Young people today are bombarded by messages that can undermine their faith. They are often over scheduled and stressed. The pressure, along with the very mixed messages from society and their peers, can lead many of them to use ungodly and unsafe ways to try and cope.
Sadly, many young people don’t get enough meaningful attention from parents and other adults to help guide them through the ups and downs of growing up in our world. If young people do have parents who give them enough attention and guidance, they also need other adults to reinforce what their parents have taught them about what God wants for their lives.
Your kids need godly mentors in their lives. It helps them to have another adult who gives them the same advice God wants them to have. If their mentor has expertise in areas – like schools or careers – in which you may not, it also gives you and your kids another resource.
Some churches have a formal mentoring program. The ways they choose and train mentors can vary greatly. Or you may need or want to try on your own to find a godly mentor for your child. In either situation, you need to be aware of the qualities of a person who will make a great mentor for your child.
A potentially great mentor is someone who:
Children who are introduced to God later in childhood often say they have a tough time believing in God. They weren’t taught from an early age to see God working in their world and can’t articulate what it would take for them to believe God is real.
Like many other Christian educators, I prefer children to worship with their families and not in a separate children’s worship service. Often children’s worship is little more than entertainment- with children learning they should always have fun during worship and that worship is about how they feel, not about worshipping God. Your children are missing so many things vital for their spiritual growth and health when they are separated from you – even for just part of the service.
If your children can speak, you probably realize they consider you and anyone else close to your age “old”. I laugh now, because I will talk to friends from home and they will mention someone is “getting older”. In my memory, that person had to be at least in their 60’s or 70’s when I was a child. Inevitably, I will ask “What?! Isn’t she over 125 by now?” Usually, I realize the “old” person had actually been only in their 30’s or 40’s when I was little!
There was an interesting article in the New York Post this weekend. The thrust of the article was that parents aren’t doing anything positive by occasionally having lunch with their kids at school. Read closely though, and you will notice the main “source” is someone who seems to resent her child constantly bugging her to come have lunch at school with him or her.