You've Got to Be Kidding! by Pat Williams

Author:Pat Williams [Williams, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55205-1
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

2. DON’T WINK AT IMPROPER BEHAVIOR

When Mom found a pack of cigarettes in her Stacey’s school bag, she told herself that her little girl was just “going through a phase.” She did the same thing when she discovered that Stacey had gone against her wishes and had a butterfly tattooed on her back. Then came the tongue stud, the pierced eyebrow, and the foul language, all accompanied by frequent outbursts of anger toward her parents.

Then one day Stacey announced defiantly that she was pregnant and that it didn’t matter who the father was because she was going to get an abortion. Her parents pleaded with their daughter to reconsider, but legally there was nothing they could do.

Today, at the age of twenty-five, Stacey has had at least three abortions that her parents know about. She lives in a rundown apartment in a crime-infested part of town. She has had a succession of minimum-wage jobs and has been fired from several of them due to her drug and alcohol abuse.

Her parents continue to pray for her, but she refuses to listen to their advice or accept their offers to help her get her life together. She seems content with her squalid lifestyle.

An extreme example? Perhaps. But there are more Staceys than you might expect—children who came from good, solid Christian homes, but who threw it all away. What began as a “phase” catapulted into disaster. All children go through phases, but a phase left unchecked and uncared for will result in a much larger problem. If your child is going through a phase you don’t like, our advice is to address it immediately. Talk to your child about it and try to find out why it’s happening. Is it a peer thing? Does it have something to do with a boyfriend or girlfriend? Is it just growing pains? Once you’ve talked things through and discovered what’s really going on, you can deal with it properly.

Some rebellious behavior is to be expected. It’s part of growing up. It is true that, as youth pastor/editor Wayne Rice writes, “Children need to assert themselves during their adolescent years. They need to separate themselves from their parents and to establish an identity of their own. It’s necessary and good for young adolescents to want to act and behave differently than their parents. It’s the only way the teen will develop the self-confidence he or she needs to survive, and it’s a skill that must be learned through experience.”

But he goes on to say, “It is normal for kids to rebel when they become teenagers … [but] rebellion that is harmful and destructive cannot be tolerated, because it is not ‘normal.’ ”

How can you tell the difference between a passing phase and a descent into self-destructive, rebellious behavior? You can’t. The best thing we parents can do is enforce the rules we have established for our household and refuse to look the other way when those rules are violated.

The very best way to cut short a

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