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Friday 10th, March 2023
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Series – Perfect Relationship: 24 Tools for Building BRIDGES to Harmony and Taking Down WALLS of Conflict in our Relationships.
Episode 16 : Building a
New Relationship between Parent and Teenager – Focus on Friendship – The Art of Listening and The Prayer of Release – True Stories – Steve Wonder’s Son, Marshall and Ex- Wife Kay ; The Johnsons, The Collins; The Stevens, The Wallaces, and The Harpers
Friends, if you are soon to be a parent of a teenager, you will need to prepare in training through these series ahead of time because you will need this series on relationship when that time comes. If you are a parent of a teenager, these teachings will equip you to manage your relationship with your teenagers better like never before. If you are struggling with any kind of relationship for that matter, these series on relationship will equip you to handle some or all of your relationship because these teachings are about human engineering that are hardly thought in our educational establishment today.
God had an intention of sustainable relationship that was why He sent His Son to present to us a picture of Himself and restore the lost relationship as He had intended before the foundation of the earth was laid. All the fruit of the Spirit as typified in Galatians 5:21-23 and works of the Flesh bothers on managing relationships as God intended it to be. So, pay attention and it will yield tangible dividends for your life’s journey here on earth and in eternity. we will be judged by how we managed our relationship with Gods Son and with others. This conclusion can be supported upon the commanded that hangs all the laws and the prophets as revealed to Moses and Re- echoed by Jesus: Read, Memorize and Meditate on these.
Deuteronomy 6:5: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.
Leviticus 19:18 – Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD
Matthew 22:37-39 KJV
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Our Christianity, or our lives race will be measured by how we handled these summarized verses by Jesus in the above scriptures. Our giving our lives to Jesus will be proven by these scriptures. Not by the church we attend, not by how busy we are serving God, not by how long we have been christians, not by how long we prayed and fasted but by how we managed our relationship here on earth, especially those relationships that are not in our good books. Anybody can relate with a good person who is cool and calculated but not many will relate well with the trouble makers. God is calling all of us to the place of perfection in our relationships as stated by Jesus in
Matthew 5:47-48
Amplified Bible, Classic Edition
47 And if you greet only your brethren, what more than others are you doing? Do not even the Gentiles (the heathen) do that?
48 You, therefore, must be perfect [growing into complete [a]maturity of godliness in mind and character, [b]having reached the proper height of virtue and integrity], as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Our first training grounds is in our homes, between siblings, parent and children, extended relations and the larger community.
If you missed our last post in our series on perfect relationship – 24 Tools for building bridges of Harmony and taking down walls of conflict in our relationships where we dealt with Episode 15 – Wounded Parents Overcoming Discouragement – Action Points for Deep Personal Healing for Parents with true life stories – 8 Life transforming questions to ask yourself, visit the link here https://www.otakada.org/8-life-transforming-questions-to-ask-yourself-in-episode-15/
Now let’s get into our title today, ” Episode 16 – Building a New Relationship between Parent and Teenager – Focus on Friendship – The Art of Listening and The Prayer of Release – True Stories – Steve Wonder’s Son, Marshall and Ex- Wife Kay ; The Johnsons, The Collins; The Stevens, The Wallaces, and The Harpers.”
A wounded parent can neither correct all the mistakes of the past nor bring a son or daughter back to the relationship that existed five or ten years earlier. Present realities must be squarely faced and accepted. Although you may not agree with your child’s lifestyle, values, or behavior, it will help the family situation greatly if you can merely accept the fact that “this is the way it is.” Such acceptance will facilitate immensely your next move: trying to build a new relationship. This will not always be easy, nor can it be done quickly, but you can start in this direction.
From Parents to Friends
All parents should be working themselves out of the job of being parents and easing themselves into the relationship of being friends of their children. This is especially true of wounded parents. I am not suggesting that you cannot be both parents and friends at the same time during the early
formative years of your children’s lives. By the phrase the job of being parents, I mean the role of parenting. But as children grow up, the role of parenting by father and mother should diminish while the role of friend should increase.
The application of this point obviously depends on the age of your son or daughter. A thirteen-year-old daughter certainly is in greater need of parental direction than a twenty-one-year-old. But the process of shifting from predominantly parent to predominantly friend is an ongoing one. You will have to be the judge of the degree of parental
control and direction currently needed.
Yet, let’s face reality. If your son or daughter has largely rejected you and what you stand for morally and spiritually, you have already lost control and probably cannot regain it.
Control can be exercised effectively only as long as there a basic respect for you as her or his parent. If respect has gone, so has control.
Some readers may object to the word control. I don’t care for it myself, but essentially I am referring to direction, influence, discipline, veto power over certain decisions, and guidance. What this means in specific instances depends on several variables. A three-year-old boy who heads out to cross a busy street alone needs one kind of control.
A sixteen-year-old boy who insists on your buying him an automobile needs another. There isn’t much you can do to stop older teen-agers, and certainly young adults, from experimenting with drugs, sex, or alternative religious lifestyles if they are headstrong and determined to do it.
My point is this: regardless of the age of your child and the circumstances of the present ruptured relationship, you would be wise to minimize the parenting and maximize the friendship. The older the child is, the more advisable this becomes. For whatever reasons, he or she resents your parenting. It will be difficult for him or her to resent your friendship. He or she does not want to be controlled, but understood and accepted as a person.
When Gray Greenfield, the author of the book first offered this advice to Kay and Steve Wonder after they had several explosive confrontations with their son Marshall, who was involved in the college drug scene, Kay replied, “But I’m his mother; in no way can I be anything else.” It took several months for Kay to accept the fact that Marshall deeply resented her smothering control. When Kay began to shift to being an understanding friend, the Wonders were able to build a new relationship with their son.
From Being Judgmental to Being Respectful
In building a new relationship, wounded parents need to stop being judgmental and to try being respectful of their children. Not all wounded parents have been judgmental, to be sure, but most of the ones I have counseled have been and continue to be until they realize that a judgmental attitude blocks any future reconciliation.
Parenting tends to be heavy on oughts and ought nots, shoulds and should nots, and rightly so in communicating moral boundaries to developing children. But through the years, this process needs to diminish while a developing dialogue pertaining to morality and religious faith should increase between parent and child.
A major problem I have noticed in the parenting process is that some parents maintain a heavy emphasis on oughts and ought nots and expand this role to condemnation for misbehavior with little concern for why the child is misbehaving. To continue being judgmental toward your wayward son or daughter will only make matters worse. Your children already know you disapprove of certain types of behavior. A negative, judgmental attitude only widens the gap.
What is needed is respect. To respect someone means that you feel or show esteem for and honor that person. If you respect someone you show consideration and regard for and avoid violation of that person. This includes expressions of appreciation and deference.To esteem means to regard as a high order, and to prize.
When this was suggested to one wounded parent, he replied, “But he [his son] doesn’t deserve my respect after what he has done.” That is to miss the point of respect, as well as the value of human beings from a Christian perspective.
Respect is not something to be earned or deserved. It is given. Children, whatever their age, are inherently valuable and to be prized. This is a clear teaching of the Bible (Pss. 127:3-5; 128:3-4; Mark 10:13-16).
There is a tendency among adults to think of respect as that which children should show their parents, when it is equally important for parents to show respect for their children. Where prodigal children have poor self-images, there tends to have been little respect shown to them by their parents. The person with a positive self-image tends to be the one whose parents esteemed him or her through the formative years.
To respect your son or daughter means that you stop judging and condemning and start nurturing. Nurturing calls for understanding, caring, and encouraging (as you are allowed to). I am not referring to a smothering kind of protection.
This would violate that sense of independence your son or daughter is striving for. There is no simple “how to do it” formula for nurturing a wayward child. It will be expressed more in your attitude than in your words.
This attitude of respect communicates the message, “I may not agree with what you have done or the way you are living, but I do not condemn you; I regard you as a person of infinite worth; I am with you as a friend; I will assist whenever I am needed and where such assistance is acceptable; I encourage you to find the fullness of life’s meaning; I offer you my trust, love, and appreciation.”
From Talking to Listening
The process of building a new relationship with your child will show a quality of respect that moves from a stance of talking to one of listening. If you can stop being heavy on advice-giving and start trying to understand how that son or daughter truly feels, you will have made significant progress. Most wounded parents talk too much. This is another expression of the “heavy parent” role (the controlling parent).
There is also a “healthy parent” role, referred to as nurturing, and a part of nurturing is listening. When Karen Johnston began to listen to Robby, she discovered a boy who was deeply resentful over his father leaving them and who was subconsciously blaming his mother for driving his father away.
When Art and Betty Collins started listening to Irene, they found a lonely girl who felt unloved and unwanted. She had sought love and acceptance in her basically unhappy high-school peer group, but their abuse of alcohol became her retreat from unhappiness.
When Jack and Robin Stevens began listening to Richard, they found a discouraged young man who was made to feel that he would never be able to measure up to Ronald and Roger Marks, the brothers next door. Richard felt he could never please his parents by being himself. Ronald and Roger
got more of Richard’s parents’ attention than he could.
Therefore, he reasoned, “If I’m no good as I am, then I might as well prove it.” So he drove his car recklessly, getting into trouble with the police. This brought about his parents’ attention, even if in a negative way.
If you will listen carefully to your children, you will learn a great deal about yourself. You may not like what you learn, but listening is an essential ingredient in building a new relationship.
On Turning Loose
Some wounded parents I have known have unwittingly made matters worse with their son or daughter by trying to hang on to the parental reins and continue controlling things, even when it is obviously futile. To build a new relationship, it is much better to turn loose of the parental controls.
When Susan Wallace realized that her parents eventually had decided no longer to try to control her life, she was open to communicating with them. When J. C. and Phyllis Harper stopped trying to choose Buffy’s friends for him, stopped nagging him to go to church, and stopped overloading him with all kinds of advice about how to behave, the atmosphere in the home began to change. J. C. quietly but firmly told Buffy that if at age sixteen he wanted to run the serious risk in the local school drug scene, be arrested, and face juvenile-court action and possible detention, then he would have to be prepared to pay the price. J. C. added that he and Phyllis had asked God for direction and that it seemed best to turn loose of the entire situation.
They were not going to fret, plead, or be anxious about it anymore. They would have to make this decision afresh each morning, but they were going to turn loose and let God take charge. The responsibility for his behavior was placed firmly on Buffy. This was the beginning of this boy’s sober reversal of behavior.
Turning loose seems, among other things, to remove one side of the conflict and give God room to work.
On Trusting God – Prayer of Release
The other, and more vital, side of turning loose is to trust God to take your family situation into His hands and begin to work redemptively. After all, when you’ve done all you can do and it doesn’t work or nothing happens for the better, doesn’t it make sense to let God take charge of the ruptured
relationship between you and your child?
Several wounded couples have told me that they were unable to have any peace about their wayward children until they learned to pray the prayer of relinquishment. This is not merely a one-time prayer, but a way of praying daily until God has an opportunity to reverse the situation.
One parent expressed the nature of such prayer:
O God, I love my son very much. I tried to be a good father, as best I knew how, to him, although I’m sure I made plenty of mistakes. I don’t fully understand why he has turned out the way he has. He has no room for You in his life. His actions lately I deplore. But I do not know what else to do.
His mother and I are at the end of the road and we are brokenhearted. We turn loose of our son today and place him into Your hands. We give him to You as You once gave him to us. We believe You love him, infinitely more than we do.
We ask that You take complete charge of this entire situation. We ask for Your will to be done in all of our lives. Show his mother and me what changes we need to make in our relationship to him. Thank You for Your love which gives us hope. Amen.
Getting out of the way and simply trusting God to bring about the necessary changes are extremely difficult things for wounded parents to do, but God works so much better and more quickly when we are not interfering with His efforts. Moreover, God has chosen to work through the faith (trust) of His people, even the faith of wounded parents. To
paraphrase Psalm 127:1, “Unless the Lord builds this new parent-child relationship, those who build it labor in vain.”
Moreover, turning loose is not rejecting your child. It is placing him or her totally in God’s hands. It is availing yourself of God’s resources for dealing with what, humanly speaking, is an impossible situation.
Recognizing Your Child’s Rights
For years, you have had hopes and dreams for your son or daughter. Yet because of what has happened, these have been largely shattered. If you are going to see a new relationship between you develop, then it is important that you recognize your child’s right to choose his or her own lifestyle.
Where there is no freedom to choose, there can be little or no meaningful relating as friends. Naturally, freedom involves risk. But recognize that when God created the human race, He ran the same risk you and I ran when we chose to bring children into the world. There were no guarantees. God expects us to be willing to run the same risks He ran when He made all of us.
My son has the right to be what he wants and chooses to be (as long as that choice does not cause harm to other people). Your daughter has the right to become what she chooses. We may not like or agree with their choices. But they deserve the same freedom we had when we were their
age.
As long as we parents insist on placing certain arbitrary restrictions on our children’s choices, it will be difficult for them to relate freely and enjoyably to us. In many instances parental restrictions and conditions force some children, seeking their self-identity and independence, to choose alter-
native lifestyles, including both moral and spiritual behavior patterns. Call it stubborn rebellion, bullheadedness, or obstinancy if you will, but some youth, when given no choice, will prove their independence by going the opposite direction from their parents’ choices.
I am not talking about house rules, regulations for using the car, and other day-to-day family expectations for cooperative and responsible living that are usually needed for preteens and teen-agers. I am talking about life goals, moral and religious commitments that affect one’s entire life, and cultural and spiritual lifestyles, along with their
behavioral expressions. I am talking about youth’s basic questions, such as, “What kind of person will I be? Whom will I choose to relate to on deep and meaningful levels?
What is really important in life? What in life has ultimate value? What is the meaning of morality and spirituality?”
Our children have the right to answer those questions for themselves. We will certainly influence their answers by both words and example, but the final decision is theirs. When they know we recognize their freedom to choose, and we respect their freedom even to choose differently than we do, it will go a long way to build a new relationship when we have our differences and disagreements as parents and children. If they are not free to violate our moral code and reject our religious beliefs, then they are not truly free even to behave morally and believe religiously as we do.
However, your children’s rights end where others’ and society’s begin. They need to clearly understand that if they choose to break the law or disrupt the stability of the family they will have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.
You do not really help your children when you protect them from the consequences of such behavior. In recent years, some wounded parents are discovering that it pays off when parental love “gets tough,” holds the line on family rules with penalties for violations, even allows a child to discover what it’s like to go to jail, organizes parent groups to assist each other in combating peer pressure and a hostile youth subculture, and practices firm discipline. In other words, they have learned that simple understanding and forgiveness without firm discipline do not work.
Your Child’s Need for Your Faith
If you want to build a new relationship with your son or daughter, he or she needs not only the freedom to be him or her self but also your faith in him or her. There is no stimulus like that of the confidence which one person, especially a significant other, expresses toward another. (A significant other is a person whose influence and approval are important to another person.)
I have often heard the wayward children of wounded parents say, “My parents don’t think I can do anything right.
They don’t care what happens to me. No one believes in me.” Consequently, these children tend to be discouraged.
Rudolf Dreikurs, the famous child psychiatrist, contended
* reference
1. See the story about Toughlove, an association of parents who draw the
line against out-of-control youngsters and force them to behave or leave home,
in “Getting Tough with Teens,” Time, June 8, 1981, p. 47.
that misbehaving children are discouraged children. The opposite should also be true: encouraged children tend to be cooperative. Self-confidence is often the result of someone having confidence in you.
The faith of significant others is a stimulating and motivating power in one’s life. There is a strong inclination in human beings to live up to the expectations of parents. If you can shift your expectations from the negative, based on past misbehavior, to the positive, based on “the assurance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1), you will begin to experience a new relationship with your child. Faith solicits faith. Hope solicits hope.
Confidence (from you) will solicit confidence (on the part of your child). People tend to want to carry on a good relationship with those who believe in them, and this applies to children as well.
Keep the Lines of Communication Open
To build a new relationship with your child, you will need to take the initiative in keeping the lines of communication open. This calls for unconditional openness. If you take the attitude, “I don’t want to talk with you unless you…,” then don’t expect any communication to take place.
You don’t have to compromise your moral convictions or religious beliefs in order to be open in communication. If your son or daughter has moved out of the house or lives at a distance due to location of a job, you can still call or write, but keep the conversation or subject on a nonjudgmental level. He or she knows how you feel about value differences between you. Your son or daughter wants to know if you still care, in spite of differences. Is a communicating friendship still possible? You will have to decide.
Obviously, in some cases, your child simply may not want to communicate with you at present. There’s too much anger
*Reference
2. Rudolf Dreikurs and Vicki Soltz, Children: The Challenge (New York: Haw-
thorn Books, 1964), chapter 3.
being felt now. If so, wait for a while and be available and responsive when he or she does call or write.
In the meantime, as you have opportunity, be ready to be more of a friend than a controlling parent, to be more respectful than judgmental, to listen more than to talk, to turn loose and trust the situation to God, to respect your child’s right to make his or her own decisions yet to be firm in your love as you hold the line on your family rules, to believe in your child as a person of worth, and to keep the lines of communication open. A new relationship may
develop between you, although this will always take time and patience.
Questions for Discussion
1. How do you feel about shifting from the role of parent to that of friend with your children?
2. Are you engaging in any kind of smothering control of your children?
3. What does it mean to be judgmental of your children? respectful?
4. What does it mean to nurture and to listen at home? to express faith in each other?
5. How do you turn loose and trust God with respect to your children?
6. Does your child have any rights?
7. To what extent should you protect your child from the consequences of his or her behavior?
This brings us to the end of Episode 16 – Building a New Relationship between Parent and Teenager – Focus on Friendship – The Art of Listening and The Prayer of Release – True Stories – Steve Wonder’s Son, Marshall and Ex- Wife Kay ; The Johnsons, The Collins; The Stevens, The Wallaces, and The Harpers.”
In our Series – Perfect Relationship: 24 Tools for Building BRIDGES to Harmony and Taking Down WALLS of Conflict in our Relationships.
