PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE
The future can be a scary thing for teens to think about…choices, challenges, school, college, dating, drinking, growing up, discovering one’s identity, discovering one’s purpose. As parents you will not be able to make these decisions for your teens, but you can prepare them to make good decisions for themselves.
Discuss values and character with your teens. You can share your own values of course, but also help them to discover the things that are important to them.
• What kind of life does your teen want to live?
• What does your teen want for himself or herself?
• What do you want for your teen? Education? Family? A career? Happiness?
• What kind of person does your teen want to be?
• What steps is your teen willing to take to get there?
Help your teen set both long-term and short-term goals. You can share your own life experiences here. Talk about goals that you had and how they shaped the decisions that you made in your life. If something stopped you from achieving a goal, what happened and would you go back and change things?
• What are your teen’s goals?
• What does your teen want to do and become in life, in school, with friends, in relationships?
• How will the short-term goals help your teen reach the long-term ones?
• What does your teen need to do in order to accomplish his or her goals?
• What things will make it harder to accomplish those goals?
• How can abstinence help your teen achieve those goals?
Avoid the negative consequences that come from premarital sex
Helps to develop positive character qualities that will help one to achieve goals
Goal: Graduating from College
Abstinence can help by avoiding things like unintended pregnancy, which will make it more difficult to go to school. It can help you to stay focused on important things like school, homework, and friendships, and help you to avoid stress and anxiety over the possible consequences of sex outside of marriage. Abstinence can also help to develop qualities like patience and self-control, which will help in lots of areas in life, including waking up in the morning, going to class, and doing homework or extra reading to get good grades.
Goal: Get Married Someday
Abstinence can help make a relationship strong by allowing the couple to focus on really getting to know each other. When a relationship becomes physical right away, the couple might miss key differences in character qualities, values, and beliefs, and this can hurt the relationship in the long run.
The choices your teen is making today will impact your teen’s future in significant ways. Help your teen to understand that making good decisions now will benefit him or her in the future.
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