Parenting Teens: Getting Ready for the Release

Show Notes

What are some of the practical life skills parents can help their teens develop as they anticipate leaving home for the first time? Dennis and Barbara Rainey answer that question in this episode of the Barbara Rainey Podcast.

What is The Barbara Rainey Podcast?

Barbara Rainey mentors women in their most important relationships. She loves encouraging women to believe God and experience Him in every area of their lives.

Phil: If you ever take archery lessons, you’ll learn how to hold the bow, how to draw the arrow back to your cheek and sight the target.

SFX: Drawing back arrow

Phil: But the most important moment — the instant that will determine whether your arrow goes where you mean it to — is your release.

SFX: arrow being shot

Phil: In Psalm 127, God compares children to arrows in a warrior’s quiver. Today, you’re the warrior, and Dennis and Barbara Rainey are here to help you work on your release.

Barbara: We could have bailed her out and said, "Oh, honey, it's okay," and we could have just sent her the money, but we wanted her to learn the lesson about being responsible for your mistakes.

Dennis: You need to know what you’re aiming for. You need to know where you’re launching the arrow towards, what the bullseye is.

Phil: Welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast, helping you be changed by Jesus which will, in turn, transform your home. Thanks for listening!

In actuality, parents have a lot of so-called release points with their children, those moments where they have to loosen their grip and let their kids go a little more.

But a major release happens when your child finishes high school and moves into the next phase of life: college, a trade school, working full-time, the military, whatever that might be.

Well, today we’re going to hear from the warriors Dennis and Barbara Rainey, who at one point had six arrows in their quiver, so they have some experience with this concept of releasing kids to fly straight and true toward the mark.

Here’s Barbara.

Barbara: I remember the first time we sent a child, our first child, off to college. All the fears that plagued me – was she going to be able to manage her schedule? Was she going to stay up so late at night, night after night, talking and visiting and not studying? Was she going to flunk out of school? Was she going to eat the right things? Was she going to get sick and get mono because I wasn't there to help her go to bed on time?

Just on and on and on – the fears and the concerns that you have for your child when they go off on their own are just limitless.

Phil: Teenagers have a lot of learning left in life. Dennis points out one practical area where they often need some help.

Dennis: Time management is something that has to be taught to children. They are not going to naturally learn this. In fact, in my hands, I have Exhibit A of the great need for time management. It starts at the very beginning of where time starts every day – getting up.

A teenager has to learn how to get up. I walked into my daughter Rebecca's room and found all of these notes that I have in my hand. She had these notes taped on her alarm clock, on her lampshade, on her window, on her bedpost – I mean, it looked like some kind of card game.

But here is the first one – it said, "Get up now!" Then the second one reads, "Don't close those eyes!!" The third one reads, "Come on now, don't go back to sleep." And the last one reads, "Get up or else!"

But, you know, as we train these young people to ultimately take on responsibility on the college campus, in a job, or in the service, they've got to learn how to get up, and they need to learn that first at home. They ought not to sleep through half of their classes before they learn how to wake up in the morning.

Phil: Managing time wisely is something some kids latch onto more quickly than others. Barbara says the school of natural consequences can be a parent’s ally in this.

Barbara: Part of learning to manage your time and manage your life is going to come about through making mistakes. You're going to have to over-commit or not do the project on time to learn what it cost you to not do it well, and then you say to yourself, "Oh, well, I better not do it that way again next time," and I think our kids have to learn some of those lessons in order to understand how to manage their time. They're going to have to make some of those mistakes.

So, yes, we've had some kids that have been better at managing their time and keeping things flowing than others, but they have all had to make those goofs and those mistakes to really understand what it means to keep a schedule going.

Dennis: And one of the best things we've done for each of our children is give our children a notebook or a schedule, a time-minder, that enables them to be able to schedule and anticipate things in their day, in their week, in their month, and I think help them ultimately be time managers.

Barbara: One of the phrases that I've often said to my kids is, "Do your work first and play second." And I just have to remind them that the way you should do it is do your work first and then you reward yourself with your play, whatever it is. They, of course, don't want to live that way, but that's a part of teaching them priorities and teaching them that they need to do what needs to be done first and then do what's frivolous second, and they don't like it, but it's a part of growing up.

Dennis: It's at this point that a parent has to learn the art of allowing their children to make their own choices and, at times, fail. It's at those points that God grows our kids up, and we, as moms, as dads, have to move ourselves out of the way of that young person and let them hammer out their values, and they're going to be different because they're not identical to us, and they shouldn't be identical to us.

As a parent, what we have to do is take our hands off and let them learn the consequences of their own choices – have the pain settle in deep and let them feel it and not rush into rescue them, because if you do, you are creating an emotional cripple or perhaps a spiritual cripple at that point who isn't always going to have a mom or a dad to bail them out when they get into trouble.

Phil: Time management is key. And closely related to that is another practical life skill parents would do well to instill in their teens. Barbara explains.

Barbara: One of the things that we try to do as a couple when we were raising our kids is instill the whole idea of the work ethic with our kids. And one of our top 10 values was teaching our kids how to work and teaching them how to complete a job and teaching them that it's important to be faithful when you've been given a task to do and to do it well and to not do a sloppy job. Even though they try to do a sloppy job, we try to make them go back and do it well.

So I think that in addition to helping them get a job, as we have done with all of our teenagers when they were old enough to get a job, we have also tried to teach them how to work and how to be good workers and how to work hard. So that's been kind of in tandem – those two values – teaching them how to have a good work ethic and then helping them get their first job and teaching them what it means to have a job.

Dennis: And, you know, again, our sons and daughters need parents to be involved and stay involved as they make these choices. We need to be lighthanded about it. We need to let them go and then let them make their own choices. But as they open up and want to discuss it, interact with them and talk with them about where they're headed and what their values are and why they are making those choices.

Barbara: If I had a child who was a senior in high school and was struggling with that balance of priorities between, say, sports and homework, I might say something here or there, but I would step in and actually help – I wouldn't go to the rescue as much with a senior in high school as I would with someone who is a freshman in high school, because I think there's a big difference in their ability to balance all that in those three years. I think there's a huge difference.

So – with a senior, I would back off, and I might remind a time or two – because I'm pretty good at that, maybe too good at that – but, anyway, I can't totally let go as a mom, it's real hard for me to totally back off. I did back off with Samuel a good bit.

Dennis: I can testify. I watched it.

Barbara: I did, and it was hard.

Dennis: It was hard for Mother to do this.

Barbara: Because he'd rather be on the computer, so his thing wasn't sports, his thing was computer, and he'd rather read his e-mail and send e-mail and do computer games and all that kind of stuff and then start his homework at 10:00 at night, and that was his pattern, and that's what he'd rather do, and he never did buy into my "work first, play second" philosophy of life. His was always "play first and work second," if you can do it.

So it was hard for me to back off, but I knew that I had to because I'd rather he'd learn those lessons in high school than fail and flunk out of college.

Phil: The Bible makes a clear connection between being a good worker and accumulating wealth. Common sense tells us that, too. But lots of teens have some lessons they still need to learn in managing their money well.

Dennis: One of the things that happened as our older two went away to college was they hit the proverbial wall. They realized they did not have enough money coming from us to be able to sustain their tastes, and they were putting the full court press on Mom and Dad. I can still remember the spot this occurred in our house. Ashley and Benjamin had me cornered, and they were saying, "You're not giving us enough money," and I said, with a smile on my face, "That's by design. I am not intending to satisfy all the wants and needs that you have as a young adult. You both are growing into adults, and that means you have adult tastes and adult purchasing habits, and that means you need adult income. Now, if Dad is only able to supply a childlike income, then the difference has to be made up by somebody other than Mom and Dad."

And they both began to look at one another, "Well, who might that be?" And the answer is "You – you are the one that has to make up the difference. You need to get a job, you need to learn the art of saving your money, and you need to determine what you're going to spend your money on because there will always be more desires, more wants, more things you'd like to have than you'll ever be able to purchase and you know what? You can't use a credit card. And you're going to be bombarded by credit cards as you get away to college, but I'm not going to let you have a credit card for your first year at college because you're not ready to handle credit yet."

Barbara: I’ve tried…(budgets 11:00-ish)

Dennis: In fact, the bottom line on not releasing our kids is we prolong childhood, and when you do that, you prevent your child from becoming an adult, and what I've seen as I've ventured out onto the college campus, I am seeing a lot of young people who have been repeatedly bailed out of problems by their parents.

And so they are still children even though they have adult-like bodies, and what we have got to do, as parents, is allow our kids to fail and then allow them to …

Barbara: To pay the price.

Dennis: That's right – to feel the pain and allow them the privilege of solving their own problems.

You see, as a parent, we have got to be developers of their conscience and of their dependence upon God for some of the fixes they get themselves in because if they act like a fool, they've got the consequences of a fool to deal with. And when we mask the pain, when we keep them from feeling it, full force, whether it be financially or emotionally, we bail them out, we may be preventing them from really becoming dependent upon Jesus Christ and growing into the young man or young woman God wants them to become.

Barbara: Well, and then they are even more susceptible to becoming bait on the college campus because they haven't developed that sense of responsibility that says, "When I get a driving ticket, I have to pay." And if they don't ever have to pay for those, and they know Mom and Dad is going to always be there, then why worry about making mistakes. What difference does it make? It doesn't.

And so I think it's very important that parents understand that they've got to let their kids suffer those consequences when they're at home so that they will understand what that means when they are on their own in college.

Dennis: And, parent, do not rescue them. Let them deal with the consequences – get another job, get two jobs, be forced to really pay the price for their wrong choice. Sometimes those results can help our children wake up.

Barbara: The ideal way to do it is to begin to give them some freedom at home during those high school years, especially the later high school years, and then interact over the decisions that your child makes, and it may be that even as a junior and a senior, you need to establish some discipline for some of those poor choices, but you talk it through, and you say, "Now, this is why we believe what we believe. This is why you're going to suffer this consequence, but we want you to understand so that you can make a wise choice later on," and help walk them through some things as juniors and seniors especially, so that when they are in college, they've got some experience to count on and to work from as they go on into college.

Dennis: Just think about it, Mom, Dad – reflect on your own lives – where you were at this age. Reflect on the mistakes you made, and I shudder – I mean – I believe in angels. I believe God protected me as a young man, and that's a part of our problem. We reflect on how we were, but what we need to do is we need to reach out to our kids when they make those mistakes in love, in gentleness – not reject them, not shut down communication, not withdraw from them but love them through the process and not react emotionally to them. They need to be loved in the middle of their mistakes.

Barbara: Sometimes those mistakes are pretty hard to live with. But it's good for them. I remember the first year of Ashley's college experience when she was balancing and keeping her checkbook on her own for the first time, and even though she had responsibility for money through her high school years, she didn't really have total responsibility like she did in college, and she was talked into joining a health club by a friend, and she didn't realize, because she just had never had to do this before. She did not understand what it would mean to have to pay that fee every month for nine months or 12 months, whatever it was, and after she joined she couldn't get out. So she was strapped with this financial obligation as a freshman and was just absolutely dying because she couldn't meet it month after month.

Well, we could have bailed her out and said, "Oh, honey, it's okay," and we could have just sent her the money, but we wanted her to learn the lesson about being responsible for your mistakes, and it was clearly a mistake, and it was a hard lesson for her, and she suffered throughout that year because of that commitment that she had made.

So that's the kind of lesson that I think it's important for kids to learn, and it was hard to watch her make it, and we wanted to rescue her, but we knew it would have been the wrong thing to do.

Dennis: And that's why, as a parent, you've got to save your silver bullets. You've only got so many of them to fire during that senior year, and you can't unload your holster in their lives the first 30 days of their senior year. You've got to begin to back off and say less and less and less and begin to let them know that you are trusting God in their lives to bring them into conformity of Jesus Christ.

Phil: We’re talking about practical life skills that parents want to be sure their teens are at least working on developing as they look toward graduating and perhaps leaving home for the first time.

Barbara points out, it takes intentionality, especially when your child is in that last semester of his or her senior year. She says the busyness of life begins to ramp up.

Barbara: Our seniors always do a play at the end of the year that the senior class puts on, so that requires a lot of practices, and it requires the family to go and watch, which we want to do, but it's another event, and then preparing for graduation and senior prom and a lot of the other things that go along with your son or daughter being a senior.

And those activities are fun, and they're wonderful, and they're special, but it just creates a lot of extra busyness for the whole family.

Phil: Kids are busy, the family’s busy, and parents can lose sight of the fact that the “arrow” is about to be released.

Barbara: Yes, I think the tendency is to forget, because I do think that in the busyness you lose sight of what's ahead. But, for me, it kind of caught up with me at graduation because at graduation you can sit down, and you can breathe for a few minutes, and I just remember the whole graduation thing and watching the kids together and watching them parade in, and they call out their names, and it's not just my son, as I think back to that graduation – it was all these other kids that I knew, too, that he had gone to school with since he was in elementary school, and I knew those kids, and I knew their parents. So it's not just my own child that you begin to think ahead for – you're thinking about all these other kids and what the future holds for them and what does the future hold for your son? And that was when it sort of began to catch up with me, and I began to feel that emotion of what is this going to feel like when he's really gone?

Dennis: Well, it was all pretty emotional to me, but at a church service where we honored our seniors one night, there was a defining moment where the kids' youth pastor had written a poem that was entitled, "With These Hands," and what he did was he asked all of us, as parents, to stand as our graduating senior was seated in front of us, and we placed our hands on the shoulders of our sons and daughters. And Barbara and I were standing above Benjamin, and I remember, the more he read the more emotional I got.

Because this poem that he wrote really helps capture what is taking place in the heart of a parent as they are releasing their children to adulthood.

Barbara: It's not real easy to listen to because the way he wrote this there are so many pictures that standing there with our hands on Benjamin's shoulders, just a jillion memories flood through your brain because you just can picture doing all of these things that he has written about. So I will do my best to read this.

"With these hands I gently cradled this child,
Held him close to my heart;
Nursed his wounds and calmed her fears;
Held the books that I would read and rock this child fast asleep …

Dennis: She's never going to make it. I'll read it.

"With these hands I gently cradled this child,
Held him close to my heart;
Nursed his wounds and calmed her fears;
Held the books that I would read and rocked this child fast asleep.

With these hands, I made his lunches
And drove the car that carried her to school,
Snapped endless pictures,
Wrapped countless gifts,
Then did my best to assemble those gifts.
Combed his hair and wiped her tear,
Let her know that I was near;
To nurse his wounds and heal her heart when it would break.

With these hands, I made mistakes,
And with these hands, I prayed and prayed and prayed.
These hands are feeble, these hands are worn;
These hands can no longer calm the storms.
These hands have done all they can do;
These hands now release this child, my child, to You.

For Your hands are able,
Your hands are strong,
Your hands alone can calm the storms.
Your hands will continue to do what they are so gifted to do,
To shape his life and make her new.
Into Your hands receive this child,
For my child I now give back to You.
In the strong name of Jesus, and with all my heart I pray, amen."
(With These Hands, by Mark Dymaz © 1994)

I think the picture of standing over your son or your daughter and having that read and of seeing the snapshots along the way of the vivid memories of raising a son or raising a daughter, you are hit with the brevity of life and with the importance of the handoff. And although those seniors who sat there didn't weep nearly as much as their parents did, someday they will, and someday they will stand over a son or a daughter and, all of a sudden, they will understand why.

And the reason is, parenting is exhausting, it is a challenge. It takes everything you've got to be able to pull it off to His glory, and as a parent, you desire that this child be commissioned by these hands and receive the blessing of God and go off on their own to make their own choices and honor Him with their lives, because I think that's what God set the family up to be, this nurture center that after the life was built into and after it was cherished and cared for, that child was not intended to stay there but was intended to go adulthood and to make an impact on his or her world.

Barbara: One of the things that we've done with our kids – somewhere during their senior year, we've given them more freedom on hours, more freedom on where they can go and how late they can stay out and what they can do. But I've had lots of conversations with those seniors during their senior year about what it means to be accountable, because, in their minds, they're thinking, "This means I can do whatever I want whenever I want, and I don't have to report in."

And I've said to them, "Well, that's true, we're giving you more freedom, but it doesn't mean that your freedom is unlimited," and I with, each one of them, give the illustration of our relationship in marriage and how Dennis and I have freedom, but we always tell each other where we're going, when we're going to come back, when we expect one another, and if we're going to be later than we say, we're going to call. And I have explained to them that it's important that there is still accountability.

Even though we're giving you more freedom, you need us, and we need you, and we need to continue to relate. It doesn't mean a total letting go, and that's what we mean by abandonment, and I think it's easy to be talked into letting go too much by your kids because that's what your kids want, and they're going to demand that. But, as parents, we need to be wise and let our kids know that they still needs, and there needs to be a level of accountability and interaction in this increased freedom.

Dennis: It's my understanding that the eagle will begin to dismantle her nest as soon as the birds are ready to fly. They may not know they are ready to fly, but the mother eagle does, and so one day God has put it in her being to being to, piece by piece, take the nest apart. And you can almost picture these little birds looking at Mom going, "What in the world are you doing? We're on a cliff."

You know, and the little ones want to stay there and perch on the nest, but the mother eagle knows the birds were intended to soar, not to stay in the nest and perch.

And one of the things that your mind goes back and forth between is, one, is you keep in mind that your children were meant to soar. They weren't meant to stay home.

But you also remember the nest, and you remember the pleasant time of having that relationship and that friendship and the fun that is involved in a family, and on one hand you don't want to dismantle that nest but, on the other hand, you realize God intended them to soar.

And it was with those conflicting feelings that Barbara and I, along with Benjamin and Ashley, drove Benjamin to the university to take him to school. And, I've got to tell you, before we even got out of the city limits, Barbara and I looked at each other, and we were already starting to cry. And we thought, "You're a basket case," and she looked back at me and said, "You are, too." But the emotion of the moment was so profound, so powerful, to take Benjamin away to college, and Ashley had joined with us because she wanted to go be a part of this day, which was kind of Benjamin's sendoff.

Barbara: With Ashley it was pretty easy to be naïve, and we just hadn't been through it before and so we didn't really know what to expect. But with Benjamin, we did know what to expect, which is why we found ourselves getting teary before we'd even left the city limits because we both knew what was coming. So it was with a sense of "wish we didn't have to go through this again" kind of thing and yet knowing that we had to do it; that we'd left town to drive him to school.

Dennis: Well, we went ahead and drove on to the university and arrived to have to clean his room, which was a pit. But it was nearly dusk when the first bittersweet moment came. Benjamin and I went outside the student housing for some fresh air and sat on the tailgate of a truck parked near the door.

There we sat and watched a stream of young men pass by. Most of them had been drinking or were in the process of getting drunk. I can't tell you how frightening it was to sit there and watch that occur and wonder – were we making a mistake? And here is where fathers have got to help the mothers of these young men and women – they've got to help them not build a fence around the nest. The dads have got to say, "Come on, Mom, you've got to start dismantling this thing and stop keeping the bird in the nest and let go."

And also remind one another that if you keep stuffing the bird back in the nest, the bird will never learn how to fly. The bird was meant to leave the nest and was meant to soar. And, as a parent, at that point, you've dismantled the nest. The bird has been kicked out of the nest, and there may be a freefall for a moment, but then the wings stretch out, and the bird begins to soar, and it wasn't long before we realized we hadn't made a mistake, and Benjamin was beginning to have an impact spiritually on those that he lived with.

We ended our day together with dinner, and, interestingly enough, we went to a place that Barbara and I used to hang out when we were college students in Northwest Arkansas, and after we worked our way through some of their chicken, I pulled out my Bible and just a couple of days before when I was having a quiet time, I believe the Lord had brought me a passage of Scripture that embodied what this release point was all about.

Philippians 2:14-16 "Prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation holding fast the word of life so that in the day of Christ I may have cause to glory because I did not run in vain nor toil in vain."

The more I read, the more I choked up. The words "crooked and perverse generation" described the world Benjamin was about to enter. It was a solemn moment. As my eyes met Benjamin's they filled with tears again. I challenged him – "Son, hold fast to your faith so that your mom and I will have reason to rejoice that the 18 years of parenting was not in vain."

Moments later, Barbara and I hugged Benjamin's neck one last time in the parking lot before letting go. We told him we loved him no matter what and prayed that God would give him the strength and the courage to withstand the temptations he was about to face. Then all three of us cried together one last time.

And those are bittersweet moments but now, you know, looking back on it, it was right, it was good, and it was a passage of a life into young adulthood, and God has honored His faith and His Word in Benjamin's life, and his mother's faithfulness and all the instruction she brought to bear in his life, and we look back now as that mother eagle must look from the ledge as her young eagles soar.

Phil: Well, we’ve managed to mix our metaphors today. But analogies can be helpful. Whether you think of yourself as a warrior with an arrow that is going to need to be launched, or more like a mother eagle encouraging the young one to leave the nest and soar on the wind, it’s going to take being intentional and depending on God for help, isn’t it?

Intentionality and dependence on God are really at the heart of a book by Dennis and Barbara Rainey titled The Art of Parenting. In it, they help you focus your attention on four crucial elements in your child’s life:
Relationships
Character
Identity, and
Mission

You can find more information on how you can order your copy of The Art of Parenting, by Dennis and Barbara Rainey, by going to:
EverThineHome.com/ArtOfParenting. Again, it’s EverThineHome.com/ArtOfParenting.

Thanks for listening today! May your parenting and all of life be increasingly dependent on the Lord. See you next time, for the Barbara Rainey Podcast, from Ever Thine Home.