers. Kids are humans and therefore too complicated to be reduced to a manual.
But this book! I cannot remember how I happened upon it, but it is the very best parenting book I’ve read. I borrowed the audio, read by the author, from our local library. In Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen, Michelle Icard guides readers through talks that overwhelm parents like me. Tough stuff: friendship, sexuality, pornography, hygiene, money, how to dress, privilege, and behavior. She is funny and yet grounded, honest that the role of parents is never to protect kids from the world but to equip them to move around the world safely.
Her acronym is easy to implement into conversations with my teenagers and has been a helpful guide. Icard calls her framework for conversation the B.R.I.E.F. Model:
- Begin peacefully.
- Relate to your child.
- Interview to collect data.
- Echo what you hear.
- Give Feedback.
If you have kids or grandkids who are teenagers or soon to be teenagers, this book will challenge you. What grown-ups like to do (when we are not at our best) is to apply our own teenage experience to the lives of teenagers today. This is an excellent method to raise defensiveness in teens and immediately stop a conversation.
A better way, provided by Icard, is to be intentional in deciding when to have a tough conversation. And to respect teenagers enough to give them a heads up. “Begin peacefully” is great advice for beginning any tough conversation, not only with a child, but with a spouse or co-worker. Be careful when you enter into a thorny conversation. Don’t do it when you are tired, hungry, or ticked off at someone, including your child.
Even though teenagers are quickly gaining independence, there is so much they are trying to figure out from moment to moment. In many ways, it has never been more challenging to be a teenager. They have access to every kind of yuck on their devices, and so they need a loving and forgiving guide to be there and begin those conversations peacefully, not out of anger or fear.
When I drop off my daughter at school (the only person I drop off anymore) I remind her “Jesus Loves You,” and she does the same for me. I cannot walk with her through the hallways or around the playground, but I can do my best to prepare her for situations she might encounter. And more importantly, we can remind one another that Jesus’ love does not expire, and it is not revocable. Jesus’ love cannot be undone. Teenagers, like all human beings, easily forget this promise. We make mistakes and then make the mistake of assuming our mistake undoes the promise of Jesus’ love.
Although I can attest to how hard it is to raise teenagers, I can also tell you it is much easier when I get to remind them (probably more than they prefer) that Jesus loves them, all the time.
Lisa Lewton 