Shepherding a Child's Heart

Signs of the Times
The benchmarks for this period of life are the onset of puberty and

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the time when the child leaves home to establish a home of his own.
The teen years are years of monumental insecurity. The youth is
neither a child nor an adult. He is unsure about how to act. If he acts
like a child, he is chided to “act his age.” If he acts like an adult, he is
told not to get “too big for his britches.” Sometimes, the whole world
seems exciting and attractive—he loves being a teen. At other times,
it seems frightening, demanding and foreboding—he wishes he never
had to face it.
One of our children loved being 17. For him, 17 was the perfect
age. You weren’t a new driver anymore (you had a few accidents
under your belt), but you weren’t a legal adult either. Our daughter,
facing college and all the decisions that seemed so serious, would hug
Mom and Dad and say she never wanted to leave home. She wanted to
remain a girl—old enough to do things, young enough to enjoy the
shelter and protection of home.
Teens feel vulnerable about everything. They worry about their
appearance. Do they have the right clothes? Are they wearing them
right? What will their friends think about this shirt, dress, or new
haircut? What if they get to wherever they are going and everyone is
dressed differently?
They feel anxiety about their understanding of life. Will they
know the right thing to do or say in the restaurant? They worry about
whether their fund of knowledge is big enough to see them through
the situations that they long to experience.
They are unstable in the world of ideas. We have made our dinner
table a place for discussing politics, current events, and popular ideas
in current discourse. No one has the teenager’s capacity to argue on
all sides of an idea in a single conversation. Why is this? For the first
time he is trying to formulate his independent identity in the world of
thought. He knows enough to engage in the conversation, but his ideas
are not fully cooked.
Teens feel insecure about their bodies and their appearance.

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Teenagers spend fully half of their lives in front of a mirror. They
worry about whether they are developing on schedule.
Teenagers experience apprehension about their personality. They
wonder whether they are serious enough, funny enough, creative
enough, carefree enough. One of our children was very
straightforward about these fears. He would announce at the breakfast
table that he had decided to change his personality. Sometimes he
changed personalities more often than he changed his shirts. He didn’t
know yet that personality is resilient; what he was really reflecting
was uncertainty about who he was.
While this is a period of instability, anxiety, and vulnerability, it
is also paradoxically a period when children are seeking to establish
an independent persona. The teen wants to be his own person. While
his need for direction has never been greater, he will resist overt
attempts to corral him.