Choices for teens

  Lately, I have been hearing my friends talk about what their children will be doing for school next year.  There are a lot of changes in the works and it got me thinking about something that they are saying and that I have said in the past.  “She decided she wants to . . .” and “he would rather . . .” are the main ways the conversation starts.  I did this with one of my kids.  I gave her a choice - she could go to school and not play sports or she could homeschool and still play sports.  She chose to homeschool, but really, should I have had her making that choice?  On the one hand, we want our kids to want what we decide is best for them.  But on the other hand, it is our job as parents to decide what that is, even when they are 16.  

Now, I am a firm believer that teens should be making more and more of their own decisions, even if they choose something that will turn out to be a mistake.  I think teens should be learning how to be adults, with responsibilities and consequences to their actions.  But are they equipped to make this decision and looking at the right things to be deciding where they go to high school?  College, maybe, with some guidance, but the type of education they get leading up to college?  We aren’t really talking about “where” so much as the type of education they will have.  If we choose public school, they get one kind of education.  Private school means another type.  Homeschooling can be a whole range of types of education because you not only decide to homeschool, you decide what your homeschool looks like.  

School is so much more than the academic subjects.  They learn social skills, good and, mostly, bad.  They learn how to deal with authorities other than their parents.  They learn time management, or not, if the school dictates every minute of their day to them.  The list goes on and on.  But what is a teen looking at when they are deciding what type of education they want?  They are most likely only looking at where their friends are and what their friends are doing.  They might also look at whether they want to be around their parents or siblings.  What they are not looking at is the long term consequences of the worldview they are being taught.  They are not looking at the long term consequences of how their choice will affect family relationships.  They are not looking at what they need to know, really, to be godly men and women.  

So who needs to make the choice?  Parents.  We should probably discuss it with our teens, but that doesn’t mean we just hand over our responsibility to them and let them do what they want.  We need to prayerfully consider Scripture and what God is asking us to do with and for our children and then do it.  Whether they agree with our decision or not.   And this isn’t just for education.  I am very guilty of handing over my parenting responsibilities too early in my teen’s life.  Something I need to repent of and work on.  Our kids need us to be parents.  Let’s do this.