Parenting teenagers is an emotional business.
In theory, we know it’s developmentally normal for teens to experience big feelings and to struggle to manage them. But, in practice, witnessing our teenagers wrestle with their emotions is every bit of an emotional exercise for us parents, too. No amount of knowledge about parenting teenagers can really prepare you for the words that cut to the heart, the stonewalling (it sure feels like rejection!), and the mood swings. The house can feel like a minefield where intense emotions threaten to blow up. Trying to tiptoe over them is draining. It’s no wonder that we parents can begin to see our teens’ big emotions as problems to overcome. How can we view our kids’ emotions in light of Scripture and help them learn to steward their emotions well?
A Biblical View of Emotions
Scripture doesn’t espouse any sort of view that emotions are problems, weaknesses, or inherently sinful. Scripture constantly exhorts God’s people to feel. God calls us to engage our emotions as a response to our condition and as a response to truth. He calls us to rejoice, to take joy, to mourn. Scripture never advises us to avoid emotion, not even if our feelings are messy and seemingly nonsensical. Though we ought to be cautious with emotions (particularly anger) because of their potential to lead to sin (Eph 4:26), we should not think of our teenagers’ emotions as weakness or as sins in and of themselves.
Neither are emotions inconveniences, like unwanted side effects of human frailty. The emotions of sinless Jesus played an important role in the perfect, righteous life he lived. Jesus was angry when people desecrated Father’s house. He was sorrowful when death took his friend Lazarus. His heart ached with affection and compassion for the helpless (Matt 9:36). He embodied the emotional rendering of love for others—mourning when others mourned and rejoicing when others rejoiced. He felt anguish, dreading the pain he would have to endure on the cross. All of Jesus’s emotions were an indispensable part of his righteousness. All were an outflow of his perfect love for his Father and his people.
When we view all of this together, we can see that emotions are essential to living fully as people of God. Emotions are how we connect with God and with others, how we can understand ourselves, and how we experience God’s personal nature. They are a gift of our imaged-ness. We feel because we are made by a God who feels.
Like any other gift from God, emotions are a gift that we must steward.
Understanding Emotional Stewardship
Good stewardship of emotions cannot happen apart from facing emotions. God’s people have never been in the habit of denying or suppressing their feelings. They have been using language to identify a full range of emotions throughout biblical history. We find emotions in songs of triumph and rejoicing or in songs of despair and lament in the writings of the prophets and in the psalms. In the New Testament, the apostles’ letters use upfront language to express their joys, sorrows, and frustrations (3 John 1:4, Rom. 9:2, Rom. 7:24, James 4:9).
We don’t acknowledge and identify our feelings so that we can give the feelings themselves the driver’s seat, though. God’s people are not to submit themselves to their emotions, or sinful wants, or anything else. They are to submit themselves to God (Rom. 6:12-13). As God’s people, we don’t acknowledge our feelings just to chase after them or celebrate the feelings themselves. Feelings have a purpose and a destination.
The Bible repeats an imperative that sums up the purpose and destination of emotions (cf. the Psalms; 1 Pet. 5:7): Cry out to God. We feel because our feelings exist to move us toward God in connection with him. Good stewardship of emotions begins with identifying and acknowledging emotions while not allowing them to rule us and motivate our actions. And good stewardship of emotions continues by bringing our honest, authentic feelings to their destination: our heavenly Father.
Helping Our Teenagers Grow in Stewardship
Our teens are still learning that the purpose of their emotions is for them to connect with God, others, and to help them understand themselves better. They may see their emotions as a weakness to conquer or a danger to snuff out. Teens can be judgemental and unaccepting of their own emotions, often thinking, “When I’m emotional, I’m bad.” At the same time, they long for the safety of acceptance and love in the midst of bad feelings.
So for our teens, the battle to steward emotions well is a battle to see that it is safe and okay to feel the way they feel. They are not okay because they should trust the emotions themselves to guide them. They are okay because they are okay, however they may be feeling. And the gospel truth is that they are okay because God loves them unconditionally in Jesus.
Each believer deepens in learning and holding to these truths over a lifetime. So how can we parents help our teens in the process?
God’s Response to Messy Emotional Reactions
Let’s consider God’s response to the emotional reactions of his people by looking at two biblical examples, Job and Jonah. Their understandable despair and hurt mingled with sin in an impossible-to-untangle, messy medley of feelings. Job, distressed by tragedy, accused God of “destroying hope” and abandoning him (Job 14:18-20). Jonah, bitter against a people that had oppressed his people, refused to rejoice that God gave them a chance to turn to him (Jonah 4).
But God was not deterred by their imperfect, sin-tinged responses. He listened and took the full brunt of their feelings, without dismissing or shaming them. This is not at all to say that God agreed with the emotions themselves, or that he was turning a blind eye to the sinful part of their response. God corrected Job and Jonah the way he saw fit. But overwhelmingly, God’s response to their messy emotional reactions was not to punish them or to leave them. It was to turn his face towards them, to engage and to respond to the people he loved.
God is patient with his people in their messy, sin-stained emotions. We help our kids deal with their emotions by continuing to point them to this truth about God.
Parents, Be a Safe Place
As parents, we give a picture of God’s rock steadfastness by being a safe place for our teens to feel their emotions. By being a rock for our teens as our primary response—even if, and especially when, they are expressing emotions alongside uncontrolled words and actions—we illustrate for them God’s patient response to his people in the mess of their feelings. This is not being permissive or neglecting to discipline our children. We still hold them accountable for their words and actions, dealing with both in good time, with wisdom and grace. But in order to show our kids that emotions are meant to land at the feet of Jesus, we need to first demonstrate that emotions have a safe place to land in us, their parents.
This safety is patience. It is not dismissive, defensive, or shaming. It looks like:
- Patiently enduring the door slam, the unkind words, and the stonewall by not lashing out or stonewalling ourselves, escaping or sweeping things under the rug.
- Validating feelings (“That sounds really hard”) while holding a boundary (“It’s not okay that you speak to me that way, so after you cool off, let’s talk. I want to hear you.”)
- Respecting their boundaries and space (“It’s okay that you don’t want to talk now. I’m here to talk when you’re ready.”)
- Apologizing when we’ve lost control of our emotions or when we’ve lacked grace
- Not allowing our own discomfort with our teens’ emotions to lead us to neglect having tough conversations
The Safest Place
Learning and practicing to steward our emotions in a godly way is not easy, for us or for our teenagers. We come into parenting with our own experiences of emotional safety or unsafety. Sometimes we find being safe for another inordinately difficult when our teens’ big emotions trigger our own fears and insecurities. Maybe our own desires are at stake when our kids’ big emotions seem to hit pause on whatever we had envisioned. Maybe we’ve put too much stock in our own ability to keep free of major parenting mistakes, and their every blow-up triggers our fear that we’ve done something irreparably wrong as parents.
Thank our Lord: he is not one to turn his face away when our emotional reactions are sinful or imperfect. We don’t have to be capable enough or our parenting mistake-free enough for God’s face to resolutely turn towards us. Our heavenly Father awaits for us to bring him our exact fears, our exact shreds of faithlessness, frustrations, disappointments and heartaches, our sins. He hears our emotionally charged cries—even when we’re suffering because of our own mistakes!—without ever changing his open-arms stance towards us. He is more patient with our teens and us than is humanly possible.
This is because he is our God and we are his people, whom he bought with a price. Surely he will not deal with us as our sins deserve (Ps. 103), because they have already been dealt with at Jesus’ cross. Justified by grace, God calls us his beloved sons and daughters, and we call him our good and perfect Father. Jesus our Savior keeps us firmly in the loving grasp of the Father (John 10:28-30). Praise God! He truly is the safest place for all our messiest emotions.
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