It's Not Too Late: The Essential Part You Play in Shaping Your Teen's Faith

By Dan Dupee

It has long been said that once kids are in high school and college, they are beyond the influence of their parents. This pervasive cultural myth is not supported by research, biblical teaching, or even anecdotal accounts. Yet because of it, many Christian parents live in silent angst about the faith of their older and adult children, thinking they can no longer do anything to shape their kids' spiritual and life decisions.

Drawing on sociological research and Scripture, Dan Dupee shows parents that it is not too late--and in fact these turbulent years of transitioning into adulthood are a time when their kids may need their guidance the most. He shows parents how to make the most out of the opportunities they have to offer guidance, wisdom, and spiritual support, with the goal of seeing their children not just survive college with faith intact but enter adulthood with a faith of their own--one that will carry them through all that life brings their way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781493401628

Dan Dupee

Dan Dupee is chairman of the board of the Coalition for Christian Outreach, a Pittsburgh-based campus ministry working annually with over 32,000 students on over 115 campuses. He brings together biblical truth, sociological research, college transition findings, and focus group work with parents of adolescents to develop principles that are fresh, clarifying additions to a growing body of research on teen faith development. Dan and his wife, Carol, are the parents of four children. They live in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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© 2016 by Dan Dupee

Published by Baker Books

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakerbooks.com

Ebook edition created 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-0162-8

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2007

Scripture quotations labeled GNT are from the Good News Translation—Second Edition. Copyright © 1992 by American Bible Society. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations labeled Message are from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled NLT are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Parenting is the most difficult, painful, glorious and sweet gift I have known in this life. Parenting college-aged young adults is as complex as any calling on earth. Dan Dupee—a parent, an educator, and president of one of the most remarkable college ministries in America—offers tender, humbly wise, and compelling counsel for walking the tightrope of parenting children who are of the age to not want to be parented. Dan guides us to neither give in to the need to micromanage or justify cowardly detachment. Further, he explores the wealth of opportunities to participate in learning to join your child in the adventure of making faith the framework to explore all knowledge. Your relationship with your child will grow far beyond your wildest dreams as you explore this glorious book.

Dan B. Allender, professor of counseling psychology and founding president of The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology; author of How Children Raise Parents and Healing the Wounded Heart

Dan Dupee has great news for all of us raising teenagers: We continue to be the most influential people in our kids’ lives. With biblical wisdom and a healthy dose of common sense, Dan encourages us to realize that our teenagers need us now more than ever—and with love and guidance, we can send our kids out into the world with a vibrant faith of their own.

Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family

"As a parent of two teenagers, I found It’s Not Too Late both encouraging and empowering. Dan Dupee deconstructs myths that leave moms and dads feeling inadequate to influence their children’s faith and replaces them with God’s wisdom, grounded in Scripture, sociological research, and anecdotal experience. You will find help and hope in these pages!"

Jerusha Clark, coauthor of Your Teenager’s Not Crazy

"It’s Not Too Late. That is Dan Dupee’s important message to parents of children who are in the transition from child to adult. As a college professor myself, I see many people in this age group every day, and while they are coming under other influences, I agree that parents remain vitally important in the lives of these young men and women. Dan gives great practical advice based on theological insight and, out of his long experience as CEO of the Coalition for Christian Outreach, a deep knowledge of this age group and their parents. Every parent ought to read this book!"

Tremper Longman III, Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies, Westmont College

There is no one I trust more on this topic of raising kids who can transition well into their young adult and college years than Dan Dupee. I’ve watched his leadership within the campus ministry organization he leads and how he pays attention to the ways young adults thrive and grow, and I’ve seen his family, including his own young adult kids, and admire them greatly. This book is one of a kind, bringing together great stories with reliable research, helpful biblical truth, and keen insight gleaned from focus groups and interviews with parents of older teens and young adults. He knows the issues and he has learned what works, even in difficult times and in painfully messy situations. Our culture implies that parents have little influence over their college-aged sons and daughters, but Dupee proves otherwise and invites us to hopeful, engaged, positive parenting. This book will be reassuring and helpful to parents and will change the tone of the conversation about emerging adults in the church.

Byron Borger, Hearts & Minds Books

To my wife, Carol,

truly a woman of noble character,

and to our parents,

Dave and Kay Dupee and Jerry and Mary Gail Korsmeyer,

who have shown us how

to love our kids by loving us.

Contents

Cover    1

Title Page    2

Copyright Page    3

Endorsements    4

Dedication    5

Introduction: There’s Hope for Your Great, Scary Expectations   9

1. A Foundation of Wisdom   15

2. Getting Clear on the Goal   23

3. Seven Myths That Might Be Sabotaging Your Parenting   33

4. You Are Nowhere Close to Being a Perfect Parent: That’s Okay   45

5. Losing Control as Your Kid Grows: Time to Develop Influence   61

6. Center on Home: It Is Still the Place of Greatest Opportunity to Grow Faith   85

7. Invite Community: Good Parenting Requires More Than Parents   107

8. Invite Kids: Guide Your Kids from Peer Pressure to Peer Positive   123

9. Christian Kids Can Thrive through College   141

10. When the Wheels Are Falling Off: Look for Spiritual Growth   157

11. The Worst Is Happening: It’s Not Time to Give Up   171

12. There’s Hope for Your Great, Scary Expectations, Revisited   189

An Afterword for Fathers   197

Acknowledgments   201

Notes   203

About the Author    207

Back Ad    208

Back Cover    209

Introduction

There’s Hope for Your Great, Scary Expectations

You’re in a classroom with an unlikely collection of people (the guy behind the meat counter at the grocery store next to your college sweetheart), while someone who looks vaguely like a professor begins to pass out a final exam. The feeling in your stomach goes from butterflies to pre-ulcer panic, because—son of a gun!—you forgot to show up at this class for an entire semester! You realize this is not going to turn out well at all. To make the whole experience complete, you are not wearing pants.

Thankfully, at this point you begin to wake up and shake off the dream. Hey, wait a minute, you think. I haven’t taken a final exam in thirty years, and I’ve never been in a classroom with the guy behind the meat counter. Whew! Your subconscious has been working overtime on some loose end in your life—something capable of producing regular anxiety.

If you are a Christian parent of a child ranging from sixteen to twenty-three, I have at least one idea of what might be making you anxious. You might be turning two questions around repeatedly in your head: Will my child navigate the dangers of post-high school and make a successful transition into adulthood? When my child gets to the other side of college or into the job market, will he or she still be following Christ?

At the core of your anxiety is your changing relationship with your child. While your child is navigating his or her most turbulent, life-defining season, you feel ill-equipped to help. Worse yet, you feel your own sense of power to guide your child shrinking at an accelerated rate. In fact, according to popular culture, your time of influence is past, and your child’s peers are far more important than you are.

You might even think of yourself as in a dead zone. When your child was a toddler, you had some control; when he or she was in elementary school, you were perceived to know everything. Now that your child is sixteen to twenty-three, you know nothing and are relegated to the role of observer, financier, and prayer warrior. Your child might eventually come to value your opinion again, but by then it may be too late. For now, you’re in an anxiety-inducing dead zone. You may fear your best efforts haven’t been enough or your failures have far overshadowed your successes. In many cases, you have to watch your child in transition from a geographical distance as the behavior boundaries of a kid living at home are dissolved.

As a Christian parent of four young adults, two newly post-college and two in college, I’m familiar with the anxiety. To me, nothing is more important than my kids having and living out a vibrant relationship with Christ. Of course, I also want them to grow into mature, healthy, and independent adults.

In addition to being a parent of four, I am former president and now chairman of the board of the Coalition for Christian Outreach (CCO), a campus ministry. Over the past seventeen years, I’ve shared coffee or meals with countless parents struggling with a sense of powerlessness as their children navigate the most turbulent years of life. Christian parents in this state look to youth pastors, youth trips, and campus ministry to do what they feel they can’t do: influence their child in healthy spiritual and life-affirming ways. Christian parents look to people like me for answers.

Over the years, I’ve worked hard to uncover every answer I could find. I’ve searched biblical and sociological materials, some of which I’ll describe in this introduction. I was unable, however, to find satisfying sources that address the role of Christian parents in the lives of their adolescent children. As a parent, and as one who serves struggling parents as his life’s work, I looked for a practical guide to navigate these troubled waters. It’s not that I expected a simple, straightforward formula with direct cause-and-effect results. People are messy, and parenting is messy. Even so, there had to be principles and practical guidelines to follow. God would not leave us powerless in the lives of the very children he gave us.

It was time to go to a source plentifully available to the CCO: Christian parents. Although the CCO ministry is to students, parents and concerned adults finance our work. Our reach extends to the most concerned parents (willing to spend cash to support college ministry) across a wide spectrum. The CCO works annually with over 32,000 college students on 115 campuses spread across 8 states in the Mid-Atlantic and part of the Midwest. We have 251 staff and over 67 formal partnerships with churches, colleges, and community organizations and a number of informal connections. We are connected to a lot of parents.

I decided to host a series of focus groups composed of parents, the vast majority of whom are raising adolescents, and young adults. I sought to learn about parenting from parents: what is working, what isn’t, and what their adult children are saying has been spiritually valuable. Where do parents judge themselves successful and where do they perceive failure? What are their deepest anxieties and what are they doing to address those anxieties? Most important, what principles, biblical and otherwise, can we glean to help those parents next in line?

My goal was to combine what I could learn from parent focus groups with what we know from Scripture and other reputable sources to create positive pathways for parents. I didn’t expect these pathways to make parenting black-and-white but sought to guide parents in the context of their search for wisdom regarding each individual child. While my goal was to be practical, it wasn’t to pretend that a cause-and-effect equation is all we need to guide emerging adults. My goal was to help parents build constructive pathways where they could confidently walk with their emerging adults.

In Scripture, God never directly addresses the question, How do I get my sixteen-year-old to engage in conversation at the dinner table (or at least use polysyllabic words)? Jesus didn’t tell a parable on the issue of kids home from college and curfews. Even so, the Bible is overflowing with wisdom for parents, much of it fitting for the emerging adult transition. I did my best to dig into biblical teachings about parenting, influence, and wisdom.

While I was digging into Scripture and other sources, I held the focus groups. Sixty-seven parents participated in nine different group interview sessions over a five-month period. The results were amazing. The focus groups revealed information I might expect, but they also revealed surprises that revolutionized my thinking. For example, I learned that although parents relentlessly seek to shield their children from suffering, difficulties and trials can be experiences that positively shape a child’s faith. These struggles can create opportunities for a child to connect with God in a personally relevant way.

When it comes to sociological research, the starting point was a survey done by the Barna Group and subsequent writing and speaking done by Barna’s president, David Kinnaman. I particularly turned to the book UnChristian, which Kinnaman coauthored with Gabe Lyons. My primary sociological research source was the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), as presented in the book Souls in Transition by Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, and again in Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church. Sociologist Vern Bengston’s recent book Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down across Generations (with Norella M. Putney and Susan Harris) became an important secondary source, particularly on the role of fathers.

I also drew on two very good books on the college transition: Make College Count by Derek Melleby and Sticky Faith by Dr. Kara E. Powell and Dr. Chap Clark. The best book on the next big transition, from college to the real world, is Steven Garber’s The Fabric of Faithfulness, which I read with this project in mind.

From the synergy of these sources, I learned one resounding truth: the whole idea of a dead zone of parental influence is off the mark, perpetuated by a number of myths that even Christian parents typically fail to question. It turns out that Christian parents have more influence on their kids than anyone else does.

This book puts forth good news and a call to action: Christian parents can and must reclaim a healthy place of influence in the lives of their young adult children. If you are a parent of an emerging adult, you’ll find encouragement and help in these pages. If you are a less-than-perfect parent (as we all are), if you do your parenting in less-than-ideal circumstances, or if you feel you are stumbling blindly along, it’s okay. You still have the opportunity to influence your child positively for Christ under an umbrella of grace.

It’s not too late.

1

A Foundation of Wisdom

Is there anything you’ve undertaken—any goal, challenge, or project—that has been harder or more rewarding than raising a child? There is no easy formula for parenting, and here is at least part of the reason why: being human is messy, and parenting emerging human adults is messy. As I facilitated parent focus groups, I encountered surprising lessons within some messy stories. An exchange from a focus group in Philadelphia is a good example.

On one end of the table sat the parents of five kids, each child managing the transition from high school, to college, to young adulthood quite well. Tom and Alice’s kids all own their faith as Christian young people, practice Christian disciplines, are members of churches, and make good decisions.

Also at the table sat Mike and Michele, parents whose son and daughter were on a different path. Two years ago, Mike and Michele’s daughter moved in with her boyfriend. Last year, just as their son was preparing to leave for a semester abroad, his girlfriend became pregnant.

Now Mike and Michele, who are wonderful Christian people, are grandparents. Both of their children have made choices that will permanently affect their futures: their daughter has no desire to follow Jesus, while their son seems to be making his way back, with a hard road to travel.

Imagine my role as facilitator of the focus group. My stomach felt queasy as I anticipated the next question I was to ask: What would a successful transition look like for a Christian young person as he or she passed from adolescence to adulthood?

Seemingly, this question would force Mike and Michele to relive their heartbreak all over again while Tom and Alice would have to decide whether they could say anything without sounding like know-it-alls. Tom and Alice didn’t seem the type to say, Want to know what success looks like? Just look at our children!

Reluctantly, I spit out my question. Then something remarkable happened. Alice, the mother of the five thriving kids said, I don’t think we could say our kids have successfully transitioned because they have never had their faith really tested. Our kids haven’t gone through adversity—haven’t faced any real trials the way Mike and Michele’s kids have. I don’t think we can say ours have yet made the transition to an adult Christian faith.

Here was a golden nugget in the midst