Creating Connection: Developing Relationships With Your Teens

Adolescence is a curious developmental period, marked by fluctuations that occur along multiple dimensions. Although as adults you have already lived your own experience, suspended between childhood and young adulthood, you experience it again, yet from a parental perspective as you move through your relationships with your teens.

As we once did in a previous season, we are privileged to parent our teens as they experience changes in their psychological, emotional, social, and physical development. One of the most significant areas is in their relationship with us as their parents. While this can produce frustration at times, we can embrace the spiritual and practical insights that hold the potential to shift our relationships.

Create safe space in relationships with your teens

Let’s consider the first commandment of parenting and fostering relationships with teens is to listen more than we lecture. Listening offers our adolescent sons and daughters an avenue to express emotions and experiences. We gather insight and invite opportunities to notice without judgment.

Listening invokes fellowship and deeper connection, even across differences. Active listening provides an advantage, enabling us to clarify what we don’t understand and exert positive influence from a place of wisdom, grace, and humility.

Communication and connection

In dialogue with our teens, we may hear perspectives that alarm us; but we can allow our discoveries to effectively inform our prayers and action. We can engage in proactive parenting that communicates regularly instead of waiting for a crisis to erupt. We don’t want to frustrate or break our teens’ spirits, giving them no place to feel safe. We want them to confide in us, trusting our consistent character (Ephesians 6:4).

Reacting out of dysregulated emotion or attempts to control, may potentially disable communication and connection in the relationships with our teens. It may take all manifestations of spiritual fruit, from love to self-control, to couch our words and actions in the Heart of the Father (Galatians 5:22-23). With the Holy Spirit, we as parents, can temper our responses to challenge and correct, inspire and instruct, all in alignment with God’s design (2 Timothy 3:16).

Curiosity

Being open to dialogue about difficult or supposedly controversial topics doesn’t threaten Jesus or the Holy Spirit who lives within. Rather, our curiosity and willingness to learn our teens’ language and gauge the experiences native to their world generate respect.

This provides a safe space to explore topics they are likely discussing with friends or others online. When we invest time and engage our teens in dialogue, we live the spoken gospel. Our lives testify of the legacy of God’s grace and goodness, as Father and Friend.

Jesus wasn’t afraid to question, challenge, or correct those whose practices and perspectives differed from His. He always engaged others, speaking the Truth in love and conveying the Heart of the Father.

Home is our first ministry, regardless of the roles or responsibilities we have elsewhere. Our teens will not know us by who and what we are to other people outside, but rather by the loving and honorable way that we engage them. When we invest in relationship with our teens, it may not always produce immediate agreement but it will foster a safe space for connection where they feel safe, valued, loved, and respected.

Credibility in relationships with your teens

Asserting parental power ostracizes and forces deep chasms that separate and divide relationships with our teens. Reasoning, however, restores fellowship as we engage in active listening and healthy communication (Isaiah 1:18).

They may not always agree or obey all the time, but following God’s pattern for integrity and honor promotes desirable outcomes in our relationships with our teens. We don’t have to insult their intelligence or badger with our views and values.

Father God leads with love and draws with kindness, even when we don’t always do what He instructs (Jeremiah 33:3). He knows what’s good and doesn’t waver, modeling that our parenting can demonstrate firmness and compassion, providing relentless love and support that anchors healthy relationships with our teens.

When we partner with the Holy Spirit for a strategy to engage our teens, we embrace the wisdom that wins souls (Proverbs 11:30). As parents, our integrity produces credibility, inviting God’s favor with our own teens’ hearts and minds.

This influence inclines our adolescents to hear us and respond in obedience as we create a culture of honor in our homes. Even when our teens are away from us or amongst peers, they are likely to make better choices when our positive influence informs and shapes credibility with them.

Next steps

Though the relationship with your teenagers may be in transition, you retain a unique role in their lives. The charge originated from God Himself. The Lord’s providence placed you in position to parent your teens and to be parented by the Father.

Where you need assistance and support, seek and schedule time with a counselor at Glendale Christian Counseling. You will find the empathy needed to create connection and develop meaningful relationships with your teens.