If they would be honest with us, our kids would tell us that their feelings and emotions serve far too often as their guide for life. Not surprisingly, today’s culture encourages this kind of feeling-driven living. To be honest, being driven by feelings and emotions is not just an issue for our kids. What a shame it would be if history remembered our generation of Christian parents as people who didn’t do anything to help their kids listen to God instead of their windblown emotions. Feelings should never eclipse God’s truth. We must walk our teens through the Scriptures to show them examples of people who allowed their emotions to eclipse the truth, and then suffered the consequences. This includes people like David with Bathsheba, Lot’s wife, and Ananias and Sapphira. One way that we can help our kids see the dangers of feelings is by walking them through the stories of our own lives by sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly regarding the feelings-based and truth-based choices we’ve made.

The title of a recent article in Atlantic magazine caught my eye. It reads, “the elite college students who can't read books to read a book in college it helps to have read a book in high school.” In the article, Rose Horowitch writes that many students no longer arrive at college, even at highly selective elite colleges, prepared to read books. In her research she found that it's not that students don't want to do the reading. It's that they don't know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to. She writes that in 1976 about 40% of high school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5% who hadn't read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped. It's reasonable to assume that one reason for the decline in reading and reading aptitude is the smartphone. One maxim that I heard years ago is this, readers are leaders and leaders are readers. Parents, we encourage you to get your kids to put down the phones and pick up a book.

I often find that when I’m with a group of parents teaching them about today’s youth culture, many wonder if their kids have any interest at all in talking about the Christian Faith, the Bible, and Jesus Christ. There’s a commonly held belief that with all the attractive things the world has to offer, kids just don’t want to have anything to do with conversations about God. But because we know that all of these other distractions offered by the world can never fulfill one’s created purpose to know God, our kids are left feeling empty. I often say that a youth culture landscape littered with brokenness is a landscape ripe for the Gospel. New research from the Barna group should be encouraging to parents who want to see their kids come to know and serve Jesus Christ. In fact, seventy-seven percent of teens are to open to having conversations about God. Should we be surprised? A child’s spiritual hunger will continue to grow if they are not filled by experiencing new life in Jesus Christ!