Parenting Teens - August 27, 2012

Day 11 - Love Languages

Parenting Teenagers

Teenagers needs the confidence that comes from knowing they are loved. Their behaviour often acts like a gauge showing how full of love their internal “emotional tank” is. Today, we introduce the concept of the five love languages as a way of expressing love to our teenagers in order for them to feel loved.

Our teenagers’ greatest need is to feel loved and accepted during this enormous transition in their lives a time of: • self- discovery • pushing for independence • much self-questioning • peer pressure

they can experience a lot of self-doubt and feel awkward and unlovable • confidence rests on: • security (knowing they are loved) • self-worth (knowing they are of value) • significance (knowing there is a purpose to their lives) • seek to keep their emotional tank" full of lOVE: • their behavior acts like the gauge to show how full of love they feel

Knowing that they are loved and accepted enables them in the long-term: • to resist peer pressure when they need to • to make good choices • to build close relationships

Discovering how our teenagers feel loved
discover the primary way each teenager feels loved, whether it's through: • time • words • touch • presents • actions

(see Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages of Teenagers) • importance of a particular love language may have changed as a child has grown older

Question:
Which of the five ways of expressing love was most important for you during your upbringing?

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A life without God at the center is one of alienation from God, and that can be experienced differently by different people.We can all understand and know this kind of alienation personally – it’s a universal experience.

We get this kind of breakdown between brothers and sisters, between parents and children between bosses and their employees—we see it all the time.

WE know this stuff about alienation—what the Bible is saying is that what God intended between us, between God and human beings, has suffered serious damage.

Life is supposed to be about being connected to God and connected to one another. –But that close and intimate relationship that we are supposed to have with God has gotten broken somewhere along the away and then everything else gets out of whack

SO serious things wrong with the world and serious things wrong with us—so much so that we now find our natural condition the Bible says is to find ourselves alienated, separated from God.

This alienation from God takes various forms:

1) Indifference:  I just really don’t care—leave me alone and let me get on with my life.

2) Hostility:  stuff in a persons background—perhaps a parent died when they were young, or they suffered some sort of abuse—-If there is a God why would this happen—I hate God.

3) Confusion:—where would I start—there are so many religions in the world and people believe such different things—what I am supposed to think ? Confusion leads to inaction

4) Fear—people are just afraid that if they get too close chances are I might loose control over my life…. Many people spend there whole lives trying to run away from God.

But the message of the Bible is clear—we were created to live in a relationship of love with God, we were created to have that relationship at the center of our lives and so often that is not the case.

If we are going to be serious about a spiritual journey, we have to face the fact there is a problem in the world we live in. 

But it’s much closer to home than just broken relationships with the world, with others, and with God.

There is something broken about us.

I can say that to you since I think that we are fellow travelers.  Something is broken inside of me.

On a simple level I do not consistently live up to being the person that I want to be—in terms of character development, how I use my resources, how I care for others, in what I invest in my marriage, and the list goes on.

Sometimes I can’t and sometimes I don’t want to. When I do something wrong it isn’t always out of ignorance—  sometimes I WANT to do the wrong thing – that’s human nature—doesn’t mean we are bad or terrible people—that’s the way we are—we all have had the experience of biting our tongue—wish I hadn’t said that.  

So there is something wrong with the world and I think there is something wrong with me.

We will look at this in detail in the next section…but the good news is, this is not who we truly were made to be, and not who we always have to be.

Do you naturally react to God in any of the ways described?  What comes more naturally, indifference, hostility, confusion or fear?  Why?