Review: At the last sesison, we looked at how parents and adolescents are alike. We found the following similarities:

Both experience:

Prov 19:22 – desire for unfailing love (NIV)

Prov 19:21 – plans and strategies to get that love

Psalm 69:27 – pain in the heart when those desires are unmet

What does a teen-ager go through today? How can we better understand what life is for a teen-ager today? Are there ways we can help our kids weather the challenges they face?

There are 2 basic roles people can take in relationships. They can be "fuelers" or "drainers" What is a "fueler?" A "fueler" is a parent who is supportive, loving, guiding, understanding and meeting the needs of her adolescent. Children are "drainers" or "recipients of this fuel". Children should be allowed the privilege of being drainers because they are not equipped and do not have the maturity to be fuelers.

How do parents use their children as fuelers? They do this when they look to their children for sympathy, understanding and support amidst problems. Parents cannot avoid draining them when they involve them in their own marital/emotional problems. He looks to his child to "fuel" or fill up what he cannot.

Eph 4:29 – One way of being a fueler is applying this verse.

• Sharing "only" what is helpful for building up your teen according to
• "his" need – not your need.

The role of the parent can also be draining at times. We need to remember an important principle in Scripture that will allow us to continue to be fuelers. A parent cannot continue to "fuel" his adolescent unless she herself is getting her own "tank" filled. The best and only source for this is a deep relationship with Jesus Christ. (See Matt 11:28-30, 2 Peter 1:1-3)

How does your child handle pain, disappointment or anger? Does he . .

• Hide his anger?
• Talk about his anger?
• Act out his anger?

Which of these would you prefer him to do?

What about you, as a parent? Do you tend to hide talk or act out your pain? What connection do you see between the way you handle pain and the way your kids handle pain?

Illustration: A survey of 3,500 Minnesota teen-agers. They were asked to rank 55 options for coping with pain. The survey found that talking to their moms was the 32^nd thing teen-agers would do. The 48^th thing they would do was talk to their dads. In dead heat for last place was to talk to a clergy member, a guidance counselor or a professional counselor. Instead, the top choices were activities that would bring them immediate relief. Girls chose watching soap operas, shopping or talking on the phone. Boys chose driving fast or playing video games that blew things up. Imagine trying to deal with the pressures of adulthood with only those ideas for handling pain!

What would you conclude from survey like this? Would you conclude that?

• Kids need to learn to communicate better with adults, or
• Adults need to learn to communicate better with kids? Why?

Illustration: High school boy who attempted suicide. It was strange how his parents insisted they had no clue that their son was feeling desperate, in spite of the fact the counselor could identify at least 4 ways the boy tried to signal them. Three years earlier, their oldest son had died tragically in a motorcycle accident. At that time, the youngest son bottled up the grief he felt and attempted to be "strong" for his folks. For a couple of different reasons, the boy felt responsible for his brother’s death, but he never expressed them. For 3 years he successfully hid his grief and sent several "SOS" signals to his family – he stopped coming to dinner, left sad poems lying around the house, dropped out of his favorite activities, and started uncharacteristically to neglect household chores. But his parents missed signals because they had been lulled by the boy’s passive and compliant manner into believing that he didn’t have a care in the world.

• How could the parents have been more sensitive to the needs of their son?
• They should not have allowed him to be the "fueler" in the relationship because he was not mature enough. The child could not meet the emotional needs of his parents. It was all right to communicate with their son his need to grieve, he didn’t need to be strong for his parents because he wasn’t.
• Because he could not articulate his feelings, the parents assumed that the boy was strong enough even when he was already sending out SOS signals.
• The parents unknowingly added to his pain by ignoring them.

Job 38:36 - Clearly we see that we cannot look to our children to "fuel" or meet

Job 32:8 our emotional needs. Only God can meet that need. We, as parents,

need to ask God to give us that kind of love so we can turn around

and give it to our children.

The tasks that confront an adolescent require him to find a way to get his adult desires met in an adult world. Consider what he must go through as he faces a crisis:

• Longing for Love and Security – Where does a child first look for love? He first looks to his parents for the love and security he needs. What inevitably happens? As the child grows up, he begins to see his parent’s weaknesses and limitations.
• Longing for Impact – Adolescents long for impact. They figure out how they can get the world to "sit up" and "take notice". Usually this involves getting good enough at something so others will notice. They use this to gain acceptability in the world they live in.

When an adolescent becomes disillusioned with relationships he experiences at home, where will he look to? He will often begin to regard relationships he finds outside the home, with his peers, as the answer to the love and acceptance he feels he has lost. However, by mid-adolescence the teen experiences enough betrayal by friends to create an even greater disillusionment towards relationships outside the home. He therefore realizes he must find the love he longs for while in relationships, but they give him more disappointment and heartache.

Isaiah 41:17 – What is man thirsty for?

John 7:37 – Jesus understands our nature. He sees our desires and longings.

John 4:13-14 – Who alone can fulfill this thirst for unfailing love and security?

Only Jesus Christ can do this. Until man realizes this, he will

continually be disappointed with his relationships, no matter how

intimate and loving they may seem. See Psalm 107:9

Illustration: This is the crisis that faced one 16-year old adolescent named Marti. Marti grew up in a single parent home, never knowing her father, who died when she was an infant. She was raised by her mother, Sandra, as an only child. Even with the absence of her father, Marti’s recollection of her childhood was very positive. She and her mother enjoyed a very close relationship.

When Marti entered high school and began to develop a social life of her own, Sandra decided it was time to start look around herself. She deeply desired to be married again and she thought Marti was now at an age when she did not need her as much. She felt free to start building her life again. Sandra met someone and eventually married him. For the first time, Marti was forced to share her home and her mother with another adult. She deeply resented her mother’s decision to marry and chose to express it by spending as much time away from home as possible. Sandra believed Marti did not need her was much and completely misread Marti’s behavior. Marti, feeling rejected and betrayed by her mother, turned to serious relationships for consolation. She started feeling very used. Finally, when one boy she really thought she loved broke up with her in order to date another girl he considered "thinner" and more attractive, she began to panic. She was confronted with a terrible possibility that she might never again find a relationship she could count on. She went on a starvation diet and eventually discovered she could lose weight by forcing herself to vomit whenever she "messed up" and ate too much. When she started to lose weight and people started to praise her for how good she looked, she was convinced this strategy would get her the love she desperately needed. As a high schooler, she decided that a "bulimic" lifestyle would accomplish the task of finding love in the midst of relationships with selfish people.

What do you think her mother could have done to prevent Marti’s tendency to be bulimic?

Prov 29:15 – What happens when adolescents are left on their own?

Looking at the world through the eyes of your adolescent and realizing the deep ways it has impacted and hurt him can be a painful experience. It can be painful because you may see things you have never seen before: how your teen has been privately suffering, how he has been trying to cope with his pain by himself, how you have unknowingly been adding to this pain by the ways you have been responding to him, and how you have failed him by not recognizing his pain earlier and doing more to help.

Parents need to recognize how their kids are not being loved by their world. And this cannot be done without producing guilt. But guilt can be constructive when you allow it to motivate you to understand your own failures to love and to seek help to love in better ways. Looking at the world through the eyes of an adolescent is a painful but necessary task if you want to deepen your love for your teen.

Here are 2 ideas for entering into an adolescent’s world.

1. If you are just starting to know your teen-anger, try asking him how things are going at school, about how his day went, or something else that does not demand too much risk on his part. If he rejects your inquiry (because your relationship has been strained in the past) try being honest. Tell him what you are discovering about yourself in a parenting class, and you’ve realized you need to get to know him more as a person. You might even try telling him something you’ve learned about your own desires or pain, or something about your own adolescence.
2. If you already have some rapport with your teen, you can try a next step: join him in an activity that is part of "his" world. Don’t invite him to an activity in your adult world, instead attend a sports event at his school, or a movie he chooses.
3. If you struggle with letting your fears control you, take some time this week to talk with God about this problem. Ask Him for the courage to brave whatever your kids dish out, even rejection or anger. As you do this, look to the Lord for the strength you need.

Isa 44:3 – He promises he will never forsake us.

Isa 58:11 – He promises to give us strength.