From ‘9 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Parenting Teenagers‘:
Over a decade ago when I was struggling with parenting issues, I wrote to a well-known author for advice on certain abstract and theoretical questions about the theology of parenting. The author’s secretary wrote back to me with advice that annoyed me at first because it didn’t address my specific questions. However, what he did say turned out to be exactly what I needed to hear, and it is advice that I keep coming back to over and over again.
He said to think of parenting teenagers like tending a garden. If you are a gardener, the goal is not necessarily to have a weed-free garden but to have healthy plants. Sometimes the way to achieve healthy plants is to weed the garden, but it is sometimes also necessary to focus on strengthening the plant before you attack the weed. For example, a particularly delicate plant might not be strong enough to withstand the gardener vigorously attacking the nearby weed, especially if the weed has deep roots nearby the plant itself. In such cases, the gardener needs to focus on nourishing the plant so that it will become strong enough to withstand an attack on the weed. In some cases we need to step back and simply let the plant become strong enough to deal with the weed on its own.
As with gardening, so with parenting. When parenting teenagers, our goal is to have spiritual healthy men and women who will multiply the love Jesus in the earth long after we are gone. In order to be instruments in facilitating this, it is sometimes necessary for us to ignore the weeds of character to focus on strengthening the plant of the soul. This liberates a parent to take a positive approach with his or her teen instead of being overly-negative. It means learning to strategically ignore certain problems for the sake of the teenager’s overall flourishing, just as we might ignore a weed to focus on strengthening the plant.