The Door-Step Evangel

What is the Parent-Teen Gap?
Dr. Ronald L. Tottingham

It is when teenagers reach the age where their final development stage prior to adulthood is faced. It is when they are faced with the greatest hurdle yet and need help climbing over this hurdle. What is that hurdle? It's the forming of their reason. Learning to reason maturely, rightly productively. The parent-teenage gap is when parents are being seen by the child as unable to lead them by mature reason into mature reasonings.

Such parents are seen as hypocrites, insincere, phoney, etc. They show what they're seeing by the charges they lay upon these parents. Parents show their inability to "grow an adult into an adult," by exclaiming that they've tried, by denying that it's their fault, by blaming others or institutions (school, society, counselors, etc.).

Parents invest money, confessing they both cannot nor intend to grow their children up across this hurdle.

Teenagers are crying help, while parents deny that it's their responsibility and maturity to develop to a finished reason logic or spiritual discretion/discernment that the teen lacks.

But this spreads to pastors also who cannot bring spiritual children across the same hurdle in the spiritual realm of logic and reason.

Pastors are threatened by young preachers who challenge their inconsistencies, hypocrisies, dogmas, etc. Their answer - send them to a college. Parents send them to Rolloff or a like help.

Could it be that there is no youth gap, but a parent immaturity instead?