Parenting Teens
When Your Teen Starts Wrestling
Drawn from Wrestling for Truth (Book 12), from the Seeds of Wisdom for Teens™ series The Divided Hallways: A Journey Through Hosea.
Have you ever heard your teenager ask a question about God that you were not sure you were allowed to ask at their age?
Maybe it came at bedtime, or in the car, or as a flat statement tossed over a shoulder: I don’t know if I believe any of this. And maybe, for one long second, your stomach dropped.
That second matters. What happens in it teaches a young person something about faith that no sermon will undo.
the question under every question
Wrestling for Truth follows the seniors at Kingdom Heights through their final year. The outside conflicts have quieted; the inside ones have sharpened. Naomi launches a special series for the school paper, asking students, teachers, parents, and mentors the same question: what moment changed the direction of your life?
The Grow Deeper guide names the question underneath all their decisions: who am I becoming? It is a better question than what do I believe? for a seventeen-year-old, because it can be answered honestly while the other one is still in pieces.
doubt is not the opposite of faith
Mrs. Bennett gives the students a sentence that has helped a great many adults too: “doubt is not the opposite of faith — refusing to seek is.” She adds a harder one: “A faith afraid of questions is a faith that secretly suspects it cannot survive them.”
The book distinguishes two kinds of uncertainty. Fear-driven uncertainty runs and hides. Humble curiosity turns toward the question and seeks. Both can sound the same out loud. The difference is direction — whether the young person is walking away from the question or walking into it.
Scripture has a prayer for exactly this place. A desperate father, begging Jesus to help his son, says it in Mark 9:24: “I do believe; help my unbelief!” It is in the Bible. It was not edited out. Belief and unbelief, in the same breath, offered to Jesus — and He does not send the man away.
he would not let go
The novel is built on Hosea 12, which looks back to Jacob wrestling through the night, weeping and pleading for a blessing. Naomi’s grandmother sums up the whole book in one line: Jacob “was changed not because he won, but because he would not let go.”
Jacob also left that night with a limp. The book does not tidy that away. It says the limp “was not the price of the blessing but part of it,” and its note to leaders insists on honoring the griefs and wounds that do not resolve, without hurrying anyone toward a lesson.
That is a kindness to pass on to a questioning teenager. Some questions get answered. Some get carried. The book’s own claim is that the destination of wrestling “is a return, not a victory.”
what helps, and what tends not to
When a teenager brings doubt home, our instincts are usually some combination of panic, argument, and a hurried stack of answers. All three come from love. All three can quietly teach that faith is fragile — that the question was dangerous and needed to be put out quickly.
What tends to help is slower:
- Thank them for bringing it to you. They could have taken it anywhere.
- Ask before you answer. “What got you thinking about that?” often reveals that the real question is grief, or a friend, or a hypocrisy they witnessed.
- Say “I don’t know” when you don’t. It models a faith that can hold an open question.
- Tell them about your own wrestling, if it is honest and age-appropriate.
- Stay near. The book’s counsel is to “struggle without letting go.” That applies to parents holding on to a wrestling child, too.
conversation starters
- “Is there a question about God or faith you have not felt safe asking? You can ask me.”
- “What do your friends think about faith? Where do you land compared to them?”
- “What moment so far has changed the direction of your life?”
- “When something hard happens, do you feel more like running from God or arguing with Him?”
- “Who are you becoming this year? Who do you want to become?”
one thing to try this week
From the book’s guide: “Bring one honest question you have been hiding — about faith, yourself, or the future — into the open this week, either to God directly or to a trusted, safe person, turning toward it instead of away.”
Go first. Name one of your own. It gives your teenager permission in a way no invitation can.
One distinction to keep in view: doubt is not despair. A teenager wrestling with questions about God is doing something healthy. A teenager who has stopped seeing any way forward needs more than a good conversation.
And if what you are seeing has moved past ordinary growing pains — a sadness that will not lift, talk of not wanting to be here, a fear that has stopped being temporary — that deserves real help today, not someday. Bring in a counselor, a pastor, a doctor, or another trusted adult, and know that in the United States you or your teen can call or text 988 at any hour. This article is education, not diagnosis, and it is no substitute for someone who can sit with your family in person.
Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC, is the author of Seeds of Wisdom for Teens™. The Divided Hallways: A Journey Through Hosea follows one school through fourteen novels, one for each chapter of Hosea; Wrestling for Truth is Book 12. Every book closes with a Grow Deeper guide for families, and the first chapter of Wrestling for Truth is free to read.