The Hope QuotientSample

My whole adult life, I have worked with teenagers and their parents. Speaking in churches, conferences, schools, and everywhere else, parents ask the exact same question: “How do I motivate my kids so that when I let them go, they go in a healthy direction?” A graduate education on parenting is distilled in this next paragraph, so read carefully.

Parents provide both direction and motivation. Direction-based parenting tends to deliver guilt. Motivation-based parenting tends to deliver hope. Although we have to provide direction, ineffective parents major in delivering direction. That tends to be guilt-based, without motivation. Effective parents deliver both direction and motivation, which brings hope. 

The psalmist taught that children are like “arrows.” You do three things with an arrow: direction (aim it), motivation (pull back the string), release (let it go). That image summarizes the whole parenting task. You provide direction, provide motivation, and let the arrow fly. 

When kids are young, parenting is mostly about direction. As kids get to be teenagers, the job is about motivation and direction. During this stage, most teenagers will go where they are motivated to go, not where they are directed to go. They no longer wake up and say, “What do Mommy and Daddy want me to do?” Instead, they wake up saying, “What do I feel like doing today?” Inner motivation has taken over.

Our problem as Christian parents is that we tend to be great at direction but not at motivation. Many of us place our kids in Christian schools or homeschool them so they get even more direction. We haul them to church for even more direction. Then we struggle when our kids hit the teen years and a little rebellion starts up. Many parents respond by increasing the amount of direction (and volume), instead of supplying good motivation. That creates a culture of shame instead of a culture of hope. The problem is, kids only flourish in a motivational culture of hope.

We need to learn what turns children on, not off. On innumerable occasions, I’ve seen a well-meaning person provide more information thinking it will provide more desire. It usually doesn’t. 

As kids grow older, we have to become much better at reaching the heart rather than filling the head. One of the best ways is to provide hope, to help kids see what they can become, rather than dwell on what they are.

Think Up:

Direction-based parenting tends to deliver guilt. Motivation-based parenting tends to deliver hope.

How can you give children more hope? (Read on).