Letting Go in the Teen Phase
Focus on the Family Equipping Parents Podcast
Focus on the Family
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learning to let go is one of the most important things you'll do when your child becomes a teen. Jim Daly joins Dr. Ken Wilgus and Jessica Pfeiffer to discuss common ways parents have to let go and give their teens freedom. Then, John asks Danny about how you can respond well if your teenager has an unclean room.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | God is at work and he's calling his people to rise in truth. Truth Rising is a powerful new documentary from Focus on the Family and the Colson Center. See how ordinary Christians choose courage in a culture that needs truth. Watch Truth Rising today and find out how you can become an agent of restoration and hope. |
| 0:24.1 | Visit truthrising.com today. That's truthrising.com. |
| 0:32.3 | When your kids are little, you have to be kind of firm and repeatedly say no, perhaps, or please stop or don't. |
| 0:40.1 | When they get older, it's a little more like, well, you could do that. I'm not sure why, but you can find out. |
| 0:47.0 | We're talking about teens today and establishing good ground rules. I'm John Fuller with Dr. Danny Werta, |
| 0:53.1 | who heads up the parenting team here at Focus on the Family. Good to be with you, John. Thank you. Yeah, John Fuller with Dr. Danny Werta, who heads up the parenting team here |
| 0:54.6 | at Focus on the Family. Good to be with you, John. Thank you. Yeah, enjoyed doing this with you. We've done this for a number of years. It's fun. How many episodes do we have gone? I always, well, we're on, more than 1900. Yeah, we've been around. We've seen a thing or two. I appreciate so much these times with you. I always leave feeling like I get a parenting tune-up just hanging out with you. |
| 1:13.0 | So today, we're going to be talking about rules and how did you |
| 1:16.5 | manage rules for your kids when they hit the teen years? Because there has to be some element of |
| 1:22.7 | agency, right? Yeah. I mean, we're giving them autonomy. They long for that. And really, it's part of the developmental process. |
| 1:31.3 | They need autonomy. |
| 1:32.3 | They thirst for that. |
| 1:33.3 | And it's good. |
| 1:34.3 | It's healthy. |
| 1:35.3 | It can be difficult in the digital age to go into the autonomy side. |
| 1:41.3 | You still need to have rules, parameters around that. The ones we loosened up on |
| 1:45.6 | really early on was any bedtime type of thing. You need to figure out when you need to go to bed |
| 1:52.5 | because tomorrow you pay for it. They need to figure out that reality that if you don't, |
| 1:57.2 | if you don't go to bed on time, next day you'll be tired. |
| 2:08.7 | And the other one that we eased up on that some parents may push back on is the homework. |
| 2:12.3 | And we wouldn't check up, hey, do you have homework? |
| 2:13.0 | Did you do it? |
... |
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