On being a good role model for your (sometimes challenging) teenagers

I could be quite an angry teenager. Life’s complicated when you’re growing up. For a while, when I was having a tough time at school, my mum drove a twelve-mile round trip every day just to have lunch with me. One day she suggested that we bought lunch (my favourite, a chicken slice) from the supermarket.

“OK,” I said grudgingly, “but you can only talk to two people.” Mum had a habit of getting into conversation with everyone she met, and I wanted lunchtime to be all about me. Sure enough, we’d already stopped and chatted to two people by the time we reached the right aisle. I was fuming. Then she stopped again, this time to help an elderly lady get something down from a high shelf. She ignored my grumpy expression while we chose our food, and even had yet another chat with the girl at the checkout.

These days I’m the one saying: “Hello, can I help you with that?” while my own daughters roll their eyes at their mum’s chattiness. I don’t remember ever having a conversation with Mum about why she reached out to everyone, but her lessons of love and kindness somehow penetrated even my self-absorbed teenage heart. Part of me must have noticed how she got a smile from everyone, and how all those little interactions brightened everybody’s day.

A living example 

Sometimes circumstances arrange themselves so your children ask questions about faith, and you can put into words what you believe and why you live your life in certain ways. But our actions are far more important than any words we use: the everyday habits of our daily life – so automatic that we don’t even notice them – have a huge impact on our family.

In high school, one of my daughters had a boyfriend who didn’t have a supportive network of relationships at home, and consequently he wasn’t particularly considerate towards his girlfriend. When the relationship finally ended she was hurt and upset. After the first storm of tears was over, she wanted a change of scene, so she went away for the weekend with a girlfriend’s family.

It’s our everyday behaviour that has the most impact

Meanwhile, we took our own boys for a day out at a nearby lake – and invited the ex-boyfriend to go with us. When she saw, on social media, a photo of me and X in a canoe, with the boys in another behind us, she was furious. She thought I had ignored how hurt she was, and instead prioritised X’s wellbeing over hers.

“Why can’t you hate him for what he did to me? Or at least pretend to hate him, for my sake?” she said. I tried to explain how needy X was, how much he needed to see what a family unit could look like, how much he needed love and fun, but she wasn’t having any of it. Her 15-year-old brain couldn’t understand what I was trying to do.

Years later, at university, she bumped into X at a party. They laughed and reminisced about their teenage romance. When he was about to leave, X turned to her and said: “Tell your mum thank you, by the way. I know I wasn’t great back then, but she was always nice to me. Specially that trip to the lake. I loved that day.”

My daughter says that was when she started to see us as people, not just parents: people who have their own worries and insecurities, people who make mistakes, but also who have their own faith and ideals and ways of dealing with the world. And she understood why I’d acted the way I did. Just as I now understand why my own mum made space in her life for other people – even when I resented sharing her attention!

Real-life, biblical parenting 

The Bible has a lot to say about teaching our children. Here are just a few verses:

“Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it” (Proverbs 22:6). 

“These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).

I don’t think this means we have to lecture our kids, or organise Bible study sessions three times a day. Yes, we talk to our children about our faith, we take them to church with us and we pray with them. But it’s our everyday behaviour that has the most impact; the lessons they absorb just by being with us. Children don’t just need information about faith: they need to see what it means in real life. If we ‘talk the talk’ but don’t ‘walk the walk’, then they can spot whether we are living out our words or just saying them. Faith has to be woven into the fabric of our everyday lives.

The teenage years can be tempestuous ones, but if we trust God to lead us all through them together, we can come out the other side with our relationships not just intact but deepened. If we can cling to doing the right thing in the face of sulkiness or anger and shouting, they will see and learn in spite of themselves. Paul understood this: “Join together in following my example, brothers and sisters, and just as you have us as a model, keep your eyes on those who live as we do” (Philippians 3:17).

The life lessons from those we love sink in deeply, past our immediate feelings, and form our characters, influencing the way we live our lives, forever.