Ever wonder what occupies the minds of your teenagers more than just about anything else? It’s the quest to figure out who they are and who they will be for the rest of their lives. Developmental experts call this primary task of adolescence “identity formation.” It’s this quest for identity that leads so many of them to regularly reinvent and curate themselves visually and descriptively on social media sites like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. To complicate matters, they’ve been hammered long before their teenage years by a non-stop flow of compelling messages fed to them by a culture that’s more than happy to write their identity script, telling them what to think, what to say, how to live, and who to be.
If our primary calling as parents and youth workers is to point our kids to Christ , praying that He would embrace them so hard that they would find their identity solely in their embrace of Him, then what can we do to help our kids find their way through youth culture’s confusing identity mess? Here are some suggestions to get you started.
First, look in the mirror to evaluate the identity you’ve chosen. Our example speaks louder than anything else to our kids. In his book The Reason For God, Tim Keller reminds us that “every person must find some way to ‘justify their existence,’ and to stave off the universal fear that they’re a ‘bum.’” Ultimately, our identity can and must be found in Christ and Christ alone. We must be sure that with Augustine we are able to say, “Our hearts our restless until they find their rest (identity) in Thee!”
Second, continually check in on the identity-shaping world of your kids. For the Christian parent, culture-watching is an active and on-going responsibility. The responsibility falls on us to stay on top of the nuances of our kids’ youth culture, particularly the messengers and messages that are shaping their identity. But it’s not just something we do. It’s something we do with a purpose. Theologian John Stott calls this “dual listening.” He says that we “stand between the Word and the world with consequent obligation to listen to both. We listen to the Word in order to discover ever more of the riches of Christ. And we listen to the world in order to discover which of Christ’s riches are needed most and how to present them in their best light.”
Third, confront the lies. Several times in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus issues “You have heard it said. . . . but I tell you” statements. Each and every time, Jesus is issuing a corrective to conventional, widely-held, cultural wisdom that his hearers had not only heard, but had allowed to become a part of their very lives. A hallmark of our parenting is continually assuming the same “you have heard it said. . . . but Jesus tells you” posture on identity matters.
Look for, find, and expose our world’s identity lies. . . in the culture, in yourself, and in your kids.
Want to know more about helping kids find their identity in Christ? Listen to this episode of our Youth Culture Matters podcast and our interview with Jonathan Holmes about his book, Grounded in Grace: Helping Kids Build Their Identity in Christ.
