Journey to Faith and Writing 'How to Parent Your Teen for a Life of Faith'

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28 May

Hi, I’m Pete, I came to faith when I was 19 after reading the ‘Questions of Life’ Alpha Book by Nicky Gumbel during my gap year. I’ve been part of Kerith Community Church since 2005 when my wife Alex and I moved to Bracknell. Our girls were born here, grew up in the life of Kerith and are now teenagers.

Since 2008, I’ve been running my businesses. I recently sold my second business, an e-commerce brand, and my current company is in self-publishing. I published my first book, ‘Startup Mindset’ in 2022 and this year I published my third non-fiction book called “How to parent your teen for a Life of Faith”.

What brought me to writing this book? Thinking about it, quite a few reasons!

From a personal perspective, I feel sad that for most of my teenage years, I missed the opportunity to be in a real relationship with God. After my mum died when I was 7, one of my Dad’s ways of coping was to send my brother and myself to boarding school. Overall, boarding school wasn’t a great experience and the only involvement that I had there with ‘Christianity’ was a very dull and irrelevant chapel service that we were forced to go to twice a week. I clearly remember thinking that if this was what it was all about, I wasn’t interested.

I had very little input from home life about what it meant to live a vibrant life of faith as a teenager. Before that, I did have some experience of being brought up in an Anglican church, but it wasn’t until I left school that I started to ask myself the bigger questions of life.

Fast forward to today and reflecting on the last 17 years of parenting, I’ve spent time thinking about my teenage years, about how I was parented and what type of parent I wanted to be. Quite often I felt like I lacked a positive parental role model of what parenting for a life of faith looked like. It made me want to be a better parent but also made me think, about how can we encourage other parents. One of the big reasons I started to think about writing this book was the fact that I knew I was far from a great parent and that I wanted to learn and improve (and I’m sure I wasn’t the only parent out there who wanted to get better).

When we started our self-publishing business we realized there was an opportunity in the area of teenage parenting, as the research seemed to show there was demand, but that there wasn’t a plethora of books out there, and some of the existing ones were a bit out of date. There were, of course, some really good books for Christian parents of teenagers and I read a lot of those to understand what others had written about and I’ll mention my favourites at the end, as you might find those books better than this one!!!

We also did a fair bit of research speaking to other parents of teenagers and what their experiences were, what worked and what didn’t work for them and listening to stories and encouragements. Part of this research helped to affirm that we were on the right track with our chapter outlines and what was relevant for 21st-century parenting.

I’m pleased to honestly admit that I’m not the sole contributor to this book. I can’t take credit for a lot of it, as it was a team effort. I’m thankful for my project manager, Hannah, who is brilliant and helped with so much of the research, and practical work of formatting, editing and getting the book to print. I’m also thankful for an American writer who helped shape our research, outlines and stories. And I’m particularly thankful to all the other authors that I read and also the parents who didn’t mind me asking them lots of questions!

So you’re probably wondering what content we covered in our book and maybe also wondering if there’s a summary or synopsis so that you don’t have to read the whole thing (I mean, what parents have time to read a book on parenting?!). Well thankfully, we got ahead of the game and as part of our introduction, shared a tip on ‘How to read the book in ten minutes’, by reading the Chapter summary, the action point, a family time suggestion and a prayer. If you want to jump right in and find that, you can buy the book on Amazon here.

It's available on Kindle and Paperback, so if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free!

In Proverbs, it says “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it” – I love this verse and it has always raised the question in my mind, “Yes absolutely, but how, Lord?!”. How do we train them up in the way of Jesus? Without wanting it to sound like 10 easy steps, that was one of the reasons we titled the book starting with “How…”. There are so many ways and I’m sure we didn’t cover everything relevant to teenage parenting today, but for those who wanted to see a summary of what we decided to include, here’s an overview of our chapters:

1. Building a foundation of love and trust

2. Cultivating Patience and Understanding

3. Forgiveness and Grace in Parenting

4. Addressing Difficult Conversations

5. Navigating Bullying and Peer Pressure

6. Developing Responsibility and Independence

7. Managing Anxiety and Stress

8. Fostering Confidence and Self-Esteem

9. Nurturing Healthy Friendships

10. Growing Together in Faith

Inside these chapters some of the highlights of things we covered were:

Love languages – understanding what your child’s love language is and practising it! If you haven’t come across the love languages before, I’d highly recommend reading up about it, as it will also do your marriage and relationships good!

Creating boundaries with their help. When our kids were younger, generally we set the boundaries as parents, but one thing it was good to address here was the more we involve our teens in decisions and boundaries, the more they will feel included and that things are fair.

We didn’t want to shy away from addressing challenging themes, so we made sure to cover anxiety, screen time, bullying, pornography, substance abuse, dating as well as other things. Don’t be afraid to talk about these themes as a family and get help if you need it!

Modelling forgiveness – being the first to say sorry can be hard as a parent, but when we are vulnerable and admit our shortcomings as parents, this immediately models what Jesus has done for us and you will see them do it too.

Supporting them in their friendships – sharing about what healthy relationships look like and how to troubleshoot when conflict happens! I don’t know about you, but we’ve had a lot of this recently!

How to help them on their faith journey – making sure we are praying for them, parenting in community with others and not in isolation and making sure we are walking the talk ourselves! Teenagers have great hypocrisy alarm bells and will quickly pick on anything that we are asking them to do that we are not doing ourselves!!

The goal certainly isn’t to be a perfect parent! But like one of the book titles below, we CAN be a praying parent and we can also be a learning parent – every day is a school day when it comes to parenting!!!

I do hope that something of what we have brought from this book will be helpful for you and we’ve also included recommended resources below. If you want to subscribe to our newsletter and receive a complimentary gift – a download of our Teen Parenting Scripture Guide, click here. In our newsletters, you’ll receive exclusive content, helpful tips and news about upcoming resources.