Raising Teenagers & Other Extreme Sports!

If I could go back ten years and give myself some advice about raising teenagers, I wouldn’t tell myself a thing. Because if I’d known what was coming, I’d probably have moved into the shed.

There are extreme sports, and then there is raising teenagers. Skydiving. Base jumping. Free climbing. White-water rafting. All activities involving significant risk, occasional screaming and the possibility of wondering why on earth you agreed to this in the first place. Amateurs. Try innocently saying something to a teenager and discovering that, unbeknown to you, you’ve just wandered into an emotional minefield. “It’s not funny!” “You’re being mean!” “What? What did I say?” Apparently this is the wrong question. So in an attempt to defuse this emotional landmine you try explaining what you meant. Wrong button. Perhaps humour will defuse the situation. Definitely the wrong button. You defend yourself. Worse. You offer a hug. Absolutely not. Eventually parenting becomes the emotional equivalent of pressing random buttons on a nuclear reactor and hoping one of them turns the alarm off before the whole thing goes critical.

I love my kids. Desperately. That’s the strange thing about raising teenagers. They can be sarcastic, overconfident and capable of Olympic-level eye rolls, but underneath all of that, I see two wonderfully kind people. They care deeply about those around them. They show affection in their own ways, desperately want to do what is good and right, and demonstrate a discernment around other people’s emotions that regularly amazes me. They’re brilliant. Completely baffling, but brilliant.

I Am Your Dad, Not Chat

Teenagers also speak a language that I’m increasingly convinced has been designed specifically to irritate people over forty. Apparently every sentence can now begin with “Chat”. “Chat, what are we having for dinner?” “Chat, do we want to see a movie tonight?” No. We do not. I am your dad. I am not Chat. You are not a streamer. There are no 14,000 people watching this interaction on Twitch. I also don’t particularly enjoy being responded to with “Yaaas queen.” I am your father, not a queen, at least have the decency to call me King. And please stop randomly pronouncing individual words in an American accent. We live in Cheshire.

Then there’s affection. If I attempt to hug one of my teenagers, the response can resemble someone trying to escape from a large, affectionate octopus. Eye rolls. Groaning. “Daaaaad.” Apparently paternal affection is deeply embarrassing. But every so often, they initiate it. They come and talk. They open up. They hug you. They say, “Love you, Dad,” completely unprovoked, and suddenly nothing else matters. There are few greater privileges in parenting than the moment your teenager chooses to let you into their world. You quickly learn that access isn’t something you can demand. You make yourself available, keep showing up and hope they know that when they want the door open, you’re there.

Apparently I’m Not in Control

I’m not quite ready to admit I’m no longer in control. Let’s say I’m exploring the theological possibility. Because one of the hardest transitions in parenting teenagers is moving from managing their lives towards increasingly walking alongside them. When they’re little, you make most of the decisions. You decide where they go, what they do, what they eat, when they sleep and whether licking the supermarket trolley is an acceptable life choice. Then adolescence arrives, and suddenly you’re raising people who need to learn to make their own decisions.

Sometimes you can see further down the road than they can. You know the thing they’re determined to do isn’t good for them. You can see the pothole. You may even have personally fallen into that pothole, broken both legs and written a detailed TripAdvisor review of it, and they still want to investigate it for themselves. Everything in us wants to protect our children from pain, but helicopter parenting can’t prepare them for adulthood. If I helicopter my children over every obstacle they encounter, what happens when life eventually puts a mountain in front of them? They won’t have developed the leg strength to climb it.

That doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries. Biblical parenting involves teaching, discipline, correction and wisdom. But our goal can’t simply be compliant children; the role of a father is not to raise children, but to raise men and women, husbands and wives who will one day become fathers and mothers themselves, we’re trying to raise wise adults. And sometimes wisdom develops through climbing.

The Fear We Don’t Talk About

For Christian parents, there’s another fear underneath all of this that I don’t think we talk about enough: what if they walk away from Jesus? I can barely imagine anything more painful. We can raise our children in church, teach them Scripture, pray with them, talk about Jesus, model faith and do everything we know to do — and still, eventually, faith becomes something they must own for themselves.

That scares me, and fear can make us do stupid things. I’ve pushed when I should have listened. I’ve corrected theology when perhaps I should have asked another question. I’ve worried about church attendance. I’ve panicked over doubts. I’ve wanted expressions of faith to look the way I expected them to look. I’ve made all those mistakes, because underneath them is love, but love mixed with fear can easily become control.

Proverbs gives us extraordinary wisdom about raising children, but Proverbs is wisdom literature, not a vending machine. Put sufficiently godly parenting in, press B7, and out pops a perfectly formed 21-year-old Christian. Our children aren’t projects, and faith isn’t hereditary. We can create the environment. We can teach them. We can pray. We can model something real. But we cannot manufacture faith.

Faith Isn’t Something We Do

What I want my children to understand about Christianity is that it isn’t simply something our family does. It’s who we are in Christ. Church isn’t the religious activity squeezed into Sunday morning before lunch. Prayer isn’t something we only deploy when things go badly wrong. Jesus isn’t an accessory to an otherwise normal family life. I want the presence of Christ to shape our home.

I hope that when my children eventually look back at their childhood, they don’t simply remember being raised by Mum and Dad. I hope they recognise that there was another presence at work throughout it all: the active, loving presence of their heavenly Father, expressed imperfectly through two parents who were themselves being parented by Him. Because Laura and I will get things wrong. I certainly do.

I can raise my voice when I’ve asked the same thing five times and nobody has moved from their bedroom. I become frustrated when chores still haven’t been done. And occasionally my darling teenagers behave with an extraordinary sense of entitlement and Dad Who Loves Jesus briefly becomes Dad Who Has Had Enough. When I’m wrong, I apologise. Sometimes Christian parenting sounds like, “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that. I’m sorry.” Although, for clarity, the dishwasher does still need emptying. Repentance doesn’t mean pretending they were right. It means showing them that Dad needs grace too.

Sometimes the Godly Thing Is to Shut Up

James tells us to be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry. As parenting advice goes, that’s annoyingly good. Unfortunately, I have occasionally practised the reverse: quick to speak, quick to react and then, five minutes later, quick to realise the mature Christian response would have been to shut up five minutes earlier.

Teenagers need somewhere they can ask difficult questions. They need to be able to tell us they’re struggling, doubting, confused or that they’ve messed up without immediately triggering a sermon. Sometimes they need advice. Sometimes they need correction. And sometimes they just need Dad to stop fixing things and listen.

That looks different for every teenager too. There is no universal technique. Personality, maturity and neurodivergence all matter. One child may need encouragement to step forward; another desperately needs permission to retreat and regulate. What looks like defiance can sometimes be overwhelm. What looks like laziness might be a struggle with executive function. Fair parenting doesn’t always mean identical parenting. The question isn’t simply, “What rule applies here?” Sometimes it’s, “What does this particular child need from me right now?”

My Teenagers Are Teaching Me About My Father

For all the challenges, I don’t know of many experiences that have taught me more about the Father-heart of God than becoming a father myself. Don’t mishear me. I’m absolutely not saying you need children to understand God’s fatherhood. Scripture reveals the Father perfectly in Christ. But parenting has given me a window into it.

There is the frustration, correction, forgiveness and enormous responsibility of loving someone who doesn’t always do what you know is best for them. And yet somehow all of that is enveloped by a love so overwhelming that everything else becomes insignificant beside it. And then I realise: that’s me. I am tired. Moody. Broken. Stubborn. Rebellious. I repeatedly do things my Father has told me aren’t good for me. I ignore wisdom and then occasionally return bruised from the entirely predictable consequences. And still He loves me.

Not with the imperfect love of an earthly dad who occasionally loses his temper over an unemptied dishwasher, but with the love displayed at the cross. Parenthood hasn’t made me understand God completely. It has made me enormously grateful that He’s a much better Father than I am.

I Only Have to Parent Today

And that changes what I do with the fear. I don’t know what my children’s stories will look like. I don’t know what questions they’ll wrestle with, what mistakes they’ll make or what their faith will look like twenty years from now. If I’m completely truthful, sometimes that frightens me. But if I really believe God is a good Father, then I can entrust my children to Him. I don’t need to parent their future today.

My responsibility isn’t to manufacture perfect Christian adults or somehow guarantee the outcome of their faith. My responsibility is to be faithful with the responsibility and enormous joy God has given me today. Today I can love them, listen, provide boundaries, offer wisdom, apologise when I’m wrong, encourage what is good and increasingly give them room to develop the spiritual and emotional leg strength they’ll need for whatever mountains lie ahead.

Hopefully, when they’re adults and no longer need my permission, they’ll still want me around. Beneath all the hopes and dreams I have for their future, I really want something quite simple: a continuing, close and loving relationship with them. So when fear whispers, “But what if…?”, I can entrust them again to their Father. He loves them more than I do, He’s more patient than I am, and He’s already present in the parts of their story I can’t see yet.

So every day I have to resolve to leave tomorrow’s parenting worries till tomorrow. For today, apparently Chat needs to work out what’s for dinner.

Yaaas queen King!