As our children began becoming adolescents, I read everything I could about adolescence. As a psychologist I read developmental psychology and was disappointed. Although psychologists described adolescence well, they had few good answers to the problems so many teens and their parents face. I read the Bible, but the Bible said nothing about adolescence.
I finally realized that neither psychology nor Christianity understood adolescence. Only as I studied how adolescence had developed was I able to understand it. I also discovered actions parents could take to help their teenagers. These are not new techniques, but ones that have worked for thousands of years.
I am simply unable to name everyone who has contributed to my thinking regarding this book. Don Joy first triggered it. Students and friends helped immensely as they reacted to ideas I proposed. Asbury College generously provided a work leave during which I wrote the first draft. Students in my classes read the manuscript, pointed out errors, and made suggestions. Of course, I owe the most to my own family. My wife, Bonnie, was my coworker in rearing our own adolescents. Our adolescents Keith, Cheryl, and Kent reacted to the ideas and then lived them out in real life.
2005 Update
About a year and a half ago (November 2003) I posted 35 brochures on my website, www.missionarycare.com. The brochures were on many different topics related to the lives of missionaries, and it soon became obvious that adolescence was a topic of great interest—today it is the brochure that has been visited the most often. Knowing that nearly 20 years ago I had written a book about adolescence, I asked the publisher to return the publication rights to me, so now I am able to post the book itself on the website.
Having taught at the college level for 35 years, my first impulse was to revise the book as a second edition. However, reading through it I realized that many of the examples were of our own teenagers at the time, and revising it would take a great deal of time and effort. It was written from the viewpoint of a parent with three teenagers, one in college and two in high school, so revising it would mean rewriting it from the standpoint of a parent with three grown “children” in their thirties and eight grandchildren.
While writing the first edition, my editor would ask, “How do we know that these things work?”
I would reply, “They worked for thousands of years, before adolescence was invented.”
You may ask, “Now that it is twenty years later, how did they work?”
All three of our children are responsible citizens, are married (only once each), have become parents, are active in their churches, and love the Lord. Keith, our oldest, is an ordained minister and pastor of a church he planted five years ago in Mooresville (suburb of Indianapolis), Indiana. Cheryl, our middle child, is a board-certified general surgeon living in New Jersey (not practicing at this time because she has two small children at home). Kent, our youngest, is also an ordained minister and Director of Student Ministries at a church in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. As parents, we are delighted with the way “things have worked” in their lives.