This morning I was considering the fact that my oldest daughter will be twelve this year.  This caused me to remember a special speaker who had come to our church a long time ago.  Philippe was a Messianic Jew from France, and he was speaking about the differences between the Christian Church and the Jews.   One of the points he brought up struck me as interesting at the time, and I made a mental note of it, filing it away in my brain for future use and pondering!

Philippe told us that the Jews that truly follow their traditions and beliefs don't have nearly the problem with teenager rebellion that we have amongst the Christian Church in America.  The reason he gave was this:  Batmizvah and Barmitzvah!  (I'm not sure if I'm spelling them correctly.)  Anyway, he said that at the age of 12, boys and girls become adults.  There is no in-between.  They are not given a teenager period of time to feel like they are in limbo and don't belong, not sure of their purpose or place in life.   I remember having a lot of Jewish friends when I was a teenager, and they did act a lot more mature than the rest of us, not having the rebellious attitudes or substance abuse problems to the same extent as the rest of us.  They weren't perfect, but they were good kids and had a better sense of who they were than we did.

This has me thinking, now that my daughter is almost 12.  In America, we all want our children to stay children as long as possible, but teenagers do seem to have an identity problem, wanting to be grown ups, not really children anymore, but not really adults either.  Many parents tell their kids to enjoy being a kid, but teenagers feel they are ready to grow up.  They are still treated like children, though they no longer feel like children.  While we maybe can't give them the full responsibilities or freedoms as adults have, perhaps we should consider treating them more like adults-in-training.  Perhaps we should discuss this with them, letting them know where they fit in and acknowledging that they are no longer children but adults in training.  I wonder if that would help them.

This is something I will be thinking more about as her birthday approaches.  The Christian Church in general doesn't seem to have a real timeline for telling parents when to consider their children as adults or how to adapt the way they parent their children as they get older.   There are some things out there concerning how to deal with disobedience and rebellion from teenagers, but it is just expected that teenagers will be disobedient and rebellious.  There isn't much out there to help parents avoid that behavior altogether.  While I realize our daughter will be disobedient or rebellious occasionally to some extent, is there a way to avoid it for the most part?  According to Philippe there is. 

I know that homeschooling does help somewhat with rebellion in teenagers because we can keep our children's environment controlled, but it seems to me that we should be able to instill some sense of responsibility into our children by the time they are twelve so they can handle spending a certain amount of time away from us without getting into trouble or having bad attitude changes.  I know many homeschooling families who seemed to be doing so well, but their children still rebelled as teenagers.  Or, they put their kids in public school in 8th or 9th grade and their children became totally different people, forgetting the values that were instilled at home.  I wonder if giving our children some form of acknowledgement and some freedom to make more of their own decisions would help with this.  I wonder if putting more responsibility on them to spend alone time with the Lord and discussing more grown-up topics with them would give them a greater sense of being valued and having a purpose and place of belonging.

Perhaps we will have a big party and make a big deal over our daughter's twelfth birthday.  We can get her a pin, necklace, or ring engraved with the words, Adult-in-Training and present it to her in front of everybody.  I don't know, but it's something to think about.

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