Teens
We get messages all the time from parents who've found out their son is watching porn. In every one, the parents express shock. They had no idea, no clue that this was going on in their house, so they just aren't prepared to deal with it. When we talk to them, though, the signs have…
A reader asks what to do with a violently angry 11-year-old son who is fighting and hurting his siblings. The father writes, I'm dying here. My boy continues to be violent to his siblings...one in particular...and tells us he wants out of the family. I feel like a prisoner in my own family, needing to…
A while back, we were in a group of homeschoolers having a spirited discussion over our blog post, It's Just Coffee. Suddenly, Melanie noticed that the woman arguing most strenuously against it was wearing a ring on her left hand. Melanie thought, Oh, maybe she found a mate through a very regulated model of courtship. Maybe that's…
A reader asked, "We are moving across the country to North Carolina this spring or summer for a great job opportunity our family has been praying for. My 14 yr old son is taking it very hard (he is a believer). My husband and I encourage him and our other 4 children, and we concentrate…
Our oldest son shook his head, sadly. “You never would have let me do that,” he said, watching a younger sibling. We had to admit, he had a point. When he was that age, we were new parents, full of theories but short on experience. He was Offspring 1.0, and parenting was still something of…
For most of us, the primary reason we install accountability and filtering software on our computer and devices is pornography – how can we protect our kids from it? What can we do to keep ourselves out of trouble? Is there someone in the family with an undetected problem? But not every device problem deals…
Recently we wrote about how to effectively parent a pre-teen son with a crush. It's not a real, mature sort of Christian love, but a 11- or 12-year-old doesn't realize that … it's feels real to him! So we recommend you take it seriously enough to talk about relationships, not just laugh him off. An…
We've all seen them: the viral videos of parents smashing their kids' computers or sharing their stupid mistakes. Some of them are pretty funny and most of us have been tempted to do something outrageous some time or another, but is this really a good idea? Public shame has been a form of punishment throughout…
Let me be upfront. I love Star Wars. The original Star Wars was released when I was a young teen and I think I saw it 5 or 6 times the first month. It was a grand story of nobility and sacrifice, knights and princesses, tyranny and resistance, epic battles and spaceships. Spaceships! It was…
A dear sweet friend of mine nearly lost her son the other night. Just a few seconds, maybe a minute more and she'd be planning a funeral right now. Here's her story: Sam, our fourteen-year-old, came stumbling into my bedroom on Saturday night at ten, crying pretty hard and saying, "Mom, I don't know what happened,…