Faith or religion may not be anything you talk about in your home or with your teenagers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t think about it. Teenagers are in the midst of asking important life questions, such as “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” These are spiritual quests, regardless of whether they’re thought of in a traditional religious sense.
I believe that every person, whether self-identified as religious or not, has these spiritual thoughts. It’s why my counseling philosophy is called ‘whole-person’ – emotional, relational, physical, and spiritual. When you treat the whole person and address each of these aspects, the opportunity for long-term recovery and healing is greatly enhanced.
Your teenager is a whole person – granted, a whole person still in formation – with emotional, relational, physical, and spiritual aspects. The spiritual longings in our lives, I believe, have to do with a sense of belonging and a desire to be a part of something greater than self. Teens, waking up to the fact of their personhood and looking to find a place in the world, desire to make a difference. They want their lives to count for and mean something. Again, all of these are core-level spiritual desires. And teens will have these thoughts and desires even if they never openly discuss them with you.
What do you want your teenager to know about religion, about faith, about God from you? Your teen is watching and evaluating and coming to conclusions based upon your life and how you live it. If you live a life devoid of an acknowledgment of the spiritual, apathetic to or hostile toward faith, this will have a profound effect on your teenager. And those effects are not positive.
Put another way, teenagers who do not attend religious services weekly or for whom religion is not important are significantly less likely to:
* have positive attitudes toward themselves
* enjoy life as much as anyone
* feel like their lives are useful
* feel hopeful about their futures
* feel satisfied with their lives
* feel like they have something of which to be proud
* feel good to be alive
* feel like life is meaningful
* enjoy being in school
Many people return to the religion of their roots or to faith in general after they have children. There is something profoundly unsettling to the veneer of control when you’ve been given a brand-new human being to raise. Because of this, people turn to a faith community for help, for support, for answers and stability. Just because your kids are older now doesn’t mean you can’t find all those things there waiting for you.
It’s not too late to return to God. It’s not too late to introduce your teenagers to a community of faith. It’s not too late to have an open and honest conversation with your teenager about spiritual matters — yours and his or hers.
As parents, we cannot control our teenager’s spirituality. We can, however, influence it. The time will come when the baton of spirituality or lack thereof is passed and older teens will be on their own.
Life is hard; adulthood is not easy. I want my kids to have seen in my house, in my life, a faith in a personal God, a loving Father, a compassionate Christ, and an empowering Spirit. I’m not interested in hanging on to the baton too long and crowding them out of their lane in life, but I am interested in making sure I pass the faith baton at the appropriate time, matching my pace to theirs, and trusting God to guide them through their own leg of this race called Life.
The above is excerpted from Chapter 9 of my new book, The Stranger in Your House.