Engaging Your Teen's World: Understanding What Today's Youth Are Thinking, Doing, and Watching

Are you struggling to engage with your kids in an era of smartphones, hectic schedules, and cultural confusion? David Eaton and Jeremiah Callihan are here to help. With great wisdom and a genuine heart for today’s teens, they offer keen, biblically based insight that parents will find invaluable.

—Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family

David and Jeremiah understand the next generation. And they are passionate about helping you parent well. So listen to what they have to say! And allow them to serve as your coaches on connecting with teenagers today. Better parenting starts now!

—Brad Lomenick, founder of BLINC and author of The Catalyst Leader and H3 Leadership

"I love this book. Engaging Your Teen’s World is a positive, practical, and powerful book. Since it is written by parents and youth culture experts, this book will help you better understand student culture today and equip you to effectively engage the teenagers in your life. I highly recommend it."

—Sean McDowell, PhD, associate professor at Biola University, speaker, and coauthor of So the Next Generation Will Know

"Say good-bye to guilt, frustration, and sullen silence. Engaging Your Teen’s World is a game changer in understanding your kids and engaging them through curiosity and common sense. David Eaton and Jeremiah Callihan from Axis are trusted ‘culture translators’ who demystify teen culture with proven, practical advice."

—Jeff Myers, PhD, president of Summit Ministries

In this culture, every parent of teens needs an offensive game plan to guide and protect their teens through one of the most dangerous seasons of their lives. Eaton and Callihan’s book will empower you with the vison, courage, and wisdom you need to disciple your sons and daughters to become mature and productive followers of Christ.

—Dr. Dennis Rainey, founder of FamilyLife

This book is full of clarity and practical—really practical—advice. Parents, youth workers, grandparents, and anyone with a teenager in their life would do well to absorb the wisdom here.

—John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and coauthor of A Practical Guide to Culture

© 2020 by Axis

Published by Bethany House Publishers

11400 Hampshire Avenue South

Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

www.bethanyhouse.com

Bethany House Publishers is a division of

Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

Ebook edition created 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-2527-3

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations identified ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016

Scripture quotations identified MESSAGE are from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Scripture quotations identified NLT are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations identified TLB are from The Living Bible, copyright © 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Brand Navigation

To my parents.

—David

To the reason God put me here to care about having one lifelong conversation: Nehemiah, Elijah, Jonathan, and Mari. To the one helping me have that one lifelong conversation: my amazing wife, Kim.

—Jeremiah

To the parents and grandparents courageously raising the rising generation.

Contents

Cover    1

Endorsements    2

Title Page    3

Copyright Page    4

Dedication    5

Introduction: We Know You Care    9

Section 1: Why Engaging Your Teen’s World Matters    11

1. You Are a Third-Way Parent    13

2. The Most Important Conversation    23

3. Your Wisdom, Their Wonder    37

4. Conversation: The Hunger for WITH    51

5. Translating Culture    58

6. Missionaries Cleverly Disguised as Parents    72

Section 2: How to Engage with Your Teen    77

7. Cultivating a Heart Connection    79

8. Two Types of Conversations    88

Section 3: Topics You Need to Engage with Your Teen    97

9. The New Sex Talk    99

10. Smartphones    107

11. Video Games    120

12. College    139

13. Depression and Anxiety    156

14. Drugs    168

Section 4: What Now?    177

15. You Can Do It!    179

Recommended Resources    195

Acknowledgments    198

Notes    201

About the Authors    207

Back Cover    209

Introduction

We Know You Care

If you’re cracking open these pages, you care about a teenager. You are a parent, grandparent, teacher, coach, student pastor, mentor, or youth worker. Perhaps your greatest tool in shaping the soft clay of their lives is the simplest tool you wield: You care. You care enough to worry about them, have hard conversations with them, invest your precious time into them, discipline them, pray for them, and pick up a book like this one to learn how you can help them. And if you don’t actually do all those things, you want to.

Chances are that someone cared for you as you navigated your turbulent and insecure teenage years. Perhaps a teacher spoke vision into you, a coach challenged you to dig deep, a parent reached past your destructive behavior, or a grandparent made you feel like you were worth loving. A moment of care or belief can change everything! We all need someone to care about us and believe in us when we are young. Care is vital, but unfortunately, it’s not enough. You’re going to need more tools in your tool belt.

Teens have a bad reputation. Too often we talk down about them. We have low expectations of them, and many times they live up to that low bar we’ve set. You had better believe they pick up on our lack of confidence in them. Many of us have believed lies that teens are full of problems, and that we just need to wait it out so they can limp into adulthood. Youth expert Sharon Galgay Ketcham says, We problematize teenagers and use significant resources to try to fix them. This narrative evokes fear and, in loving response, parents are desperate to keep them safe. . . . Teenagers are more than problems to be solved—they have potential as human beings.1 Our Axis team of culture translators and parent research assistants agrees!

Teens are also battling massive issues. There are apps, troubling videos, sexual images, and cyber bullying entering their world through smartphones. There are opioids, Adderall, marijuana, and vapes entering their bloodstream. There are mental health, depression, and anxiety issues welling up inside their brains. They live in a noisy world clamoring for their attention. Your blood pressure is probably rising as you read this. You probably wonder how you can talk about God, the Gospel, the church, and the family in a culture crowded with these vices. Keep reading. We’ve got good news!

We want to make our motives clear; we want you to move from a caring adult in the life of a teen to a confident influencer of your teen. Our Axis team helps tens of thousands of parents understand teen culture every week, and we want to equip you to join the teens you care about on their journey into lifelong faith. Think of us as your research assistants. God put them in your life and you in their life on purpose. We believe in you, and we want to help you. We want to watch your confidence and passion for discipling your teen spike like it has for tens of thousands of parents. We want to help you engage your teen’s world.

Our team creates a lot of content, too much to cram it all into this book. We organized the book into four sections: Why Engaging Your Teen’s World Matters, How to Engage with Your Teen, Topics You Need to Engage with Your Teen, and What Now? We share practical knowledge and next steps, but we only scratch the surface in some areas. Don’t worry, at the end of the book, we recommend resources to dig deeper into many of these topics.

We aim to encourage and equip you for the role God has given you.

Thanks for letting us into your journey with the teen you’re crazy about.

—David Eaton, Axis president and cofounder, and Jeremiah Callihan, Axis CEO and cofounder

1

You Are a Third-Way Parent

Young people are open and at a place where caring adults are still important in their lives—something that seems to hold true across all studies of youth and adolescents.

Daniel White Hodge, Center for Youth Ministry Studies1

Tell your children about it in the years to come, and let your children tell their children. Pass the story down from generation to generation.

Joel 1:3 NLT

The average adult says they only have about one spiritual conversation a year.

The Barna Group2

In 2007 Steve Jobs walked onto a stage in San Francisco wearing his iconic outfit; jeans, a black turtleneck, and gray New Balance shoes. The crowd waited with bated breath, anticipating his announcement. This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.

The moment he let out the secret that Apple would be releasing a revolutionary mobile phone, the crowd cheered. His next statement was nothing short of prophetic: Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.3 That same year Netflix shifted from sending DVD packets in the mail to streaming movies. Not only did phones, mobile internet access, and media consumption change in 2007, our whole culture changed.

Amidst the technology buzz, we at Axis were hatching our own plan. We were burdened for the next generation to follow Jesus into lifelong faith. Axis was birthed from our desire to see the next generation develop lifelong faith. Just like the iPhone, we had conceived the idea of Axis years before, but in 2007 we welcomed it into the world. The Axis story line has been intertwined with the smartphone ever since. We don’t think it’s an accident.

While technology has been changing for some time, smartphones introduced a level of change and complexity our world has never experienced before. That moment seemed to spin the earth faster on its axis (see what we did there?). Since then our team has been inviting teens, parents, and other caring adults to engage in this journey instead of simply fighting it or running from it.

While the story line of our ministry matters to us, this book isn’t about us or about the past. It’s about you and your future. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a caring adult—a parent, grandparent, pastor, coach, teacher, or mentor to a teen. This book is about you and your relationship with the teen (or teens) you care about. Amidst all the bad news and negativity, scrolling news tickers and social media feeds, we believe there is hope. There is good news in these pages for you. You’ve got a job to do, and we are here to help.

Two Stories, One Mission

Jeremiah and I were in our early twenties when the smartphone and Axis emerged. As a couple of zealous young guys, we saw the problem from the inside out: most teens aren’t growing into a lifelong faith; they are growing out of it. Our stories are very different, but our burning passion for teens to experience a lifelong faith is the same.

I (David) came from what you might characterize as the stable family. Every family has issues, of course, but my family is intact and more than functional. I learned lifelong faith at home. I won the parenting lottery. My parents were unassuming and gave me significant time growing up. My mom quit working as a teacher when I was born to work even harder as a full-time mom. As Lindsey and I raise our own kids, I think of that decision every week.

I’ll also never forget an ironic celebration for my father at the dinner table when I was in elementary school. My dad was a police officer and received a promotion. But when you grow in seniority as an officer it means you get the bad shifts. So he turned down seniority. My mom made a shrimp dinner (this Texas kid had never seen a shrimp before) and announced, Today is special! Your father turned down a promotion so he wouldn’t have to work nights and weekends and he can be with us. I’ll never forget eating shrimp dinner in the heart of Texas celebrating that promotion he turned down. My parents sacrificed much for us.

My parents were faithful, and they walked with Jesus. They raised me around the church with plenty of opportunities to serve within the congregation. In the mornings I would find my dad reading his Bible as he ate his Raisin Bran. The sex talk was blunt and without shame. I had an overzealous edge to my faith, and they helped me tone that down. Perhaps the seeds of this urgency for a generation to know Jesus were already in my bones. I was learning to work out the Gospel in the context of home, family, school, and the local church.

We ask a powerful question at Axis: What breaks your heart and baffles your mind? My heart breaks as I look back at my friends from high school. We went to church camp together, served on mission trips, huddled together to pray, and shared our faith. I still have a picture from a mission trip showing our team with our Bibles in hand, preaching the Gospel on a busy street corner. Since then, many of my friends have been stripped threadbare by life—many of them divorced, one of them dead, a lot of heartbreak, and three of them who were preaching in the picture with me are now atheists. Somehow the passion and zeal for Jesus didn’t stick. They chucked their faith and went on with their lives.

Jeremiah had a different texture to his family.

I (Jeremiah) weathered a disorienting tapestry of experiences, moves across the country, and strange church experiences in search of the perfect spiritual environment. My parents were Christ-followers who put my siblings and me into intense environments to grow our dedication to God. The only problem was that these environments emphasized fear and legalism. Still, there was much goodness in my family and in the connected faith communities we were part of. But the pain that began in these very legalistic environments marked me.

My faith grew through a youth group, leadership on basketball teams, conversations with my parents and more conversations with my peers (including my future wife, Kimberly), studying apologetics, and environments where reason and faith collided. My faith and maturity grew amidst the tensions I experienced. My mind latched on to the words of C. S. Lewis, modern apologists, and courses that cultivated my worldview. All the while my heart for the next generation developed. Older men showed me the way, some of whom didn’t even follow the life of Jesus.

My parents certainly were not perfect, but they did many things well. One thing I’m forever grateful to them for is sending me to Summit Ministries (which we are huge fans of) for a two-week worldview immersion. They also encouraged me to go to the Focus on the Family Institute, where I met David and my wife. Without those two organizations, Axis would not exist. I am so grateful my parents pushed me to do both.

My parents divorced when I was a young husband and father in my mid-twenties. Of course, it’s still painful, but I will continue to fight to be a faith-filled husband and father. What I still want, to this day, is a lifelong conversation with my parents, despite their divorce and the pain this caused me as a young man. My heart beats to help parents and teens develop a lifelong faith.

Our stories are very different, but they led us to the same mission: helping teens develop a lifelong faith. We watched friends drift from their faith. Instead of trying to sidestep faith barriers, we have observed that we’ve always talked openly about them. We’ve even leveraged them as mechanisms for captivating an audience and starting conversations. We’ve chosen to take a redemptive posture on culture that doesn’t condemn it or run from it. We’ll share more about that third way of parenting throughout the book.

Very few people are starting meaningful conversations to translate culture through the lens of the Gospel. Even fewer were doing this a decade ago. So, our team developed creative ways to