Shepherding a Child's Heart

Positive Interaction
You must maintain a positive relationship with teens. Your
interaction should have the objective of ministry. Be a constructive
force in the life of your child. You want to be a source of
encouragement and inspiration.
That is not always easy. Teenagers are capable of colossal
blunders. There is an enormous gap between the teen’s desire to be
autonomous and his understanding of life. This is fertile soil for
gigantic mistakes. It is easy for a parent to lose his focus.
One summer, our son was using our second car for transportation

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to his summer job. He came home one afternoon with the rear bumper
tied on with a rope. Naturally, I was curious. It seems that as he
rounded a bend in the road, a pencil rolled from the dashboard onto
the floor of the car. The bumper “fell off” when he reached down to
pick up the pencil and hit a guard rail!
We had a “parts car” at this time, so my son said he would fix the
car. That night he removed the ruined bumper, but he didn’t have time
to replace it with the one from the “parts car.”
The next day he backed into a mountain during a three-point turn.
It probably would not have done much damage if the rear bumper had
been on the car …
During times of failure like I have recounted above, your teens
need positive interaction. You need to keep your eye on the goals you
have for your children. They need Mom and Dad to be constructive
and creative. You need to have a proper sense of proportion,
remembering that your child is worth much more than a car.
I am not talking about shielding them from responsibility. I am
not talking about insulating them from the effects of their errors of
judgment. Those are important lessons when handled constructively.
What I have in view is parental interaction that is full of hope and
courage. This interaction is able to turn a fiasco into an opportunity to
learn and go forward.
You cannot afford to berate your teens with destructive speech.
The young person who is told he is “worthless, no good, a loser, a
slob, or a bum,” will probably live up to his parents’ expectations.
The Proverbs tell us that pleasant words promote instruction. “The
wise in heart are called discerning, and pleasant words promote
instruction” (Proverbs 16:21). Pleasant words grease the wheels of
instruction. A later verse underscores the same lesson: “Pleasant
words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones”
(Proverbs 16:24).
It is no wonder so many teens do not receive instruction from their

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parents. They are suffering under the cruelty of their parents’ harsh
words. Any instruction is lost to a wounded spirit and deepening
alienation.
“A wise man’s heart guides his mouth, and his lips promote
instruction” (Proverbs 16:23).
In all your interaction, your focus is to see your teenagers find
comfort and strength in knowing God.
Teenagers experience frequent failure. As Christian parents, you
must become adept at taking your child to the Cross to find
forgiveness and power to live. You do your children great disservice
if you strip away all the excuses for failure and force them to see their
sin as it is, without giving them well-worn paths to the Cross. No
wonder Christian teens often have such a poor self-concept! They
have been taught to see through all their false mechanisms for dealing
with guilt, but have not been taught adequately where to go with it.
Even your times of warning must have a positive thrust. You have
a good pattern in the book of Hebrews. In Hebrews 6, after giving
very straightforward warning, the writer adds these words: “Even
though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better
things in your case .…” (Hebrews 6:19).