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Podcast: Answering Tough Questions about Raising Teenagers (Jon Nielson)

June 24, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Advice for Parenting Teens

In this episode, Jon Nielson discusses some of the most common questions that parents of teens often ask him as a pastor—questions like, When should I let my teen get a phone? How do I help my daughter who’s struggling with depression and anxiety? How do I encourage my son to embrace a biblical vision of gender and sexuality?

God's Great Story

God's Great Story

Jon Nielson

God’s Great Story is a one-year devotional aimed to help teens establish daily Scripture-reading habits as they explore God’s grand story of redemption, from Genesis to Revelation.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:05 - What Is It Like Being a Teen Today?

Matt Tully
Jon, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Jon Nielson
Thanks. Great to be here.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about a few common questions and issues and concerns that I think parents of teens can sometimes face as they’re raising their kids in our world today. Before we jump into some of those issues, I wonder if you could just give us a sense for your experience working with teens. You’re a parent. I think your kids are all just getting into the teen years, but you do have a lot of experience working with young people.

Jon Nielson
Since you mentioned it, I’ll start with my own kids. I’ve got a seventh grader, a sixth grader, and then we have a fourth grader and a kindergartner. So as parents, we’re just getting into the years of raising and discipling and parenting teens. But I was a high school pastor for a few years. I was a youth intern for several years at Holy Trinity Church in the city right out of college. I coached high school basketball for five years during that time, and then was in college ministry. I was a college pastor at a local church here in Wheaton, and then I did campus ministry at Princeton University for a couple of years.

Matt Tully
So you’ve got a lot of experience working with young people and kind of seeing the world that they inhabit that sometimes as we get older we kind of age out of some of these contexts. And that was one of the first questions I had was, and I think people of every generation tend to say this as they look at the younger generations, they feel the dissonance at times as they get older and it feels like those other generations almost always get younger. But beyond the typical generational divides that can be there, do you think there are material differences about what it’s like to be a teen today in our culture than what it was like when you were a teen or when I was a teen?

Jon Nielson
Yes. First of all, I just turned forty, so that was kind of a milestone birthday that I just had a couple weeks ago. And even a few years back, I remember coming to a point when I was in college ministry and I realized, Oh my goodness! The college students that I’m teaching and discipling are closer in age to my children than they are to me. And it was that moment where I realized I can’t think of myself as a young recent college grad anymore.

Matt Tully
You’re solidly middle aged.

Jon Nielson
Yeah, totally. And they look at me as an old married guy with kids. I’m not young and cool like they are. I think every generation, to answer your question, has a similar reaction to the younger generation. There are actually studies, and you can look back hundreds and hundreds of years, and pretty much every generation looks at the younger generation and says, Oh, they’re so different. They’re going so off.

Matt Tully
Usually there are problems.

Jon Nielson
Yeah. Everything’s going to fall apart with this young generation. With that being said, I look at teens today and I do think—and this has been written about thousands of times—growing up with an iPhone, growing up with Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, that is a major difference, that world.

Matt Tully
The world that this new technology has opened up.

Jon Nielson
Yes. I’m forty, and in high school I did not have a cell phone. We called our friends on their home phone, talked to their parents first.

Matt Tully
To get through to the kid.

Jon Nielson
Yeah. We made plans to show up at a place, and we just showed up and our friends were there. I remember when Facebook first came out in college and it didn’t make sense to us because, Hey, we’re right here on the same campus. Why do we need to connect through our computer?

Matt Tully
Yeah, what’s the point of this?

Jon Nielson
Yeah. And that has massively changed in this younger generation.

Matt Tully
I think of other changes. There’s obviously the constant internet access and all that that opens up beyond even just the social media side of things. There’s just so much at our fingertips for good things but also dangerous, harmful things. There’s even changing attitudes towards gender and sexuality. I think when I grew up in high school, there was certainly the LGBT alliance. The stuff wasn’t not present at all, but it feels like societally it’s very different today.

Jon Nielson
I think it is too. It’s been shoved into the forefront of the consciousness of young people in a way that it wasn’t even twenty years ago or twenty-five years ago when I was in high school. We were aware of homosexuality and the concept of someone who would want to transition and try to become a woman or appear as a woman, but it was not on the forefront and publicly put in our faces anywhere near the way it is today.

Matt Tully
And it feels like back then, too, the main drumbeat was that of tolerance—you don’t need to agree and you don’t need to accept it, but you need to at least tolerate it and respect people enough not to be unkind towards them in these ways. But that’s not quite what’s being advocated for today.

Jon Nielson
I think that’s true. It’s gone from a kind of “live and let live” mentality of twenty years ago to a “you must celebrate and affirm.” That is a real challenge that Christian young people face today that we did not face twenty or twenty-five years ago.

Matt Tully
One other category that I feel like I’ve noticed among young people that feels different than when I was a teenager in high school is just the awareness around issues of mental health and struggles in mental health, which maybe can kind of pair with some of the technological advances that we’ve seen. But how do you think about that and that being a new or a renewed dynamic in teenagers lives?

Jon Nielson
That’s a hard question. I would lump some of those struggles together, actually, with what’s happened with the transgender movement, with sexuality issues. There is something to the power of suggestion. Take the reality of depression, which is a real thing. There are Christians who do struggle with depression. But for young people, there are probably some today—I would say probably many today—who are attaching labels, maybe clinical labels, if you want to put it that way, to what would have been twenty-five years ago thought of as some of the normal struggles of teenagers.

Matt Tully
The ups and downs of teenage life.

Jon Nielson
Correct. And sometimes attaching labels to it brings does bring them attention and can bring a sense of, Oh, people are noticing me in this. And so I always want to try to drive young people toward biblical definitions and biblical answers.

Matt Tully
Which doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t categories for these clinical struggles that people can have sometimes.

Jon Nielson
Right.

07:52 - Wrestling with the Issue of Identity

Matt Tully
Obviously, one of these major foundational topics or issues that I think we see in our culture today that I think comes out and expresses itself in many different ways is this issue of identity that many young people struggle with and they wrestle with. And I think if you listen carefully to many of the popular statements that we hear and the slogans that are awash in our culture, so many of them, if you dig in, they do go back to that foundational issue of identity. So as you think about your role as a Christian parent but also in your experience as a pastor and someone who was leading teens in spiritual things, how do you think about the influence that you want to have as a parent on how kids think about their identity?

Jon Nielson
First, I think about my own children. I have four daughters. The older two are both in middle school, and we sense as parents the pressures they feel. We’re entering into those years of you got to wear the right clothes, you got to have the right shoes. We had this moment where all of a sudden last year it was like, oh my goodness! We’re in the middle of social turmoil at school in ways that if two years ago when they’re in fourth or fifth grade, they’re just all friends and they’re all playing on the playground. And all of a sudden, you’re dealing with middle school social issues. But I think what I want my children to hear from me is that what I care about most, what I value most, what God values most is who they are in Christ. Our kids play a lot of sports, and we are surrounded by parents who it is obvious they are living through their kids as they perform on the sports field.

Matt Tully
They’re constructing their own identities through their kids.

Jon Nielson
Totally. And living and dying with every traveling soccer game. And so we have really tried to emphasize to our kids, We do not love you more or less based on your performance on the athletic field.

Matt Tully
Speak to that. You’re a very athletic guy. You’ve been involved with sports. You played college basketball. Is that right?

Jon Nielson
Yes. Here at Wheaton College.

Matt Tully
Here at Wheaton College. Has that been an example of something that you’ve had to kind of watch even in yourself?

Jon Nielson
Totally. And for me it was coming to the end of my high school basketball days and realizing I’m not a Division 1 athlete. My dream of playing point guard for the Chicago Bulls is not going to come to fruition.

Matt Tully
Few of us will achieve those heights.

Jon Nielson
Right. And then realizing, Okay, I’m going to go play Division 3 basketball at Wheaton College, and I’m going to throw myself into it and love it, but this is not my life’s calling. My life’s calling is to follow Jesus and to make him known. As I was going through college realizing, Okay, I think I’m called to be a teacher, coach, leader*, and that coalesced into pastoral ministry, and realizing my identity is not bound up with athletics. I think in high school I struggled with that. In college I realized this is not going to go on forever. I love it. I loved basketball, still do. I love Wheaton College sports. But as the NCAA adage goes, 98 percent of these students will go professional or will go pro in something other than sports. And even more so for followers of Jesus. There’s life beyond this.

Matt Tully
I’m struck that as we try to help our kids not root their identities in these other things, whether it’s sports or academics, so often maybe the biggest hurdle to that is us as parents, because we can still be tempted to root our identities in things other than who we are in Christ. And our kids pick up on that.

Jon Nielson
Yes, they absolutely do. Just the other Sunday I quoted the longtime football coach at Wheaton College, Mike Swider. He tells parents there’s a 0.03 percent chance that your child will play a professional sport, statistically. There’s a 100 percent chance that your child will stand before Jesus. And so, okay, where are our priorities for our children? Yes, we love sports, but there’s a 100 percent chance that they’re going to stand before God, before the judgment seat of Christ. And so how are we pouring our energies into preparing them for that day and reminding them that that day is coming?

Matt Tully
One insight that many Christian thinkers have been drawing out in recent years—one notable example is Carl Truman and his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—just talk about how more and more in our culture today the idea of identity is an idea that we are constructing for ourselves. Gone are the days where we thought of our identities as something given to us. Actually, the way that the world pushes this concept today is you need to kind of construct who you are. You are responsible. No one can tell you who you are. Really, it’s all self-driven. The insight is that that might be contributing even to some of the anxiety and the depression that we see rampant among young people because that’s a fundamentally un-Christian way of viewing who we are. So how do you think about that with your kids—instilling in them a sense of who you are is something given to you by God? And yet we want them to go on to follow their interests and passions and dreams to some extent as well.

Jon Nielson
I thought of Truman’s book earlier when you mentioned identity and the way that so often for young people today their sexuality is so much thrust to the center of their identity and how they think about themselves. I think we are seeing today in young people and in teenagers the result of the second generation of kids who have been told, You can be whatever you want to be. You can do whatever you want to do. You are special. And of course, all of our kids are special to us.

Matt Tully
All of us as parents are thinking, I told my kids they were special last night.

Jon Nielson
That’s right.But that idea that there’s nothing that you can’t do. And actually, as parents and as Christian parents, sometimes we’re called to say, No, you need to figure out who God has made you to be, and there are some things that you can’t do. Again, I have daughters, and we have had conversations. They see me—I’m a pastor—and they see me preaching. We’re part of a Reformed Presbyterian denomination, the PCA, and we’re also complementarian. Our conviction is that the Bible teaches clearly that the role of pastor and elder in the church is reserved for men. So I’ve had to have conversations with my daughters who’ve been playing around at home and pretending to preach after they’ve seen me do that at church and they’ve said, Dad, could I be a pastor someday? We’ve talked about, No, God’s made you as a woman, a young woman, a girl. That’s beautiful the way God has made you, but you’re not called to be a pastor. There’s a different, unique calling for you as a child of God, a female, a woman. And so that’s just one example of actually our role as parents, as we are under the authority of God’s word, we guide our children in the way they’re called to go rather than saying, You can do anything you want to do. You can be anything you want to be.

15:16 - Embracing God’s Good Design for Sex and Sexuality

Matt Tully
We’ve mentioned the issue of sex and sexuality and gender a little bit already and how it’s connected to that issue of identity as well. It just seems like we all are aware that our culture is just awash in a lot of unbiblical ideas related to these topics. Sometimes as parents we know that and we want to help our children. We want to teach our kids. We want to push back, perhaps, against some of the messages that we know that they’re hearing from the media and the internet and school, perhaps, and friends, but we sometimes don’t know how to do that because issues of sex and sexuality can be so sensitive, so awkward for us. Maybe we as parents know that we’ve struggled in different ways and we just don’t know how to engage our kids in these things. Any advice you would offer parents when it comes to navigating these topics with their kids and actually being proactive about some of these things?

Jon Nielson
There have been some really good voices, and Crossway has published some of these, who have emphasized beginning with the goodness of God’s design—God’s created order, God’s intent for man and woman, male and female for marriage, for sex in its proper God given context.

Matt Tully
I noticed that in the book. You’ve written this devotional book for teens where you go through 365 days of readings in the Bible and then devotional reflections on those. But I noticed that in a number of devotionals where you talk about sex in a kind of an intense way, you really seem to go out of your way to emphasize the goodness of sex and sexuality. So unpack that. It seemed very obvious to me that you were going for that.

Jon Nielson
It can be a straw man, but nevertheless, it is a perception in the minds of some young people today that conservative Christians, with regard to sex, gender, marriage, whatever, are always harping on what you can’t do and overemphasize the nos, and there’s kind of this finger wagging, no fun—

Matt Tully
Grumpiness.

Jon Nielson
Someone has characterized conservative Christians as people who have this sneaking suspicion that someone somewhere might be having a good time. And so we want to go the opposite way and say there’s a reason for the nos, and it’s because of the yeses. It’s because of the goodness of who God has made us to be as male and female, of how God has designed his created order. And it’s not because he’s an ogre. It’s not because he’s cruel. It’s not because he doesn’t want us to be happy or have fun. It’s that he wants us to rejoice and to joyfully live in his way and according to his word. A fish is not going to survive out of water. We’re not going to survive and we’re not going to thrive outside of his plan.

Matt Tully
I know some of the critiques, though, of maybe previous generations’ ideas of purity culture—however you define that term—some of the critiques have been that at times Christian adults and parents would kind of set forth this idealized vision of sexuality that if you wait, if you exercise self-control when you’re supposed to, then it’s just going to be this perfect bliss of marital love and enjoyment, and that that actually has set up a lot of people for disappointment. That’s an unrealistic view of the Christian life.

Jon Nielson
I’m glad you brought that up. I cover that in every premarital counseling relationship that I have with a young couple engaged to be married. And I think you’re absolutely right. What that has been is an idolatry of sex, really. And it’s kind of a bait and switch and it’s saying, If you wait and if you’re pure, then you’re going to have this amazing experience. When it comes to talking about intimacy in marriage in premarital counseling sessions, I try to talk about how we need to not make too much of sex or too little of sex in marriage. It’s not the be all end all of marriage. There are a lot of other ways that we love our spouses in marriage. But it’s also not insignificant. It’s an important part of marriage. So you want to try to knock down the idol while maintaining the importance and the God given nature of it.

Matt Tully
And not it just being this negative thing that’s always no.

Jon Nielson
That’s right.

19:38 - Teenagers and Technology

Matt Tully
Another thing we’ve already hit on is this issue of technology. I think of parents right now, they’ve got teenagers, and probably one of the dominant facets of their life is that smartphone that’s maybe constantly in their teen’s hand. It’s hard to get it out of their hand even if they would want them to. Do you have any practical advice for thinking about this issue and setting maybe even some guidelines for the home for helping kids navigate this wisely?

Jon Nielson
It is a hard one, and you’re right. You can walk out to any public space where there are teens and most likely 90 percent of them will have their head buried in a phone.

Matt Tully
To be fair, for those of us who are older than teens, it’s probably true for us as well.

Jon Nielson
You’re absolutely right. I’ll speak as a parent first. We are trying to hold off on a phone with internet connection and apps and all that kind of thing as long as we can. We’ve used the little Gabb phones that have capacity for calling and texting and that’s it. For one of our kids, there’s only a few people that she’s able to call.

Matt Tully
You can even limit the contact list.

Jon Nielson
So we’ve tried to say, Okay, you’re telling us you need a phone. Here you go. You can call us and text us when soccer practice is over. You don’t need access to anything more than that. I mentioned we have a seventh grader and a sixth grader. We’re already in the minority in their classes in terms of not having an iPhone.

Matt Tully
Speak to that. I imagine sometimes parents can sometimes feel pressure not just from their kids but from other parents or school administrators or faculty or other kids through their own children testifying to how isolated they feel, how out of step they feel. How have you guys navigated that?

Jon Nielson
We’ve just tried to talk through it at every point and just explain to them why we’re doing this. I have tried to not be a parent who pulls out the secret weapon “because I said so” too often. Sometimes you have to. Sometimes you have to say, No, we’re not going to do it.

Matt Tully
As kids get older and into the teen years, you kind of use that sparingly.

Jon Nielson
That’s right. And even if they don’t like it, we have found a positive response when we sit down and explain, We’re doing this because we love you. I’ve found myself saying more often as they were getting to be twelve- and thirteen-years-old, It’s not because I don’t trust you. It is because of the world we live in. And you are growing still into your own sense of responsibility and being able to discern things. We’ve talked about the internet being a dangerous place where a lot of bad people like to do a lot of inappropriate things and say things and share things that we wouldn’t want you hearing and seeing.

Matt Tully
Speak to the parent right now who’s listening to this and they would have to acknowledge, I haven’t done a good job with this. I’ve already given my kids a smartphone. They have access already, and I can see that the damage that that’s done. I can see the bad habits that are rampant in my home. What can they do? What advice would you give to that person?

Jon Nielson
I would tell them to consider meeting with their pastor and/or youth pastor and talking through it with them in their own local church context.

Matt Tully
Get some good advice.

Jon Nielson
Yeah. Get good advice. Say, Look, we’re seeing that maybe we let this cat out of the bag too soon and it’s having detrimental effects. What do we do? And maybe involve someone else in the church. But my guess is that with most of our kids, our teens, if you sit down and have a really honest conversation about the effect that their phone is having on them and what they’re looking at and the way it’s affecting them emotionally and spiritually, they may self-diagnose some of the issues. They maybe even might resonate with, Hey, could we take a step back from this? Are there some practical steps we could take to say I need to break free of this influence?

Matt Tully
And maybe it can be a whole family affair because my sense is that all of us would probably, if we were being honest, we would say there are things we could do to break free a little bit more.

Jon Nielson
Yeah, and I’ve had moments where my five-year-old daughter will literally, when I’m looking at an email or something, she’ll grab me by the chin and pull me away from my phone because she wants my attention. And I’m convicted by that.

Matt Tully
That’s a painful moment when that kind of thing happens with our kids.

Jon Nielson
Yeah.

24:15 - Helping Teenagers Cultivate Spiritual Disciplines

Matt Tully
We also want to talk about spiritual disciplines. One of these foundational facets of the Christian life—things like reading the Bible and praying, gathering with other Christians for corporate worship on Sundays—these are just core things that you as a pastor know are so important. I’m sure many of our listeners also could testify personally to the importance of these simple rhythms for our lives. And yet sometimes, as parents, it can be hard to help our kids catch a vision for why these things matter. And on top of that, as the kids get older, our influence over how they spend their time and their priorities kind of lessens. And by the teen years, it can be hard to make them do something or get them excited to do something that maybe in the past was easier for them to kind of get on board with. So how have you thought about that, using your influence, using your authority as a parent as kids get older to get them to do these spiritual disciplines?

Jon Nielson
We had twenty-five or thirty middle school students in our home last Thursday night for youth group, and we were actually talking about this. And I met with just the guys. The girls went to a different room for discussion time. It was sixth to eighth grade boys, and so many of them, when I asked them what was the major struggle in their spiritual lives, it was this: “It’s just hard for me to read the Bible. It’s hard for me to pray. I know I should.” I compared spiritual disciplines, especially reading the word and praying, to drinking coffee and lifting weights.

Matt Tully
That’s two things they probably can resonate with.

Jon Nielson
Yeah, exactly. Coffee is an acquired taste. I remember hating coffee, and then during my college years, I started to mix a little coffee into my hot chocolate to get a little boost. And then by the time I graduated Wheaton, I was a full-blown coffee drinker.

Matt Tully
Addict, perhaps.

Jon Nielson
Yeah. In fact, I’ve had to back off in recent years.

Matt Tully
And weightlifting. I told them that when I started lifting weights in seventh or eighth grade, I did not see any effect on my body for like two or three years. And it was frustrating because I knew I was getting stronger, but I wasn’t looking muscular. And reading the Bible and praying, especially in the junior high and high school years, can be a little bit like those things in that it begins with a conviction that this is good for me. There is a good God who saved me through the work of his Son. He’s given me his word. He wants me to come to him in prayer. But it can take time to actually begin to feel, to taste it, and to actually begin to feel and see the effects of it. So some of it for middle schoolers and high schoolers is just saying you need to stick with it. You need to believe that this is a God who wants you to approach him in this way, but it may take some time for the emotional response.

Matt Tully
When you have a teen who’s open to that and says, Okay, I’m willing to try it, but I don’t know how. How do I actually do it? What kind of advice would you give to them?

Jon Nielson
I always say start slow. Don’t be too ambitious. Reading five verses every day is better than starting the M’Cheyne read through the Bible in a year plan (four chapters a day) and failing miserably and then quitting and getting discouraged. That’s part of the reason I wrote the devotional is it’s a page long.

Matt Tully
The whole thing.

Jon Nielson
The whole thing, with a chapter from Scripture that you read, a little guide for prayer—how do you respond to God in prayer? So I think it’s helpful to start with manageable chunks that you’re actually going to do. And a seventh grade boy can do that for five minutes a day. He may not be ready for an hour-long, intense devotional time. Some maybe, but little bit by little bit.

Matt Tully
How do you encourage teens with the issue of accountability when it comes to their Bible reading and their spiritual discipline? We all know how helpful it can be to have other Christians checking in on us, asking how it’s going, knowing that they’re doing it with us. Have you tried to incorporate that into how you’ve given advice to teens?

Jon Nielson
I think as parents we should be not scolding our kids when they don’t do devotions but asking them about it. Hey, are you taking some time to read the Bible on your own? How’s it going? What challenges do you have? I find that a lot of the teens that I talked to really struggle with prayer. How do I pray? It doesn’t seem like God is listening. Sometimes I feel like I’m just talking to the ceiling. It can be good to resonate with that and say, Yeah, I have those struggles too. Here are some things that have helped me in prayer. So I think informal accountability from parents, if that makes sense, can be really helpful. And then getting a group of their peers to say we’re going to do this together might be a good way to do it as well.

Matt Tully
In your book one of the things that you say early on, and I think it’s in the introduction where you’re writing to teens, you say, “Your attitude toward the Bible is the most important thing. The specific methods of engaging with the Bible are secondary.” So how do you communicate that heart, that kind of underlying motivation that ultimately it’s not about finding the exact right time to have a Bible study or devotions in the morning? It’s not about figuring out an exact method. So much of that can be what we focus a lot of our attention on, but really trying to convey to them, as a parent, just the hunger for God’s word that we want them to feel.

Jon Nielson
That would be the most fundamental concept that I would want to get young people to grasp, and that is I come to the Bible to hear God speak. And then prayer, primarily, is me talking back to God in response to what he said to me through his word. And if they can begin to get that, I think your devotional life, your spiritual life, your engagement with God’s word and in prayer grows from there. But I’m coming to the Bible to hear God speaking. This is his living word. And when I pray, I’m not going to first say, God help me! I’m going to first respond to what he’s just said to me in his word. Lord, thank you for teaching me that. Lord, help me to respond like that, like I just read about in your word. And that’s something that a sixth or seventh grader and of course a high schooler can grasp. I’m going to the Bible to hear God speak, and I’m going to talk back to him about what he said to me.

30:34 - How Can Pastors Support Parents in Their Parenting?

Matt Tully
So I wonder if you can put on your pastor hat just for a moment and speak to other pastors about what it could look like for pastors to support parents in particular. So much of our thinking in the church context about teens and young people is through the lens of the church’s youth ministries and activities. And that’s all good and important and has its place, but what can pastors and leaders do to help better equip parents to take the initiative and to be proactive in helping their kids engage all these things we’ve been talking about this morning?

Jon Nielson
One thing our church is doing is that we are trying to do a better job of organizing discipleship of our teens. We have a lot of college students at our church, and so we’re trying to equip and mobilize some of the college students to help disciple the teens. And the parents are asking for that. Our parents are delighted to have a godly college student partner with them and mentor and disciple their teens. So I think the intergenerational church body should be coming alongside parents by giving other voices from different generations who are saying, Let’s follow Jesus together.

Matt Tully
I think in my own life and in my own development as a young Christian, some of the most important spiritual influences on me were not my peers and not even my parents, although they were that for me, but other adult men in my church who took the time to spend time with me to disciple me in different ways. And there’s just such a power of seeing other men, not just your parents, engaging you at that level.

Jon Nielson
Totally. And I would say the exact same thing. I had great, godly parents. And that did not mean that I didn’t benefit greatly from some of my youth leaders, some of my coaches who were Christian men, college athletes. I was so into sports. We’ve talked about that. But guys who were great athletes and loved Jesus passionately. And for me to begin to realize, Okay, it’s not just my parents’ thing. Following Jesus fits in the lives of these guys who I actually could see myself being that guy. And of course, I looked up to my dad too, but your parents are your parents.

Matt Tully
There’s a unique set of baggage or just other factors at play that affect how a kid looks at their parents, and to see those same commitments expressed in others is so powerful sometimes.

Jon Nielson
And I see it with my own kids. We’ve got a wonderful group of college basketball and college soccer players who are part of our church, and I watch the way that my daughters watch them. And they’re great young women who love the Lord. They’re at Wheaton College, so they’re at a Christian college, but they’ve also committed to the church. They teach Sunday school. A couple of them are helping with the youth group. That is such a reinforcement to what my wife and I are seeking to do.

33:36 - Enjoying the Teen Years

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final question, sometimes it seems like the teen years can kind of get a bad rap. We can focus a lot, as we’ve even done in our conversation, on some of the challenges that can come along with the teenage years. And we all know the stereotypes about teens and their moodiness and the new relationships and all that that can kind of entail. I wonder if you could speak to the parent listening right now who’s kind of at that spot, who’s feeling maybe frustrated, maybe exhausted, maybe exasperated by their teens and just the dynamics that are at play there. Remind us of what makes a teen year so exciting, so fun, so rewarding as parents.

Jon Nielson
Again, like we mentioned at the beginning, I would first have to say I’m entering these years with you, fellow parents. So we’re just starting to raise teenagers of our own, but I would say it should be thrilling to us to watch our kids begin to engage in the world with more depth, begin to apply biblical truth to more complex issues, begin to face tougher stuff with peers and social situations and school and the messages they’re hearing from the culture around them. That should be thrilling to us because we’re coming alongside them, helping them get a foothold for the way that their faith will actually carry them through life in a sinful, fallen world. And then the other thing, and this is just something that I think my parents did well and that we’re trying to do with our kids, is along the way, yes, we are authority figures; yes, we are spiritual guides; yes, we have to be disciplinarians at times, but our kids should know beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only do we love them but we like them and enjoy spending time with them and are nurturing what will become in their adult years a friendship. And so that’s what we’re trying to do. Again, yes, we are the authority in their lives, but we want them to know we genuinely enjoy spending time with them and like engaging with them.

Matt Tully
Yeah, they’re not just a chore that we have to deal with all the time.

Jon Nielson
And that means getting into the stuff they’re into and understanding it. Don’t just wave your hand and say, I don’t understand you. No, work hard to understand their world.

Matt Tully
Jon, thank you so much for taking the time today to give all of us as parents—parents of teens, parents who are soon to have teens—a little bit of advice to think through how to navigate these well.

Jon Nielson
Thank you so much.

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