Who Is The Problem?
Have you ever watched your teenager make a mistake that you’ve made yourself after you’ve warned them at least a thousand times? Is there anything more frustrating as a parent?
We screw up, tell our children about it, and what do they do? They go out and repeat the same mistake. It makes you question your own gene pool.
In actuality, the problem isn’t with the teenager (at least not all of it). The problem is in our approach to teaching our teenager the lesson we want them to learn. In a sense, we act just as crazy sometimes because we teach them using the same strategies that didn’t work a month or year ago.
Lead Them To The Answer
Here’s a better approach that I’ve experimented with few times with my own children and former high school students. It’s a modified version of the Socratic method – who actually stole it from Jesus. You simply lead your teenager to a predetermined answer that they come up with on their own. That’s it. Jesus did it all the time. I know it sounds easy, but it takes quite a bit of practice.
You simply lead your teenager to a predetermined answer that they come up with on their own.
The parent of one of my former students confided in me that her son was hanging around a dangerous group of boys in the neighborhood. She believed his friends were possibly into drugs, gang violence, and other criminal activity. With no father figure in the home, she thought maybe I could “get through” to him.
I asked her, “What have you said to him?” She replied, “I’ve told him at least a hundred times that his friends are up to no good, and they’re going to eventually get him into trouble and jeopardize his future.” She continued, as she cried, “I told him that I made the same mistake when I was his age, and he didn’t want to go through the pain I did. I just can’t get him to listen.”
A lot of us can relate to this mother’s frustration. We can’t understand why they can’t understand our concern, and we become frustrated and sometimes even angry.
Well, I agreed to meet with her son after class. But I decided to use a different approach. After a little small talk, I simply asked a couple of simple questions, “Who are your three closest friends?” After he gave their names (all part of the group his mom disliked), I asked him a second question, “If you died tonight, and you had children, would you trust any of your friends raising your son or daughter?”
After an extremely long pause, I let him off the hook by saying, “You don’t have to give me the answer, but I do want you to ask yourself another question. If you wouldn’t trust them raising your “make believe” children in the future, then why are you spending most of your time around them today?” That was the end of our discussion.
Say Less, Ask More
This little episode may or may not have put him on the right track, but it did one thing his mother was unable to do – get through to him. He now had to make his own decision based on his own reality, not his mother – and then accept responsibility for the consequences of that decision.
And that’s all you can really do for your teenagers…get them to think for themselves. The Bible tells us in Proverbs 22:6 – If you do a good job training your children in the early years, they won’t depart from that training when they get older.
The key to getting through to your teenager is to say less and ask more questions in order to get them to do more thinking. The more you say, the less they’ll think. And the less they think, the more mistakes they’ll make. So, take your own advice, learn from your past mistakes by adopting a new approach.
The key to getting through to your teenager is to say less and ask more questions in order to get them to do more thinking.
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