Lesson 4: Parents Have Deep Fears

Fear is a kind of parenting fungus: invisible, insidious, perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind. —Nancy Gibbs 

Fear of the potential problems that will arise in teenagers’ lives can be great for a parent. Just in trying to teach my oldest son how to drive, I’ve had to recognize how much I worry when I think how we’ll eventually allow him out on the road on his own. In some extreme cases, this sort of worry can be suffocating. My mother-in-law lost a child in a drowning incident, and I can’t even begin to imagine how devastating it must have been. She is now a missionary overseas with my father-in-law, and, over the years, we have been able to take some short-term mission teams to their mission field. We love going over to serve their communities with them as well as visit them in the process, and most of our mission trips finish with a day or two of relaxation.

A few years ago, because of how warm it was in their location, we asked if we could find a place to go swimming. You can imagine the fear in my mother-in-law’s eyes, seeing a team of twenty teens swimming in a lake. She wouldn’t stop staring at us swimming, yelling not to go out too far, and telling us after only ten minutes that we’d been swimming too long. She was so scared of what could happen to our students because she had experienced a fear becoming reality.

It’s an extreme example that hopefully few of us will ever know personally, but the truth is almost every parent lives with fears. Fear of tragedy, fear of the future, and even simply fear of what our teenagers are doing in private or with their friends when we aren’t looking or aren’t there to stop them.

I love reading The Youth Cartel cofounder Adam McLane’s blog, and one of his recent posts discussed social media and the sentiment of many parents who often think: If it’s private, it must be bad, right?13 Even with my teenage boys, who seem to be “good kids,” I’m often curious about what they do on social media. Like many parents, I can imagine teenagers being up to no good when we can’t listen in or see with our own eyes, so it’s comforting to hear them scream at friends playing games like League of Legends and know exactly what they’re doing.

Parents are also bombarded on Facebook with contrary and confusing information. For example, a father of a teen at my church told me he read an interesting article that came up on his Facebook newsfeed citing a study done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).14 According to this article, the current generation of teenagers is the best in history because the teenage birthrate is at an all-time low; fewer teens are having unprotected sex; high school seniors are drinking and smoking less and barely using cocaine; and instead, they are exercising more. Good news, right?

A few weeks later, this same father came to me, terrified after seeing a different Facebook story about a fourteen-year-old girl who got deeper and deeper into the world of drugs from a young age, only to succumb to her meth addiction. For this father, he connected this girl’s spiral into drug abuse with his own thirteen-year-old teenager; and he was sure his own teen was going to turn out like that in a year.

Frankly, my first thought was: Too much Facebook, dude. My immediate second thought, however, was that parents often just don’t know what their kids are capable of. Their fears and imaginations can drive them crazy. Adam McLane explains that when it comes to social media, he likes to “take stuff out of the parents’ imagination.”15 Well, let me tell you as a parent and as a family pastor for many years, there’s a lot of stuff in my imagination. C. S. Lewis once said:

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.16

I think many parents have an excessive and unhealthy interest in certain “devils,” as C. S. Lewis put it. Understanding and responding to them accordingly can enable our churches and youth ministries to work and serve parents and their teens more effectively. 

Because while there’s a biblical mandate for parents to parent well, parents often don’t know how or what to do in numerous situations related to teens. It may be inadvertent sometimes. We think we know, but we often don’t. As a parent and as a youth worker working with parents, I have outlined some of the things I’ve observed that I believe many parents are probably embarrassed to admit they worry over but know little about. These things make our imaginations and fears go wild. They are subjects that parents need more help with and equipping in, and these are areas where I believe youth ministries can support parents more deeply.

SANCTIFICATION AND SPIRITUAL MATURITY

Parents often come to me and ask, “How is my son/daughter doing?” They want a spiritual assessment of their teenagers. I also see they sometimes need coaching and help to know how to help their teenagers grow in faith. This is a reality that continually needs to be reinforced with my youth workers and volunteers, as I want and need to equip these parents. Unfortunately, when I ask parents about their teenagers or how they themselves are doing—or mention how hard parenting is—they often don’t say much initially. However, I know deep down inside they have things they want to share but, for some reason, don’t in the moment.

Recently, I noticed a pastor online using a Puritan prayer guide as a model for parents’ prayers for their teenagers. I not only had a tough time deciphering the old English language used by the Puritans but also understanding how to apply the prayers to my own teenagers. Using this pastor’s suggestions, helping one’s teenagers grow in spiritual maturity practically required learning another language just to know how to pray. But often, even for parents who have a solid walk in their faith, knowing how to nurture the faith of their own teenagers and making faith applicable to their teenagers’ lives can be a daunting undertaking—even if they aren’t attempting to pray from a Puritan prayer guide. And I wonder how many youth ministries realize the difficulty that parents have with this, let alone the difficulty of talking about it.

FORGIVENESS AND RECONCILIATION

Christianity Today featured an article in 2014 about forgive­ness between parents and children.17 The article talked about parents being flawed and the deeper meaning of mercy between parents and children; it discussed how many parents don’t know how to seek forgiveness or apologize to their children. Some of us have no idea. As a parent of teenagers, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to learn how to do this—possibly more often than most—because I’m married to a family and marriage counselor who understands how reconciliation works and has walked me through it.

As we work with parents, I often see that they really don’t know how to do this. Some don’t know how to genuinely say sorry to their teenagers if they have wronged them, not understanding that the very act of saying it might promote a genuine reconciliation that could lead to the future nurture and growth of their relationships with their teenagers. On the other side of that coin, others may seek forgiveness from their teenagers only with a hidden agenda to manipulate some kind of response or good will from their teens. Their apologies are often driven as a means to an end, and teens can sniff this out quite quickly. In both cases, the parents and teenagers are missing out on true reconciliation.

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL

I believe there isn’t rampant drug or alcohol use in our youth group—or at least that’s my hope. But I can’t be 100 percent sure. The story I shared about the post-prom incident earlier was not shocking, but it was disheartening to learn that parents (outside our youth group anyway) would willingly supply alcohol to students.

I have seen parents become curious about a teenager’s potential drug use, especially when that teenager turns lazy, rebellious, or their schoolwork starts slipping. Parents are typically not sure what to do or how to handle it when the suspicions arise. They often don’t know which professionals to turn to or even where to go for help. 

I can remember one parent who came to me long after he randomly sought the help of a drug rehab clinic. The father’s suspicion of his son had become so intense that he started consulting a second teenage drug clinic, which gave him wild ideas about how to prove his son was a drug addict. He was told if his son drank a lot of orange juice, he was a drug addict. He was even told to check the outside spigots (faucets) around his home because they were—so he was told—prime places to hide drug paraphernalia. Another thing he was told was to take his teen for a long three-plus hour drive and stay silent until his teenager started speaking—the idea being that the teenager would eventually confess any drug issue if confined in silence for that long. 

I may have to do more research on teenage drug addiction, but I’ve never heard of such ideas. Furthermore, they seemed outrageous to me. Eventually, the father forced this son to get a drug test. Not surprisingly, the son never trusted his father again. While this story is extreme, I can tell you that parents of teenagers have uncontrollable and fearful imaginations. If they suspect their kids are doing drugs or abusing alcohol, things can spiral to weird levels.

TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL MEDIA

The increased use and presence of technology and social media is a huge issue that many parents grapple with and have no idea what to do about. Even for me as a youth pastor, I don’t handle certain technology well—or at least I can admit that I struggle with it. Thankfully, I’m not alone. I recently read an article about the dilemmas parents have with properly using technology at home. Even for parents, disconnecting from technology at home is a huge issue. The amount of literature related to parents needing to disconnect from their tech devices for the benefit of their relationships with their teenagers is vast. Some parents don’t know how to do this, some parents don’t know the detrimental effect of not doing this, and some parents don’t know how beneficial it would be to use less technology while they are with their teenagers.

Similarly, many parents don’t know what to do about their teenagers’ use of technology. In our home, we decided that no devices could be used by anyone, including the parents, during our family meals. But because of schedules and competing deadlines, sometimes our entire family is not together for meals. So, our teenagers have asked if they can use their iPads for these certain situations. Other times, we may just sit down for a late-night snack or, in the summer, a casual morning brunch. Since it’s not an “official” meal but a “snack time” (according to them), our kids ask if they can use our devices. Because they know I enjoy reading online and drinking coffee, they often cleverly add that I can also use my iPad too.

It’s challenging to develop hard, fast rules. It’s also difficult to regulate them. I know we have some rules at our home, like no computer games or Xbox on weeknights, and my kids aren’t allowed to play computer games past 11:00 p.m., even on weekends. But I continually find myself asking if our rules are effective or even right. To be honest, sometimes I need help like any other parent.

As far as social media goes, Adam McLane recently addressed the question of when parents should allow children to get their own accounts.18 He mentioned the legal aspect of social media accounts, which was an angle of the discussion I had never even thought about; and he talked about issues with schools that have students use Facebook in this context and how thirteen years old is the minimum age for use. Frankly, I loved the article because it educated me and made me even more aware of how little I (and a lot of other parents) know and understand about social media usage.

When it comes to technology in youth ministry or church, we face the dilemma of how much or even if we should allow it during youth group activities, and we’re still trying to develop and amend policies regarding the use of technology on mission trips. From a parent’s perspective, mom and dad want to be able to instantly connect with their kids and know what’s going on when they go on a trip with the church, but even a day at school can be too long without communication. (Mark Matlock, the president of Youth Specialties, quipped once that according to school officials in his area, parents texting their teens during school hours was actually a bigger problem than teens themselves trying to text.)

I personally don’t feel the need for students to have contact with their parents—or vice versa—on mission trips. Of course, this is easy for me to say when my own teenagers are almost always with me, their youth pastor dad, on the mission trips. However, when we have sent one of our own teenagers on a mission trip without me, my curiosity and worry got to me. I just missed my son tremendously. I really understood how it felt to be on the other side, but still, I know there are good reasons to leave the technology behind.

Ultimately, Adam McLane says that the best thing parents can do is create an open dialogue about social media and Internet use at home. Likewise, he notes that it’s shocking to see how many parents are afraid to stand up to their ten- to twelve-year-olds. He also states: “If you’re afraid to stand up to a young teen about their social media usage … what are you going to do when that same teenager is sixteen?” And I agree with everything Adam is saying. These are wise words to parents. They are useful words to parents. They are prophetic. But let me say as a parent of teenagers, it’s especially hard if you haven’t started with these boundaries early. Teenagers are often past the point of wanting to have a dialogue about home Internet usage or submitting to parameters for them. It really can feel too late for some families, and maybe it is.

SOCIAL LIFE, SEX, DATING

We moved a few months ago, and one day, our doorbell rang. I opened the door thinking it was some kind of group selling something or perhaps the Girl Scouts. But as soon as the door was fully open, this group of eighth-grade girls said, “Mr. Kwon, can your son come out to play?” I was shocked. I didn’t even think my son knew any girls or talked to girls. 

Other times, as I’m driving my teenagers somewhere, I’ll hear one of my sons get a cell phone call. He’ll start talking to his friend about some girl who liked him or giving his friend advice about a girl. Again, it catches me off guard sometimes to realize that my boys are growing up.

Dating, having a social life, and even having sex are all issues surrounding our teenagers, whether they are engaging in these things or not. A year ago, some parents at our church snooped around the Facebook site of their daughter’s friend and discovered some provocative posts and suggestive pictures. The father who saw all of this came to me afterward and asked if I’d seen the girl’s page. This father was driven with fear that because his daughter was friends with this girl, she might have been doing the same things.

As a parent, it’s frightening to think about teenagers dating and having social lives, let alone having sex. Moreover, I have come to realize that it’s very difficult for parents to talk about their own teenagers—or even these loaded issues in more general terms—with their youth workers and in their churches. But we know communication between parent and child on these issues can make a difference. So, what are we doing to help parents get there as churches and youth ministries?

DOUBTS

I love the series Friday Night Lights. One of my favorite episodes was the one where the coach’s teenage daughter battled with her faith and, consequently her church attendance.19 I think this sort of spiritual shifting and questioning can be traumatic for any parent, especially churchgoing parents. But at the end of the episode, it was incredible to see a mother embrace her teenager’s struggles and tell her she didn’t necessarily have to go to church if it was such a conflict.

The mother’s response was extremely courageous and brave. Most parents get anxious and worried when their teenagers don’t want to go to church. Moreover, I suspect that most parents wouldn’t embrace the doubts of their teenagers in such a way. Most parents wouldn’t be open and supportive but rather disheartened and devastated by it. 

As my oldest son and I were researching colleges, I was shocked and worried when he told me he wouldn’t be applying to a well-known Christian college that many of my former youth group students attend. This information was hard enough; I can’t imagine how I would feel if he told me he would stop going to church, even for a while.

Most parents probably have little idea how to embrace and nurture doubt in their teenagers. It’s most likely a point of worry, and then blame is placed on the church and youth ministry for not “working.” It also causes the imagination of a parent to run rampant, thinking about all the wrong in their kids’ lives.

Ultimately, all of these examples of situations of the unknown—these doubts, fears, or other things that cause a parent’s imagination to run amuck—are points of struggle. Youth workers, youth ministries, and churches need to identify what kinds of concerns parents are carrying around below the surface on a Sunday morning. It’s an important starting point to recognize these things in the heart of parents, and acknowledging them and being open to them will better equip parents to deal with these things.

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13 Adam McLane, “What Are Teenagers Sharing on Social Media?”Adam McLane (blog), January 15, 2014, http:// www.adammclane.com/2014/01/15/what-are-teenagers-sharing- on-social-media/.

14 Sarah Kliff, “Today’s Teenagers Are the Best-Behaved Generation on Record,” Vox (blog), May 25, 2014, http://www.vox. com/2014/5/25/5748178/todays-teenagers-are-the-best-behaved- generation-on-record/.

15 McLane, January 15, 2014.

16 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (London: Centenary, 1942).

17 Lesley Leyland Fields, “What We Forgot About Forgiveness,” Christianity Today, Vol. 58, No. 4, May 2014.

18 Adam McLane, “When Should I Allow My Children to Get a Social Media Account?”, Adam McLane (blog), June 12, 2014, adammclane.com/2014/06/12/allow-children-get- social-media-account/.

19 “In the Skin of a Lion” (Season 4, Episode 3), Friday Night Lights, NBC, November 11, 2009.