PARENT RESOURCES

A Doubting Teen 

Whether we like it or not, we live in an increasingly post-Christian culture that no longer accepts the basic tenets of Christianity as universal truth. The rise of religious pluralism, relativism, and agnostic attitudes toward faith are changing the cultural landscape. Though frustrating, these shifts provide fresh opportunities to engage our children with both the evidence for and the heart of Christianity. 

Discipling Teens 

Instead of being our children’s conscience for them, we want to train their conscience to think deeply about the world around them. Instead of allowing them to piggyback off our faith, we want to help them own their faith for themselves. By doing so, we will better prepare them to be responsible, kind, God-honoring adults who purposefully and happily devote their lives to doing God’s will. And we do all that through a process we call Culture Translation. It’s biblically based, centered around conversation, and can be used not only by parents, but also by grandparents, teachers, pastors, youth volunteers, administrators—anyone who has influence in teenagers’ lives. This guide aims to teach you that process so that you can implement it with your teens and preteens. We want to give you our “secret sauce” because we believe so strongly in it and the difference it can make. 

Evangelism 

What comes to mind when you think of evangelism? Going door to door? Handing out tracts? Walking through the wordless book or the bridge diagram? Maybe you think of times when you’ve had deep, positive conversations with people about your different beliefs. 

Hearing from God 

In this Parent Guide, we’ll talk about how to encourage your teens to find dependable spiritual guidance in Jesus. We’ll talk about the role of scripture, the role of the Holy Spirit, and share some principles to help you and your teens stay grounded along the way. 

Profanity

In this Guide, we want to unpack a biblical approach to language that will protect us from becoming lame “language police,” but that will also allow us to help our teens discover the power, freedom, and importance of speech for themselves. We’ll take away bad words’ aura of forbiddenness, and ask how best to address the issue of foul language in our homes. Fair warning: The approach in this guide requires a fairly deep dive into history, linguistics, theology, and the movie Shrek. 

Purpose

It’s hard to understand what our purpose as humans is. We can look for it everywhere––work, family, relationships, hobbies, religion. We can look to teachers, government leaders, or other authority figures for a sense of purpose. Those aren’t bad places to seek purpose, but they can ultimately prove fruitless if they aren’t paired with meaning that comes from a relationship with God. Only that is going to be able to lead us and our teens in the pursuit of the purpose for which we were designed. 

Sabbath and Rest

Whenever “keeping the Sabbath holy” is presented as an arbitrary command, God quickly turns into a dictator whose job is to invent rules to make us miserable. In the New Testament, Jesus often broke the Sabbath to prove to law-keepers that they had missed the whole point: God has a vision for human flourishing. God has a specific shape of life in which we can be blessed—and believe it or not, resting is part of this. In fact, teenagers (whose whole goal in life is to sleep in as late as humanly possible, amiright?) might be better Sabbath-keepers than we parents. Let’s explore the “big picture” of God’s design for human flourishing and, from this, begin to understand why the Sabbath is relevant (and even fun!) for families today. 

Talking about Hell

We are called to pass on the legacy of faith to the next generation. We hope that this guide will help in passing on what can be a tough topic for the current generation to face – the reality of hell.  

The Bible 

What if much of our conversation about the Bible is missing the point? What would it be like to imagine that the Bible has the power to change how we live from the inside out? How would it change the way we read or talk about the Bible? How would it help our teens to view the Bible as relevant to their everyday lives, rather than an outdated list of arbitrary rules to follow? What if the Bible helped us start more conversations and ask more questions, rather than ending conversations and winning arguments? 

Abortion 

Our goal in this guide is to help you talk to the children in your care about abortion, the start of life, and how you would walk through it together if they ever found themselves with an unplanned pregnancy. In a time when it’s extremely normalized to consider abortion the obvious choice for an unplanned pregnancy, it’s essential to have a gameplan for how we will meet a teen in crisis with love, care, and God’s hope for a scary situation. 

Boredom

In the next few pages we’ll talk about how to respond when our teens complain about being bored, as well as whether filling every minute with activities is the best solution. We’ll explore when and whether boredom might actually be a good thing, how our understanding of success and productivity impacts the way we use our time, and how to help our families redeem the experience of boredom. 

Bullying

There is no profile when it comes to bullying. Roy Moore, Founder and Executive Director of Be Strong, a nonprofit dedicated to ending bullying, says, “Bullying does not respect boundaries.” A petite teenage girl could actually be the one bullying a huge football player—maybe not physically, but psychologically and emotionally. Bullying is a complex issue. As such, it does not have a simple solution. 

Cancel Culture

What if the worst thing you’ve ever done was filmed, and then shared with millions of people online? What if thousands of strangers judged you based on that snippet of your life? At a time when smartphones can instantly broadcast our worst sins to the world, and when digging through someone’s online dirt is as easy as typing a few keywords, the internet can be a strange and frightening place. This is the era of cancel culture, which generally refers to calling people out on social media to suffer punitive consequences for inappropriate behavior or speech. And it’s got many people wondering, “Is cancel culture a mob mentality, or a long-overdue way of speaking truth to power?” 

Drugs 

Politics

The goal of this parent guide is to walk with you through the specific experience of discussing politics with the young people in your life—how to navigate conversations that are often difficult, distressing, and dividing. Our hope is that wherever you fall politically, you see this guide as an encouragement to pursue the heart of Christ as you seek to disciple the teens that you love. 

Racism

We recognize that racism is a complex, sensitive and divisive subject. In light of this, we have sought to be as thorough, nuanced and sensitive as possible. This Parent Guide is longer and more difficult to read than most of our Parent Guides, but appropriately so, given the subject matter. Though we could not cover every angle, we hope and pray this guide appropriately challenges us while encouraging unity. 

School Shootings

School shootings aren’t a new phenomenon in America—the first recorded instance of gun violence in a school dates as far back as 1840. But they’ve never felt so terribly present. The reminder of their mortality is made all the more unnerving because they know that the threat is not external—they don’t fear a Cold War turning hot, and they’re not haunted by the specter of plane hijackers. Their danger is local, personal, intimate; they could die at the hands of someone they sat next to in Algebra 1. So how can we help them deal with this fear when it arrives? 

Teen Slang

Lost? Confused? Unable to understand your teens? Don’t worry; you’re in good company. Keeping up with teen slang is nearly impossible. New words are constantly being intro- duced, thanks to the influence of music, the Internet, apps, and celebrities (not to mention regional vernacular!). You may feel overwhelmed and lost when listening to your children/ grandchildren speaking, and it’ll only get worse when reading social media posts and hash- tags. Use this guide as a reference for what’s widely popular right now in order to translate what teens are saying. 

Violence

The goal of this Parent Guide is not to depress you, or make you feel that there is no hope. We at Axis believe in the redeeming power of Jesus Christ’s new covenant, and we believe that one day there will be an end to all suffering, including the violence we see today. But for now, we need to learn how to understand and appropriately respond to and synthesize violence, so that we can live with the hope of that new covenant without giving up on our world as it is. 

Addiction 

The word addiction covers many habits, from drugs and alcohol to phone addiction. The hope of this Parent Guide is to equip you to talk to your teens about whatever substance or behavior they are fighting, or that you think they could be susceptible to. By the end of this article, you will be able to identify the sources of different addictions, and have practical tools to support the teens you love as they struggle through some of the most difficult experiences a person can endure. 

Autism and ADHD

The CDC reports that in 2003, roughly 4.4 million children aged 3-17 were diagnosed with ADHD. As of 2019, that number has jumped to 6 million. 1 in 150 children of the same age were diagnosed with autism in 2000; by 2020 that number was 1 in 36. Those numbers are clearly significant, but in pop culture autism and ADHD are still accompanied by certain stigmas and stereotypes that can make it difficult to understand what a person with either disorder might experience in their day to day life. We at Axis are not specialists in autism or ADHD, and we want to recognize that not every perspective or experience of living with or caring for those with autism or ADHD will be represented in this guide. Our goal is to highlight the ways that autism and ADHD are often represented in culture, especially on social media, and to share some helpful information on what parenting a teen with autism or ADHD might look like. Above all, whether you’re parenting a child diagnosed with one of these disorders or you simply want to know more, we want to encourage you to trust God and ask Him to develop greater love, empathy, and wisdom in you. 

Depression & Anxiety

Teens test drive a variety of emotions every day, and sometimes they have no idea how to explain or express them. We’ve all heard (or even said) something such as, “I’m so depressed! They canceled my favorite show!” or “I’m so anxious about my math test!” The language of mental illness runs rampant through our casual conversations. It’s not all that surprising, though. These days it’s as if everyone on earth has a microphone, and with the racket of everyone’s opinions, hyperbole seems a useful method for being heard. The louder the noise, the less others want to listen, so the more we use exaggerations to describe how we feel and to connect with others. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Like other Parent Guides in this series, this tool provides knowledge, references, and faith-based encouragement on the subject to help parents connect with their kids. However, since we are NOT physicians, healthcare providers, or even experts on these difficult matters, this resource is NOT a substitute for medical advice or treatment. It can accompany and support actions directed and/or confirmed by a qualified healthcare professional, but it is not meant to replace or preclude any diagnosis or treatment by a qualified healthcare professional.) 

Eating Disorders

Besides increases in things like anxiety and depression, today’s teens also face increasing risks of developing eating disorders as a way to cope with their reality. Because there are myriad websites and organizations dedicated to educating the public about eating disorders and to helping sufferers find lasting recovery, this guide will hopefully serve to educate you on how technology and culture contribute to the problem. In addition, we hope to provide a balanced Christian perspective on how to find true healing from a disease that affects both young and old, male and female, Christian and non-Christian alike. 

Fear & Worry

Fear is real – in fact, God created it – but worry is never beneficial. By looking a little closer at the problems of fear and worry, we can learn where they come from, what they are at their root, how to overcome them through the power of God, and how to help our kids do the same. 

Fitness

The world of health and fitness has never been more popular than it is right now. In the US alone it’s a $30 billion industry that’s growing by 3-4% every year. Chances are that your teen has been affected by the fitness culture through sports, their social circle, or social media. And it takes on many forms. Depending on who is talking, fitness could mean running before school, playing sports, going to the gym to lift weights, posting photos of one’s butt-to-waist ratio (yes, it’s a thing; but read the link at your own risk), or doing Crossfit. What does this mean for our teens? Are they using fitness as a way to support their favorite sport? To have more control of their diet? Because they like being active? To get huge biceps? How does the pursuit of physical fitness help or hinder their relationship with God? 

Gen Z

How well do you know your teens? What influences them? How are they different from Millennials or other generations? If the generations have ever confused you, this guide will walk you through them and what you need to know about Gen Z. 

Grief & Death 

Rejection

Rejection is something we have probably all experienced at some point and will again. For our children and teenagers, they have to learn how to process and grow from rejection that they face. This guide aims to equip parents to have conversations that will help students along that journey. 

Suicide & Self-Harm Prevention

This guide helps parents know more about the troubling incidence of suicide and self-harm in the lives of young people. Like other Parent Guides in this series, this tool provides knowledge, references, and faith-based encouragement on the subject to help parents connect with their kids. However, we do not pretend to be physicians, healthcare providers, or even experts on these difficult matters; as such, this resource is NOT a substitute for medical advice or treatment. It can accompany and support actions directed and/or confirmed by a qualified healthcare professional, but it is not meant to replace or preclude any diagnosis or treatment by a qualified healthcare professional. Axis cannot be responsible for actions taken without professional medical guidance. 

Teen Emotions 

As Christians, we are on a journey of total redemption and transformation, following Jesus’ way with no part of us left behind. As Peter Scazzero put it, “It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.” Loving God includes every aspect of ourselves—hearts, souls, minds, and bodies. This guide focuses on the heart, exploring how our teens can develop and mature emotionally. 

Teen Identity

In the heart of every person is a deep-rooted question: “Who am I, and how do I fit into the world around me?” In other words, what makes me “me”? Am I the roles that I play (friend, sibling, athlete)? Am I a set of characteristics (quiet, bubbly, confident)? Am I my thoughts, emotions, body, soul, actions … a summation of these things? The question of identity shows up in which brands teens choose to wear, how they manage their appearance with friends, in their desire to get good grades or try out for sports or musicals, and in what they think about themselves and others while scrolling through social media. It can be difficult to navigate our teens’ search for identity with healthy language, perspective and grace. The Christian story for the world has a stunning message about who we are; our challenge is to contextualize that story in the modern world, the world of popular culture. 

Anime & Manga

Anime and manga are Japanese styles of cartooning. The basic difference is that anime is the video version and manga is the print version. Because anime is often intended for teens and adults, it uniquely appeals to teens who want to be treated like mature viewers. It addresses relatable themes like romantic attraction, teen relationships, depression, and the despair that can come when things don’t work out the way we want them to. 

Internet Filtering & Monitoring

There’s no question that there’s a lot of filth on the Internet. And it’s pretty easy to run into it, even accidentally. Internet filters are extremely useful tools for preventing you and your children from encountering content that is harmful and disturbing. This guide will provide insights as well as suggested resources to help in filter the internet in your home.  

Smart Phone Addiction

Rather than completely re-hashing the problem of smartphone addiction, this Parent Guide provides self-reflection questions scattered throughout and a few practices to try. Some exercises are just for you (because asking your teen to change their smartphone habits means being willing to evaluate your own phone use first), and some practices are for your teen. We’ll let you know which are which. Some may work for you and your teen. Some may fail epically. In any case, we hope you walk away with a better understanding of what you expect your smartphone to give you, why you look at it when you do, and what smartphone habits you want to model for the teens in your life. 

Smartphones

The phone used to be a device whose main purpose was communication. Now, smartphones help us do just about anything: shop, socialize, read a book, do our devotions, take care of finances, date, and maintain our health, to name a few. They are shaping the world in unexpected ways. It’s easy to react out of fear of the challenges that smartphones present. It’s also easy simply to mimic the habits of those around us. Neither of those responses is healthy. Instead, we need to recognize the legitimate benefits and dangers of the smartphone and assess those within a biblical framework while teaching our “digital natives” to do the same. 

Video Games

Few topics in today’s media-saturated world can get a parent or teacher ranting like kids and video gaming. According to Pew Research Center, 72% of teens have played video games in the last year, and they only represent 28% of the video-game-playing population. The video gaming world often represents unknown territory to parents, though, and their attempts to enforce boundaries and limits on their gaming kids typically end in tension and conflict. 

Money

This Parent Guide is an invitation to prayer, confession, and self-evaluation as much as it is an invitation to talk about money and generosity with your teen. We pray that this content increases our capacity and desire to invite God into every aspect of our lives— even our bank accounts. 

College Prep

Our kids are no longer kids anymore. As high school comes to a close, marking the end of a long era of their lives, they simultaneously lament what once was and excitedly anticipate college for the promise it holds. But while they’re saying goodbye to old friends and stressing over how to decorate their dorm rooms, we parents are being much more realistic, fretting about the illegal use of alcohol, atheist professors, coed dorms, and the allure of total freedom. Ultimately, as our children leave home and our loving boundaries for the first time, we’re concerned about a much more important question: How do I help my kids keep their faith in college? 

Family Night

Whether you’re on family vacation or having dinner together, time with family can be uproariously fun or full of stress, crankiness, and conflict. No matter how hard it gets to find time to spend together (or to get along while you’re together), family night is something to fight for! Trust us—you won’t regret it. 

Personal Finance

No matter who you are or where you’re from, you need to learn how to manage your personal finances in order to survive in the real world. The same is true for our teenagers, yet schools rarely have courses that teach the basic principles. This guide is a great starting place for understanding these principles and why passing them down to our kids will impact them greatly for the rest of their lives. Learn about investing, loans and credit cards, as well as how God’s Word talks about money. 

Dating

People are complicated, and romantic relationships are one of the most complex and fascinating kinds of relationships that God has given us. They’re challenging even for people working from a solid foundation. So when raising our teens, it can be daunting to consider whether or not we should allow them to date, and if we do, how we can guide them through the process well? Is it possible? Can we help our kids avoid the cesspool of “hookup” culture? Is there a “right” or biblical way to date? And above all, can we use dating as an opportunity to disciple our kids into a Christ-like perspective of others? We’ll answer these questions and more in the following pages. 

Friendship

Friendships are a driving force in the life of teenagers. Who is my best friend? How can I get in with that group of friends? Is any one my friend right now? These questions matter to teenagers. This guide will help the conversation on the importance of healthy friendships and explore what the Bible says about them.  

Gender Identity

We believe there is a God who created gender as meaningful and essential to His design of humankind, and that no matter what theories humans exchange for the truth of Scripture, that does not make Scripture any less true. The sun shines with equal brightness and warmth no matter how many clouds obscure it. The perfect and holy God created humans “in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1:27). Our goal with this guide is to come alongside you as a parent, or caring adult, and give you a Biblical basis and justification of God’s design for gender. In addition, we hope to provide practical tools for having conversations with young people who are growing up in a world that denies every part of God’s design. 

LGBTQ+

Even if your kids don’t struggle with their sexual orientations or gender identities, they probably know people who do. For the most part, the way the Church has addressed these issues has been inadequate at best and polarizing at worst. What follows is what we think you need to know about what is shaping Gen Z’s perceptions of these issues, as well as how you can engage well with your teen and the LGBTQ+ community. 

Masturbation

This Parent Guide may shock you. Actually, we hope it does. Not because we’re trying to be crude or gross, but because we believe that Gen Z needs your honesty more than you know. We hope that our bluntness inspires you to meet your kids with a willingness to be open and direct for their sakes. 

Modesty

We do not live in a modest age, and some say that’s a good thing. Talk of modesty is outmoded, old-fashioned, perhaps anti-woman, shaming, and above all LAME. Our teenagers (and some of us) will almost certainly share this perspective, and rightly so— if we frame the issue in the wrong way. What we want to do here is reframe the modesty issue in a way that is more helpful, more fair, and—as it turns out—more biblical than most of the accounts of modesty we can find today. We’ll redefine modesty, redirect the conversation about modesty, and hopefully realize along the way that the modesty talk does not have to be the lame headache it has been for several decades now. 

Pornography

There are few cultural issues more pressing than the problem of pornography. Though extremely damaging to us, porn appeals to powerful urges that God created as good. Sexually explicit material has always been a cultural pitfall, but the internet and smartphones have provided unprecedented access to it.  

Purity

As our kids become preteens, then teenagers, and eventually adults, we, as Christian parents, desire to equip them with knowledge, truth and the ability to navigate the sexual landscape. How to do just that is a hot topic, particularly in the evangelical Protestant world. From purity rings and purity balls to books and bracelets, an entire culture has developed. But often, it doesn’t seem to have worked. Parents are left wondering where they went wrong and why their children have abandoned sexual purity altogether. Young adults feel crushed and wounded by how their sexuality was treated, often citing what’s come to be known as “purity culture” as one of the main reasons they’re disenchanted with the Church. So where do we go from here? How can we take the good from the conversations we’ve been having, reject what is wrong, and raise our kids with a desire to be pure before God? 

Sexting

Today’s culture teaches teens that rebellion is part of growing up, that hiding one’s actions from prying eyes is normal, and that sex is no big deal. Because of that, sexting has become normalized—everyone does it! Right? Whether your teens attend public school, private school, or homeschool, they are not immune to the influence of culture, thanks to the ubiquity of the internet and smartphones. At some point, they or their friends will be tempted by the ease, seeming playfulness, and safety (no risk of pregnancy OR face-to-face rejection) that sexting offers. May this guide serve as an education in its appeal, its prevalence, its danger, and the underlying heart issues to begin addressing with your teens. 

Sexual Assault

We all pray that our children will experience a world safe from harm. We do our best to love and protect, but what do we do when things are out of our control? Sexual assault is a serious and scary thing and happens more frequently than we’d like to think, so we need to talk to our kids about it. As parents, we have to equip our kids and ourselves with practical tools to prevent the unthinkable. 

The Sex Talk

Because of the internet and the smartphone, culture is starting the sex conversation with our children earlier than ever. We parents can no longer afford to have only one sex talk with our kids or give them a book to read when they hit puberty. By then, it’s too late. We must start the conversation about sex early, and we must continue that conversation as our children grow.

Social Networking Etiquette for Parents

FOMO

The desire not to be left out is universal: no one wants to miss out on something interesting or important. This desire, which is especially strong during adolescence, stems from a God-given yearning to participate in significant experiences and be in meaningful community. So while it’s a natural human tendency to fear being excluded, it’s unhealthy when we let this fear control our lives. Rather than getting easier, it’s only gotten harder to resist feeling left out in today’s world. The smartphone and social media have (perhaps intentionally) exploited this fear, making it even easier to see each and every little thing that happens without us. It’s become such a powerful phenomenon that it’s been given its own term: FOMO, the “fear of missing out.”

Influencers

This guide will unpack the people driving the views, clicks and interactions on social media platforms:  the social media influencers.

Instagram

Though much younger than its predecessors, Instagram has become a social media behemoth through its simplicity, ease of us, and focus on imagery. Along with Snapchat, it’s considered by many teens as a non-negotiable in their arsenal of online profiles. So what’s the good, bad, and ugly of the app? Let’s look at how the app is changing us, both for better and worse.

Snapchat

Snapchat took the world by storm, capturing teens’ attention like Facebook did in its infancy. And while its popularity remains high, adults everywhere are still scratching their heads as to why. Now with more features that increase its popularity and continue to be mimicked by other platforms, it’s important that we parents understand how it works, why it’s so popular, and how to have formative conversations about it with our teens.

Social Media

This guide will hopefully help put parents back in the driver’s seat because children still need guidance, wisdom, and yes, sometimes even boundaries to keep them healthy and safe on social media as they learn and grow. Though trying to write the Parent Guide to Social Media is, as one Axis employee put it, like trying to write the Parent Guide to the Entire Internet (#impossible), we hope to offer a big-picture perspective, conversation starters, and ways to train them to make wise decisions. It’s easy to try to be our kids’ conscience for them, especially if we’ve already seen them make poor decisions, but it’s better in the long run to do the hard work of training their conscience properly so they can flourish and thrive the entire time they inhabit our social-media-saturated world.

TikTok

TikTok has rapidly gained popularity among teens and tweens since its launch in 2016. As “a destination for short-form mobile videos,” users upload videos of themselves lip-syncing, telling jokes, dancing, etc. For parents of teens and tweens who use the app (or keep asking to), it’s helpful to know what it is, its pitfalls and dangers, and how to talk to them about it in order to help them pursue abundant life in every area of their lives.

Youtube

If you’ve ever wondered how teens can spend hours upon hours watching random videos on YouTube, you’re not alone! YouTube is a phenomenon that has bypassed many of us adults to win over Gen Z. As the social network they “can’t live without,” we need to know all about it so we can help them think about it biblically.