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It was in his book entitled, The Screwtape Letters that C.S. Lewis wrote, The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil. The forties and fifties can be a time of life where we encounter the accusations and seductions of Satan in so many ways.

We remember that King David was vulnerable during his midlife years of success. In his leisure, David decided not to go with his troops to fight a campaign with a physical enemy but ended up being defeated on a different front by his spiritual enemy when he lusted after Bath Sheba. What a terrible fall occurred because prosperity and possibly even a persistent ennui seduced David into weakness.

Those who reach the apex of their lives and have experienced great success and/or are financially secure and have raised and sent off their children may eventually ask, Is there nothing more to life? Is this all there is? In order to spice up their dull lives, these men and women may be tempted by the excitement found in material things like a new house or a new car, illicit relationships, world travel, exotic foods and wines, and maybe even learning how to fly (John Denver?) as a way to create fleeting pleasures in their otherwise boring lives.

Other individuals in these middle years may be especially vulnerable to disenchantment and disillusionment if they feel like their lives have been unfulfilled or marked by failure. For these people, time feels like it is running out and that they may never have an opportunity to attain their dreams. They might think, My life did not turn out as I had hoped. What is the purpose of it all anyway?

The middle years are not the only potentially difficult phase of life. Possibly even a more tumultuous season is adolescence (12-18 years of age, or maybe even 12-24 in my estimation). It is during these years that young people, according to Erik Erikson, are dealing with the developmental stage of Identity vs. Confusion. They are attempting to discover who they are as a person separate from their parents.

Some people say that teenagers are seeking a subjective sense of self. I don’t think there is anything subjective about it. God created them and placed a unique personality within them, so the search is for the objective person God made them to be. It is often not an easy search. It is always opposed by the fallenness of each one of us and by the enemy who wants to steal, kill, and destroy.

On top of seeking who they were created to be, teenagers also must deal with fallout from previous stages of development (according to Erikson) like mistrust, shame and doubt, guilt and inferiority.

There is no doubt about it: moving from childhood into adolescence can be a most violent transition.

And not just for the teenagers.

These are the words a man named John had to say about being a parent of a teen: My daughter is fifteen going on thirty going on six. It all depends on the day. I don’t know her anymore. An alien has abducted my little girl and taken up residence in her body. But the worst of it isn’t just that she is a different personality. What is so difficult is how I feel around her. In the car when I’m taking her to dance class, she gives me only one-word answers and won’t even look at me. She’s on her phone all the time. I feel so rejected—even invisible. I haven’t felt this irrelevant since . . . growing up with my alcoholic father who never even knew I existed. Is my daughter rejecting me because I’ve been a bad parent like my own father? I feel angry, sad, terrible—like a bad mistake or a person who can’t do anything right. I feel rejected by my own daughter and a part of me wants to reject her in the same way. Ugh. I hate how I feel around her!

Today’s blogpost will consist of a few things to consider when living with a teenager in your home.

• Margaret Mahler was a Hungarian psychiatrist who studied the development of children. Her primary focus of study was what she referred to as separation/individuation (S/I), that is, the process infants and toddlers navigate as they mature from totally dependent creatures (who must rely on their parents for things as basic as feeding and protection) to separate individuals who often are referred to as living in the stage called the terrible twos.

Separation is the term used to describe how the infant slowly differentiates from the mother (parent) while individuation describes how the child develops individuality apart from the mother. S/I can be challenging both for the infant as well as for the mother.

The main point in this blogpost is that during adolescence, a second period of separation and individuation occurs. As teenagers begin the process of adulting, they differentiate from their parents. They do things like develop friendships that are more important to them than their parents and, due to cognitive growth, become capable of abstract thinking ability that they use to challenge and debate everything that they perceive as unfair or unjust—especially to them.

This season of S/I is a normal part of growing into adulthood but is fraught with difficulty. Parents might feel like they are losing their little boy or girl and might try to hold on a bit too tightly. Meanwhile, the preteen or teen will want more freedom and will be quick to perceive being controlled by their parents and will push against that control, sometimes with fierce intensity. The adolescent will not be able to fully develop a separate self unless they create increasing separation from the mother ship.

Interestingly, Jesus, who was fully human, separated from his parents at age twelve when he remained in the temple to teach the teachers of Israel. Yes, S/I–or whatever you wish to call it–is a normal developmental stage between 12-24 years old (my selected age range) that can feel as disruptive as a bad divorce to the parent.

• Parents must remember that most children don’t even know they are going through S/I but only experience the sense of needing more space, privacy, and freedom. They will argue any topic as if they are practicing new abstract debating skills (which they are doing). It is almost like they are going through a birthing process.

Teenagers are moving out of the womb of childhood and travelling down the birth canal toward emergence into the outside world as an adult. If mothers thought the first delivery was painful, this second one can be long and agonizing—just in a different way. Just as Mahler wrote that the infant breaks out of an autistic shell and into the outside world, so the teenager breaks out of the safe womb of the latency years into pre-adulthood.

• Of course, part of the breakout from childhood is the phenomena known as puberty. The child physically transforms from being an uncomplicated platonic being to becoming a sexual being. (I wonder how smooth and easy this change was before the fall!) At the beginning of this post, you read C.S. Lewis’ comment about middle-age and how this period of life can be excellent campaigning weather for the devil. Well, the explosion of sexuality onto the scene during adolescence can also make for excellent campaigning weather as well.

How many parents struggle to navigate this slow avalanche of sexual growth with their teenagers? Some parents simply give their children condoms and tell them to practice safe sex. I know one parent who left a book about sexual development on their teen’s bed but never spoke a word about the topic to their child. How easy a path that is—to stay largely uninvolved–but also how dangerous for their unguided adolescent.

Other parents will attempt to control and maybe even shame the child’s developing sexuality to such a degree that the teen will feel that they are prisoners of their parents’ prudishness or that sex is a bad thing. As a result, adolescents will never approach their parents to seek counsel about their struggles in this area.

What a volatile time it can be for concerned Christian parents when they attempt to cultivate healthy attitudes and boundaries in their children around this new development called sexuality while the child tries to navigate growing separateness and experiences new desires in their bodies!

• I believe that the period of S/I is potentially a very difficult season of life for both the parents and the children. On the one hand, the child needs to move through the developmental stage of becoming a person God created who is separate from the parents.

I don’t think any of us can even love the other if we are not healthily differentiated from them. Mature love does not flow from unhealthy merger or emotional incest but only when a person is separate from the other and has learned how to love someone different than themselves. It was Irving Yalom who warned us not to mistake merger (lack of differentiation) with love. They are very different phenomena. Merged people do not love each other in an adult fashion. They are each other.

On the other hand, in this fallen world where the baseline position is rebellion against God, adolescence affords Satan an excellent opportunity to confuse the child. Instead of experiencing healthy differentiation from the parent and a God-ordained season to grow into their own personhood, teens can swing the pendulum too far in a direction that is more sinful than separating.

Under the influence of the dark campaign, separation becomes disobedience. Individuation is distorted into the development of a rebellious self—probably not a new development of rebellion, but leaning more intentionally into what everyone is already born with—an innate rebellion against God and others.

Teenagers face a fork in the road, then, where they must choose the healthy path of becoming who their Creator made them to be which will require them to onboard God himself through the new birth process (the spiritual rebirth of John 3); or they will choose the other path that will lead them into deeper disobedience, rebellion, and separation from God.

So, parents, be sure to pray for your pre-teens and teenagers during this period of separation and individuation. This season of transition is a vulnerable time during which the enemy (and the fallen self) will strive to lure your children down the path of hatred of all authority. We see it all around us in our culture today. Pray that your children will forsake the hard-wired path of disobedience and surrender to the love and parenting of their kind heavenly Father.

The baseline position of rebellious separation must be supplanted by the new self that God wishes to place in the hearts of your children. Ultimately, healthy S/I will not occur if the Holy Spirit does not inhabit the lives of our children. I suppose there could be some healthy S/I without God living inside the teenager, but only on a psychological level that misses the whole purpose of humanity—experiencing the mystical union of oneness with Christ.

• When it comes to interacting with their teenager, a parent must try not to take the behaviors and attitudes of their child personally. The problem is that the teenager will push every button on the parent’s personality. They will bump up against every wound and unresolved issue from the parents’ past.

One of my professors in grad school told me that profiles of adolescents on the MMPI II personality assessment often resemble those of a paranoid schizophrenic. If that is true, no wonder the teenager triggers so much in those around them—especially the parents.

Remember the father, John, whose words you read at the beginning of this blogpost? He said that he felt things with his teenager that he had felt previously only with his alcoholic father. John purposely chose a calm, predictable, unemotional woman to be his wife because he had grown up with so much emotional chaos in his family of origin. The only problem was that he did not take into account the personalities of his children.

John had the power to choose a very safe wife but then his son came along. When the son became a teenager, he morphed from a sweet, likable boy into a distant, emotionally volatile, and even acidic personality that reminded him of his father. John was aghast.

He began to feel things toward his son that he had not felt since growing up around his father. John experienced powerlessness, rage, and anxiety that his nice wife never triggered in him. Because he felt so much anger and subsequent shame, John began to believe that he was a terrible father. Eventually, he began to avoid his son because he so often felt bad around his young teenager.

• Related to the above thoughts, remember that teenagers–because of their tendency to color outside the lines, practice obnoxious attitudes, and display intense, unpredictable emotions–can become a lightening rod for the parents’ own emotions. Parents can displace (or transfer) onto their adolescent emotions meant for someone else. Sadly, and sometimes tragically, the teenager can become the pin cushion for parental emotions meant for a boss, a parent, a friend who betrayed them, the economy, or maybe even an irrational person the parent encountered on the freeway on the way home from work.
• Maybe a bit too simply said, the job of teenagers is to push the boundaries while the job of parents is to set the boundaries. Conflicts and impasses are bound to happen. As a parent, choose your battles very carefully and don’t back down or you will reward your teen for fighting back. Do not fight every battle. Do not create an ongoing power struggle. Set boundaries out of love and protection, not out of control and retribution.

Remember bi-directional influence. Yes, your teenager will push all your buttons and will elicit strong reactions from you. But do not forget that you push their buttons as well and might treat them as the aforementioned lightening rods.

• Finally, and maybe most importantly, be sure to understand Projective Identification. What does this psychobabblese refer to? Simply said, your teenage might, more often than you realize, cause you to feel what they are feeling but never directly talk about it. John, the father we have encountered several times in this post, often felt things more intensely around his teenage daughter than anyone else in his life. Yes, sometimes, he felt things strongly because Elise was pressing his buttons and making him feel his own (suppressed) emotions.

Other times, however, Elise was subconsciously projecting her feelings into her father in a way that he would then feel what she was feeling. For example, when Elise gave her father one-word answers or never looked at him but only grunted in his general direction, he felt rejected and worthless. Were these feelings all from his childhood? No. Often, teenagers trigger in their parents what they, the teens, are feeling inside deeper than words.

When John felt rejected, worthless, unseen, and like he was a bad father, he was actually feeling what his daughter was feeling inside—abandoned, bad, invisible, and too messy to be loved. Wise parents will step back when they are negatively triggered by their teenager and attempt to hear what the child is saying between the lines.

The next time you have an intense reaction to a teen, think about what they are telling you about themselves. Hear what they’re not saying. Your strong reaction may have nothing to do with you and everything to do with what your teen is feeling in his or her private space that they desperately need someone to enter.

Instead of making it about you and reacting with, I can’t believe how easily you dismiss me after everything I have done for you, pause and then reflect back to your adolescent, I wonder if sometimes you feel like I don’t value you as highly as my job or the football game I just watched today. I want you to know that I thank God for the gift he has given me in you. In fact, I’d like to take you out to eat at your favorite restaurant next weekend so we can hang out a bit.

Your teen might roll his eyes and make another dismissive comment, but don’t take it personally. There is often a maelstrom of emotions inside a teen’s heart and mind, and he needs to know that you will not give up on him even when he is so unlikable.

One way to look at the teenagers in your life is that God gave them to you to teach you how to love and also how to depend on his strength to help you be patient and compassionate toward them. Always remember that marriage and having children are two challenging ways to grow away from innate selfishness and toward caring for others.

Many children lose their footing between the ages of twelve and twenty-four, so be there for them. Don’t take them personally. Contain their intense emotions that they find too overwhelming to manage. Recognize what they trigger in you that is unfinished business you need to heal. Be willing to run the gauntlet that often guards a teenager’s heart.

Just as Jesus pursued you, pursue your teenager and always welcome them with open arms. Unconditional love with firm boundaries is a healing balm for these young personalities who are so often accosted by the accusing voice of the enemy.

Never forget that the adolescent years can be excellent campaigning weather for the devil. Be a protector of vulnerable teenagers even when to love them is to embrace a porcupine. After all, Jesus embraced you when you were a walking dead person.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ ~ Ephesians 2:1-5