482. Pursuing the Growing With Posture
2. Pursuing the Growing With Posture
Parenting in Real Time
The Argue family has photographs everywhere.
That’s because my (Steve’s) wife, Jen, loves taking pictures. Over the decades her photos have chronicled our marriage, friendships, vacations, and kids’ growth.
At each photo opportunity, the Argue family dialogue is predictable. Jen urges, “Oh, here’s a great shot. Get together!” The other four Argues roll our eyes, take a deep breath, and assume the photo-shoot pose. While we complain in the moment, inevitably we end up thanking her for each great snapshot when we pore over pictures that spark memories and feelings.
Honestly, it’s sometimes hard for me to look at these old photos. We seem so happy and carefree. But then I remember that the snapshots never tell the whole story. Over the years we have been committed to growing with our daughters, but this commitment is not always easy. Our photos rarely capture how exhausted we were as young parents; how overwhelmed we were trying to balance grad school, jobs, and work; or how anxious we were about moving, parenting, kids’ sicknesses, or extended family challenges.
Not only are we tempted to selectively forget certain past family seasons, we also are tempted to try to preselect ideal future scenarios for our kids. These “future snapshots” are laced with our hopes, dreams, and expectations and are reflected in the language we use about our kids’ futures.
“When Trey gets his driver’s license . . .”
“When Jasmine goes to college . . .”
“When Valentina takes over the family business . . .”
“When Zach comes home this summer . . .”
“When George gets married . . .”
These future aspirations for our children are completely normal, but they can be just as unrealistic as the snapshots remembered from the past. They are selective and likely have more to do with us as parents than with what may actually be best for our teenagers and young adults.
The reality is that our kids are growing into their own persons. Their interests, aspirations, and skill sets may be different from ours. Growing alongside our withing, faithing, and adulting kids requires holding our future snapshots loosely, because our dreams may not end up being theirs.
You want your son to get his driver’s license, but he isn’t interested.
Instead of going to college, your daughter chooses to take a gap year.
You’re mentoring your stepdaughter into the family business, but her interests are in a different field altogether.
You love his girlfriend and envision wedding bells, but they announce they’re going to live together first.
You’re encouraged by his steps toward independence, but then he gets arrested for drug possession and needs rehab.
You couldn’t wait for your new grandchild to take on the family name, but they named her after a flower with a strange spelling.
You assumed that she would secure a full-time job after graduation, but she moved home and is still looking.
You’re excited that he finally got married, but then his wife wants a divorce and you feel caught in the middle.
You were so proud when she told you that she made the dean’s list, but then she admitted she was pregnant.
You sacrificed so much to see the first person in your family go to college, but you worry that her ethnic identity and sense of responsibility to the family are eroding.
You raised him to be Christian, but he just told you that he’s not sure he believes in God anymore.
Growing With parenting means putting aside our selective past memories or attempts to control our kids’ future dreams. Instead, our kids need us most in the present. And that requires a new parenting vision.
From Snapshots to Live Cams: Parenting in Motion
In contrast to snapshots, let’s consider live cameras (or “live cams”) as a better Growing With parenting metaphor. The campus where my (Steve’s) daughter attends college has live cams that let viewers see new buildings being constructed in real time or a moment-by-moment view of the local beach. In fact, whatever your hobby, there’s probably an online live cam for you. For climbing enthusiasts, there are Mount Everest cams, and for budding zoologists, there are panda cams!
While it may be adorable to watch a panda feed her young, we are not advocating “live cam” parenting as a new method to track our adolescent or young adult 24/7. Unlike snapshots, the live cam metaphor reminds us that since our kids’ lives are in motion, what we see in them is constantly changing. Growing With parenting isn’t about preserving the past or predicting the future (as if either of those were even possible) as much as it is about cultivating our relationships with our kids where they are today—in real time.
Fostering a live cam parenting mentality that honors a growth mindset means we perpetually ask questions such as:
What do we see in our kids these days?
What do our kids need from us in our relationship with them right now?
Who do I need to be as a parent this week?
How are our kids’ lives and relationships with God changing these days, and equally important, how are ours changing?
When we as parents start with these questions, we recognize that our parenting must be in motion. Growing With parenting assumes that our teenagers and emerging adults are . . . well . . . growing, and it doesn’t take a PhD to know this is true. The evidence surfaces everywhere as our kids grow out of their clothes, empty out the refrigerator, and act a little less excited to see us at the end of the day. These obvious differences are symptomatic of deeper, more significant changes.
In order to embody our Growing With definition, we must respond to our kids’ maturing process with a parenting posture that honors their current withing, faithing, and adulting progress and that positions our family for future growth. That posture is best accomplished through a new paradigm we introduce in this chapter. Your young people are learners, explorers, or focusers who consequently need teacher, guide, or resourcer parenting.
Learners, Explorers, and Focusers: Tracking with Our Kids through Three Key Stages
Generally, young people ages 13–29 have been divided into two primary developmental categories: adolescents and emerging or young adults. While these are helpful pigeonholes, we believe today’s young people actually warrant more specific and nuanced descriptions that best fall into three categories we call learner, explorer, and focuser. The following figure depicts the relationship between the two traditional categories of adolescents and emerging adults and our preferred categories of learners, explorers, and focusers that better reflect today’s young people.
We have intentionally depicted these stages with fuzzy endpoints and with lines that overlap in order to acknowledge that because of our kids’ various personalities, life situations, and cultural expectations, they progress through them in varied time lines. Some of us may determine that our kids are either ahead of or behind the curve. Others of us might find that our kids are learning in some areas (e.g., in their relationships) while they are exploring or focusing in other areas (e.g., in their vocations or spirituality). This is entirely possible. And normal. Our purpose in describing these three stages is to remind us all that our kids are changing and we need a live cam view of them that grows as they grow.
Learners: Changing at Light Speed
When our kids are in late middle school through high school (typically ages 13–18), they are in the learner stage—a season of rapid physical, emotional, relational, intellectual, and spiritual growth and change. Parents who long to grow with their kids recognize that most 13- to 18-year-olds are:
Learning how to use their increased intellectual capabilities. Teenagers are learning to think abstractly and are able to form more robust arguments (as all six kids in our two families have demonstrated all too well). Abstract thinking gives them new capacities to envision an ideal situation or perfect world, thereby inspiring their imaginations, problem-solving abilities, and aspirational goals. Furthermore, they also more readily notice the imperfections in others, in our world, and even in themselves, which can be disorienting.
Learning how to live in their physically changing bodies. They’ve entered puberty and notice change almost every time they look in a mirror. They have new energy and appetites, and how they care for themselves (through exercise and nutrition) starts having long-term effects.
Learning how to manage their heightened emotional awareness. Despite what we may sometimes feel, our high school students are not “crazy” or just “overemotional.” Rather, their prefrontal cortex is developing and now integrating all they experience into an emotional milieu that is often intense and unpredictable.
Learning how to navigate a broadening circle of relationships embedded with expectations. Their circle of peers increases in size and diversity. In-person and online relationships increase opportunities for connection and possibilities for risk.
Learning how to start living out their faith as their own. They start recognizing that their relationship with God is bigger than Sunday and that not everyone sees God the way they do. They now grasp that belief isn’t simple and that doubts are real.
Explorers: Sorting through Lots of Options
When our kids are roughly ages 18–23, they enter the explorer stage. As our kids leave adolescence and launch into emerging adulthood, they often venture for the first time away from home or home-oriented routines to pursue their goals, relationships, and beliefs. Legally they are expected to be more reasonable, and vocationally they are trying on different roles through service, training, education, and work. Explorers feel excited about the future yet still feel unsure about themselves. Parents who grow with their kids recognize that most young people in this stage are:
Exploring career paths through schooling, internships, travel, military service, new jobs, or gap year projects. Most young people entering this stage say that they want to get more education and training. As we will further describe in chapter 8, this is the most educated generation, the generation with the most student loan debt, and the generation with a rising number of incomplete degrees.
Exploring their own interests, gifts, and talents. They are often “trying on” many options that carry greater weight than the identity exploration of their younger learning selves. This often results in switching jobs and majors as they seek congruency between what they do and who they believe they are.
Exploring what they desire in deeper, more romantic relationships. While this does not mean that their current relationships will lead to marriage (since many delay marriage until later), they are more emotionally invested and often more physically involved than in high school, which means more heartbreak when relationships do not work out.
Exploring new ways to relate to their parents. Generally, this age group reports that their relationships with their parents are better than during their teenage years. They have richer conversations, are more open about their similarities and differences with their parents, and are more appreciative of their parents.
Exploring what they believe and how those beliefs inform their view of work, relationships, faith, and life. Our kids at this age are introduced to a multiplicity of worldviews different from what they have known, which typically prompts them to reconsider their own assumptions. For some this is a liberating experience. For others it’s disorienting. As we will explore further in chapters 5 and 6, some leave church, perhaps returning later or perhaps pioneering new spiritual paths.
Focusers: Landing on the Path(s) That Best Fits
When our kids approach the latter half of emerging adulthood (ages 23–29), they inhabit the focuser stage. They begin to gain a clearer sense of who they are and have likely made educational, vocational, and relational choices that set them on particular trajectories. These choices have opened up new opportunities and closed others. Parents eager to grow with their kids recognize that most in this stage are:
Focusing on their careers. They find themselves having to strive harder to find friendship, community, and love while working longer hours as they try to establish themselves vocationally and financially. On average, they spend approximately 45 hours a week at work.
Focusing on their relationships. Many no longer find themselves in the semi-structured environments of school, military, or gap-year organizations. The automatic peer connections they accessed in their early twenties diminish as they move to new cities and focus on their careers. They discover they must be more intentional with their friendships and sometimes endure seasons of loneliness. Their relationships are becoming more mature and emotionally closer as they learn to trust and support their significant friends and perhaps live with a romantic partner or get married.
Focusing on their beliefs. While parents and churches hope that focusers will eventually “return to church,” when and why some reengage with church is varied and complex. Thus, those who rely only on church attendance numbers to gauge young people’s faithfulness will misunderstand focusers’ faith journeys. Many emerging adults search for a spiritual identity but find it challenging to connect with churches that do not address their personal challenges and social concerns, or that fail to see them beyond their singleness.
Focusing on a reset. Too many young people have bought the mantra that “30 is the new 20,” and they are reaping the fruit of an unfocused decade. As a result, many are trying to get beyond cobbled part-time jobs to an established career. Some are recovering from drug and alcohol abuse. Others are smarting from the loss of failed relationships and are longing for a relationship that will last.
Growing Kids Need Growing With Parents
The following chart spotlights the unique journey of today’s learners, explorers, and focusers.
Learners
Explorers
Focusers
In the midst of rapid physical, emotional, relational, intellectual, and spiritual growth and change, learners are increasingly aware of their abilities, flaws, and possibilities.
Often venturing for the first time away from home or home-oriented routines to pursue their goals, relationships, and beliefs, explorers feel excited about the future yet unsure about themselves.
Having developed a clearer sense of who they are and having likely made educational, vocational, and relational choices that set them on particular trajectories, most focusers feel on track with life. Yet others still feel behind.
Based on the chart above and your own experience, it is pretty easy to surmise that the strategies you used to parent your kid last year (or even last week) do not always work today! As parents, we never have the luxury of saying we have cracked the parenting code. Success today with our kids does not guarantee success tomorrow. Kara and I confess that we often feel like we’re just a few steps away from the next parenting challenge or surprise. While it takes effort and stamina to keep up with our growing kids, we believe we can anticipate their growth by holding on to this important piece of wisdom: young people need a different kind of parent in each of these three stages. Withing looks different with a 14-year-old than it does with a 24-year-old, as do faithing and adulting.
Specifically, we propose that as kids enter each new developmental period, parents grow with their kids by starting out as teachers, then moving to guides, and finally becoming resourcers. The following figure extends our diagram of the three primary stages of young people by including these three parenting roles.
Parents as Teachers
Growing With parenting of learner children (roughly ages 13–18) requires us to play the role of teacher. We recognize that the term teacher conjures up many different images. What we don’t mean by teaching is merely telling our kids what to do, maintaining order, or expecting our developing teenagers to accept what we say at face value. Instead, our role as teachers requires us to do what educators describe as “learner-centered teaching.” Learner-centered teaching asks something different of the teacher. It calls us teacher parents to integrate new ideas, skills, and competencies into the frameworks and paradigms our teenagers already possess.
There is a vigilance inherent in learner-centered teaching since we are required to step closer to our teenagers’ lives to see them, know them, and engage with them. In many ways, the characteristics of a learner-centered approach can be applied to Growing With teacher parents.
Teaching invites and endures practicing. We assume that parenting our kids will be a messy process in which they will learn by trying, not just by listening. This means that teaching allows for the lawn not to be cut “just right,” the dishes not to be put away perfectly, the makeup to be a little too much, and the hairstyle not to be our favorite. In this mess, teacher parents find opportunities for conversation and growth—both for their kids and themselves.
Teaching trains specific skills. We don’t assume that our teenage kids know how to plan ahead, ask someone to the dance, introduce themselves to an adult, or track down missed homework assignments after they’ve been sick. In these moments, we have a chance to teach them to make a game plan and walk them through the skills they need to navigate the scenarios they will encounter.
Teaching encourages reflection. We recognize that a crucial part of our kids’ learning is encouraging them to reflect on their experiences. So we cultivate space for our kids to process an event beyond what score they got on the test, whether or not they made the team, or if they “liked” youth group tonight. Our questions about their feelings, their methods, or their opinions teach them to reflect on their lives and grow in their critical thinking.
Teaching introduces choice and agency. Our learner kids are in a stage when we can encourage and motivate them by giving them new and expanded options. This may mean we hold more loosely to our opinions and our need for efficiency in order to encourage their agency and growing independence.
Teaching fosters collaboration. We value learning together and sharing what we’re learning with each other. Instead of asking our kids, “Did you get your homework done?” we consider asking, “What is something interesting you’ve been learning lately?” In the spirit of withing, we invite them to share what they’re discovering. We can also seek out others to help them grow in areas they are interested in or where they need help.
To envision a snapshot of a Growing With teacher, imagine how you would interact with your learner about how they might plan their weekend. A parenting reflex for pre-learner kids might be to dictate their weekend schedule or, in response to your kids’ requests, offer yes or no responses based on the reasoning “because I said so.” What if you instead played the teacher role and, prior to the weekend, began to dialogue with your kids about their school responsibilities, family obligations, home chores, and social plans? This approach likely would require more time and intentionality (not to mention occasional frustrations and adjustments!) but would allow opportunities for your learning teenager to manage time, think of others, and pursue their interests. To be a better teacher, in what areas might you need to loosen your grip and desire for control? What will you, as a teacher parent, learn about your child . . . and yourself?
TOP QUESTIONS FOR TEACHER PARENTS
Beyond navigating weekend expectations, many parents misread a growing distance with their teenage kids and stop trying to connect with them. But our learner kids need us to take new steps toward them and grow with them by asking ourselves these questions:
Parents as Guides
Growing With parenting shifts a second time when our kids inhabit the explorer stage (roughly ages 18–23) and need us to embody the role of guide. As someone who loves hiking, I (Steve) often envision a guide as someone who leads other hikers through less-traveled trails so they can experience new sights and new challenges. I have also appreciated being guided through the biggest metropolitan centers by enthusiastic citizens who love their neighborhoods and want me to experience the subway, meet artists on the west side, or enjoy an incredible meal in an obscure restaurant.
Consider what guides on a hiking trip or city tour do and don’t do. A guide is the experienced traveler who knows the terrain, uses their trained eye to gauge the weather, highlights the beautiful spots to stop, and anticipates what lies ahead that is either safe or dangerous. A guide doesn’t carry your pack or do the exploring for you! They walk with you, attending to the novice traveler’s untested instincts, wrong turns, missed opportunities, and awe-inspiring moments.
As parents who are guiding our explorers on easier or familiar terrain, we will encourage them to run ahead. On more dangerous or technical segments, we’ll draw a little closer. With explorer kids, we shift our parenting focus away from setting goals for our kids and toward guiding them on the journey of setting their own goals. As guide parents we recognize certain elements of guiding.
Guiding requires more empathy and perspective taking. Our seasoned perspectives may be valuable to our explorers, but what is usually more important is that we do our best to understand their goals, their views, and their self-determined next steps. Parents as guides must expertly and artfully gauge how much help is most beneficial for their kids. This requires us to empathize with our kids in order to understand their hopes, fears, and aspirations. It means valuing the process of growing up as much as the result of reaching adulthood.
Guiding discerns both novice and intermediate terrain. As guides, we grow with our explorer kids by evaluating how closely they need us to journey with them. Good guide parents know when to encourage our kids by stepping away, encouraging them to take the lead, as well as when to step closer to support them through more taxing terrain. In this stage, we parent by expecting more of our kids while recognizing that they may still need initial assistance in learning how to live on their own, cook their own food, manage their time, pay their bills, plan their future goals, and advocate for themselves.
Guiding values different forms of appreciation. This stage signals a change in how our explorer kids view their relationship with us. While their increased physical distance and growing autonomy highlight the gap between us, explorer kids may discover a newfound appreciation for their parents’ unique journeys. This new stage offers promise for a new adventure together, even if the previous teacher-learner relationship we had with our children was rocky.
To envision a snapshot of a Growing With guide, imagine your explorer kid wants to switch jobs or their undergraduate major. The temptation might be to quickly solve their problem, offer them an ultimatum, or manipulate them into doing what you think is best. But this is your chance to empathize with them, seek to understand the crossroads they feel, and join them in the process, not just the solution. What might it look like for you to let your child take the lead? How can you phrase your questions with an aim of encouraging them to assess and think ahead for themselves? What will you, as a guide parent, try to learn in this process yourself?
TOP QUESTIONS FOR GUIDE PARENTS
As guides, we grow with our explorer emerging adults by asking ourselves questions such as:
Parents as Resourcers
As maturing emerging adults approach the focuser stage (roughly ages 23–29), they are now typically leaning in to their chosen career and relational trajectories. Our parenting journey shifts yet again. We do not lead them as teachers or walk beside them as guides, but instead we intersect with them as resourcers during crucial points in their lives.
They may now come to us for advice pertaining to new challenges and opportunities. They seek us out because we have lived through the life events they now anticipate, including career advancement, marriage, parenthood, renting or buying a home, and financial investments. As resourcer parents, we grow with our kids by recognizing particular aspects of resourcing.
Resourcing exercises patience. Being patient means resourcing our focusers when they ask for our input while resisting the temptations of being either too controlling or too aloof. We can be interested in their faith, relationships, jobs, families, or goals, but we must not demand full disclosure. Chances are that our forcuser kids will seek us out for some topics but not others. They may want to talk with us about careers but not faith. They may want to talk investments but not relationships.
In some cases, our focuser kids may not want to access our wisdom at all. This can be disheartening, but it is also an opportunity to grow in our patience, acknowledging that we cannot force our resourcing on them. Whether they reach out or not, we can always pray for them and consistently remain interested in them.
Resourcing offers perspective. As we both work with graduate students, we have found that many of them need help in asking the questions they don’t know they’re supposed to ask. The perspective of another person (including a parent) offers more questions, another angle, or a third-way option. When our forcuser kids seek us out, they are often looking not for the answer but for a bigger view of the situation. Some of us feel like we don’t have much to offer, so we downplay the power and relevance of our advice.
But let’s remember that we have lived longer, have succeeded and failed more, and have learned more life lessons. There’s a difference between a peer saying to a focuser, “It’s going to be all right,” and an older person telling them, “It’s going to be all right.” The latter possesses the quality of a lived life that forcuser kids seek.
Resourcing supports—no matter what. During my pastoral work, I (Steve) have seen many families divided because some parents didn’t approve of their forcuser kids’ choices. While these situations are complex, resourcer parents remember their place in their focuser child’s decisions. Once our kids choose, our role as a resourcer requires us to find ways to love and encourage them—whether or not we agree with their decisions. When we are hurt, offended, and distraught over their choices, it may be prudent for us to consider whether we overstepped our role and tried to take possession of a choice that was never ours.
To envision a snapshot of a Growing With resourcer, imagine your focuser kid is faced with two options. She’s wrestling with whether she should move to another city to take a job promotion or stay in town with her boyfriend who she has been dating for a year. Perhaps you have even faced a similar choice in the past and you have a strong opinion about what she should do. She hasn’t come to you for advice yet. How does that feel? If she does talk with you about her decision, how will you frame your questions and interactions with the aim of honoring her priorities rather than yours? What is your best posture as a resourcer parent who is encouraging but not enmeshed, and available but not anxious?
TOP QUESTIONS FOR RESOURCER PARENTS
Resourcer parents are the trusted conversation partners who help forcuser kids see the bigger picture of the situations they face. As resourcers, we grow with our focuser emerging adults by asking ourselves questions such as:
In the following chart we build on the previous one by adding our corresponding role as teachers, guides, and resourcers.
Explorers
Focusers
In the midst of rapid physical, emotional, relational, intellectual, and spiritual growth and change, learners are increasingly aware of their abilities, flaws, and possibilities.
Often venturing for the first time away from home or home-oriented routines to pursue their goals, relationships, and beliefs, explorers feel excited about the future yet unsure about themselves.
Having developed a clearer sense of who they are and having likely made educational, vocational, and relational choices that set them on particular trajectories, most focusers feel on track with life. Yet others still feel behind.
Parents as Teachers
Parents as Guides
Parents as Resourcers
Lead their kids by teaching them how to integrate new ideas, skills, and competencies into the frameworks and paradigms their teenagers already possess. This role requires parents be patient, attentive, available, interested, and encouraging.
Accompany their kids as their kids articulate their own journey and goals. This role requires wisdom to know when to encourage independence and when to offer proactive support during trickier life scenarios. This role recognizes the changing yet potentially positive relationship that can develop with their kids.
Intersect with their kids’ lives during crucial points by exercising patience, offering perspective, and preserving their relationship with their kids, even if their kids’ beliefs, values, or goals diverge from their own.
When we add our kids’ maturing as learners, explorers, and focusers, as well as our subsequent role as teacher, guide, or resourcer, the Growing With path we introduced in chapter 1 becomes more complete.
You can see immediately the overlap between the life stages (indicated by the darker sections of the intersecting circles). That’s because the progress from learner to explorer and explorer to focuser is often gradual. In some areas of their lives, your 18-year-old will still act like a learner; in others they will already have transitioned to being an explorer.
While not to be taken literally, the dots on the withing, faithing, and adulting paths remind us to consider our kids’ status and our relationships with them. Learners need teacher parents to take the lead and help them anticipate life’s demands. Explorers need guide parents who walk alongside them, assisting them as they need support. Focusers need resourcer parents who watch their kids take the lead and are available as wise counsel when their kids ask for it.
Three Mantras Growing With Parents Tell Themselves
As Growing With parents journey alongside their teenagers and emerging adults, they remind themselves of three key mantras.
Mantra #1: Today I Will Attempt to Be at the Right Place at the Right Time
Parents who understand that their maturing kids are working through learning, exploring, and focusing stages will make two commitments. First, they will discern which stage their kid inhabits. Second, they will then pinpoint the most appropriate parenting role, whether that’s as a teacher, guide, or resourcer.
When parents forget their most appropriate role for the current season and situation, confusion and tension ensue. Could it be that “helicopter parents” who are overly involved in their children’s exploring and focusing stages are actually parents who haven’t learned to be anything but teacher parents? These overly attentive parents still assume that their role is to direct and protect their children rather than play a guiding or resourcing role.
Similarly, might it be that “distant parents” are merely acting as resourcers, making them seem hands-off and disconnected from their learner and explorer kids?
Sadly, the most heartfelt parenting calibrated for the wrong developmental stage keeps parents from parenting—and growing with—their kids. When we start to sense a disconnect in our relationship with our kids, this may be our signal that we are not being a bad parent but must become a different kind of parent to match our kid’s new stage.
Mantra #2: Today I Will Allow Grace to Give Me Courage to Take a Next Faithful Step
Sometimes it is hard to let go of the past, not because it is better but because it is familiar. Our past successes and failures have woven a narrative about our parenting that keeps us from seeing new ways we can grow and change ourselves. We get stuck, afraid, or cautious about taking parenting risks.
As followers of Jesus, we celebrate God’s grace as a gift of God’s faithfulness that saves us from our sinful motives or actions and strengthens us daily. This Christian reality of grace reminds us that every day is a new beginning filled with potential to learn and grow—no matter our past mistakes or successes. God gives us courage to embrace new ways of thinking, behaving, and believing as parents. It is a journey infused with this message of grace: Today you only need to take one faithful step toward who you want to become as a Growing With parent.
Perhaps Jesus said it best when he invited his disciples to “follow me.” His invitation had long-term implications, but it also was a present, simple, grace-filled invitation to take a next faithful step. As Christians and parents, we believe that each day Jesus extends this same invitation to us.
Mantra #3: Today I Have What It Takes to Be the Best Parent for My Kid
No matter how you may feel right now, remember that you are journeying with a generation of mothers, fathers, foster parents, and grandparents raising kids and grandkids who are experiencing new parenting opportunities and challenges. Lately I (Steve) have started parenting seminars with this phrase: “From one parent to another, remember that you are the right parent for your child and that no one loves your child the way you do.” Often the crowd responds with a holy silence. And even with tears. There is a solidarity among parents and an unspoken understanding that we love our kids, we want what’s best for them, and we want to be there for them. So let’s just reaffirm that together now:
No one loves your child the way you do.
You are the right parent for your child.
You have what it takes to be the best parent for your kid.
To help you best love and parent your child, we’ve structured the rest of this book in order to increase withing in your family, faithing in your child’s relationship with God, and adulting in their engagement with the world. In the following chart, we build on information presented earlier in the chapter and highlight our main concepts in order to offer a map for the remainder of the book.
Teacher
Guide
Resourcer
Thriving in family
Thriving in faith
Thriving in future
Chapters 3–8 are divided into three major sections, each of which propels your family forward in the quest toward withing, faithing, and adulting. Since each of our families is different, feel free to jump around through these chapters based on your most pressing questions. You are more than welcome to plunge into faithing or adulting chapters before you dive into withing if those are your family’s most urgent needs.
For those of you who gravitate toward data on parenting young people, focus on the insights section in each chapter that draws on our own experience as well as world-class research conducted on families and young people like yours.
Those of you searching for new and fresh parenting approaches for your growing kids might want to focus on each chapter’s ideas section that puts the research into practice.
If you’re especially eager to take a first or next step in your Growing With parenting, you’ll be grateful that we conclude each chapter with practical questions to pinpoint the best few ideas for your family in this particular season.
Throughout all three sections, we provide sidebars that we hope are catalysts for your Growing With parenting. These “Growing With in Real Time” case studies (which may mirror your own parenting dilemmas), quotes from parent interviews, and additional insights from research are all geared to help you better respond to your maturing learner, explorer, or focuser.
Our hope is that these sidebars, insights, ideas, and practical questions help us all move away from distorted snapshots of the past and unrealistic images of the future. Instead, let’s pay attention to the live cam of our family by moving forward and growing with our kids.