Want to De-stress Your Teen?

Written by Dr. Steve Shores

This article is courtesy of Living with Teenagers.

Would it be that remarkable to find out that teens are feeling major stress these days? Probably not, but what might grab parents is discovering the reason adolescent stress is way up. That reason is not what you might think. The usual culprits—peer pressure; academic stress; violence in schools; the availability of escape through drugs, drinking, and sex; struggles between teens and parents—are only partially to blame. The deeper problem is that teens have lost their sense of “truth” and are, therefore, helpless against the lying voices that harass them.

 Now, what would “truth” and “voices” have to do with teen stress? Basically this: the human heart is made for truth, God’s truth; and when God’s truth dwindles, it leaves a vacuum that is rapidly filled with competing voices that tell misleading and, too often, destructive stories. For anyone, the loss of truth is a disaster. For an adolescent, who is so impressionable, it’s a profound train wreck of the soul.

The Heart Starves and Stresses without God’s Story
One teen recently said to me, “If you care, you set yourself up for trouble and heartache. So you find ways not to care. The best way is to become a cynic.” Now, a cynic is someone who believes there are no more meaningful stories, none big enough anyway. This is especially true of God stories. So, implied my adolescent friend, don’t get sucked into a story because stories tend to have meaning, and meaning will make you care. It hurts too much.

On the other hand, the heart must have a story to live in. And that story must not be cynical, twisted, or fictional. A redemptive and true story is the heart’s oxygen. God’s story as revealed in Scripture is true life for the heart. The teen stress we’re seeing today is the suffering of starving hearts. Secular culture portrays God’s story as more and more untrustworthy. “Only gullible people believe that God-stuff!” thunders American culture. Teens are deeply susceptible to cues that the culture sees Christians as losers in the worldview sweepstakes. The heart longs to feed on God’s story, but such a mocked story has been rendered inedible and inaudible. A heart meant to be filled with wonder becomes filled instead with wondering, “Why do I feel abandoned?”

Renovating a Teen’s Sense of Story
How can parents begin to restore God’s story to their teens? There are at least three stiflers of God’s story: boredom, legalism, and forgetfulness.

1. Boredom. Often, both church and family present the Scriptures as heartbreakingly boring. The Bible is treated as an information-dump about God. It seems that millions of facts and factoids about God are crammed indiscriminately between those holy covers as if the phone book had been ripped apart and thrown back together out of order. Teens often see the Bible as a daunting task instead of the delightful love letter it really is. Over all the information and stories in Scripture the words, “I have come for you!” should be written in big, block letters. Why? Because teens need to realize that God is a passionate pursuer, and that He has come after their hearts with such recklessness that a death has occurred! God has not been turned away from them. He has burst through sin, death, hell, chaos, the Devil, and all his hosts to claim the hearts of teens.

2. Legalism. A woman said to me, “I’m committing a mortal sin by wearing pants.” Her weary statement conveys the heart of legalism and confusion about the role of God’s law. The law is an educator (Gal. 4:24). It teaches us that we can’t earn God’s love through performance. It leads us to Christ for grace-filled forgiveness. At that point, we receive both a new nature (2 Cor. 5:17) and the Holy Spirit to nourish that new self (1 Cor. 12:13). The Spirit teaches the new self to see God’s commands as the structure for an intimate, loving relationship rather than as dead rules, the keeping of which supposedly controls God’s anger at us.

Legalism makes God a short-tempered cop handing out tickets and court dates with grim satisfaction. This distorted picture of God makes the Bible tell an unattractive story of a moody God with a short fuse. The real story between the Bible’s covers is that God will come through those deadly barriers to rescue us and take us home to be healed and enjoyed. Job says, “I know that my Redeemer lives” (Job 19:25). A redeemer is someone who will pay a price to buy you out of slavery. Legalism says you have to earn that effort. The Bible says you can’t, yet God will pay the astounding price for you; out of simple, intense love.

3. Forgetfulness. Have you ever thought about how many times God says, “You have forgotten?” Our tendency to forget is significant enough for God to make it a major theme in Scripture. The Bible is there to help us remember who God is, who we are, what story we’re meant to live in and live out. The Bible is the shock of memory; it’s like a bucketful of light, poured over us and dazzling us out of soul-amnesia. The Bible is the interruption of the media-induced coma Americans, both teens and adults often fall into. Newly awake, we’re called to remember the grand story in which we live.

When teens forget the story God is telling, they forget His voice. God is a speaking God. That is why Christ is called the Word in John 1:1. God continually seeks to get to us with hopeful, guiding, correcting, enticing, encouraging words. His voice rings out through His Word and through His Spirit. Jesus said, “My sheep hear My voice, I know them, and they follow Me” (John 10:27).

Distracting, Destructive Voices
But it is hard to hear God’s voice if one is not living in God’s story. When His story is buried under the noise of a mocking, busy culture, His voice can be submerged. Other voices reach out for the teen. Many of them are seductive, while others are contemptuously powerful. Teen stress increases when these voices seem credible, and no one helps them see the hidden agenda in them. There are three types of voices that grab for our teens and increase their stress.

1. Sensual voices. These say, “It’s possible to change your mood from bad to good. If you feel bad, just do something about it.” This voice lies beneath teens’ heavy dependency on sex, drugs, unbalanced friendships, and alcohol. This voice says quick doses of sensation, no matter what the source, will lift your mood from the pits to the pinnacle. But quick rises in mood simply make the teen dependent on the mood-changer (result: another addiction in the making). The teen never figures out why his mood is low because he has no basis for insight into his pain.

2. Prideful voices. These say, “You’ve got what it takes to beat your friends and classmates. Go for it; be popular; win the academics sweepstakes; grab for glory. Don’t worry about relationships that might need nurture and investment. You don’t have time for that. Get going!” Teen culture is extremely competitive, a fact not helped by schools under pressure to perform. Whether in academics, athletics, or social climbing, adolescents hear one thing: excel! And often they do; but at what price? Anxiety, depression, and anorexia come to mind. And, why excel if there’s no true, meaningful story to live for?

3. Nihilist voices. Remember the kid who said, “When you care you set yourself up for  for Teens Under Pressure.
trouble and heartache?” He had become a cynic, one who doesn’t believe there are any meaningful stories. He handed me Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s, Slaughterhouse Five, a novel that exemplifies the nihilistic viewpoint (traditional values and beliefs are baseless; there is no universal meaning) that still attracts so many teens. Vonnegut eclipses God’s story by showing that humanity, under extreme conditions, suffers so greatly as to shatter any attempt to find sense in the pain. Yet God’s story, with its focus on death followed by resurrection, insists that God is intent on bringing meaning, no matter how extreme the suffering.

What Can Parents Do?
Now, parents don’t have to become experts on nihilism to help their teens de-stress. We can help our adolescents most by examining our own effectiveness in living out God’s story. We must ask ourselves: are we bored with the Bible? Are we legalistic, portraying God as a rule-obsessed controller with little passion for us other than anger when we sin? Are we forgetful, showing our kids examples of acquisitiveness, moodiness, or forcefulness without love? Or, do we live sensually, plugging in too often to the television, into hidden pornography, into our own struggles with alcohol or drugs (including over-dependence on prescription drugs)? Do we get pushed by prideful voices that foist a competitive spirit on us so that we’re focused on how our ego is faring? Finally, do we function as nihilists, carrying on grimly, half-dead inside and having little of the life and joy of Christ within?

Our teens watch us closely. If we ask them to live the Christian story while we follow the path of other stories our teens see confusion and inconsistency which causes stress. God calls parents to live connected to Christ and to ignite a passion in teens to be Christ’s disciples.

When parents exemplify the Christian story freed from boredom, legalism, and forgetfulness, the siren-voices of our culture recede like darkness before the sun.

Dr. Steve Shores i s a professional counselor at the Center for Biblical Counseling in Hickory, North Carolina, where he resides with his wife, Susan, and their three children. Dr. Shores is the author of Stressbusters:

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