Partnering With Parents in Youth Discipleship

One of the biggest buzzwords in youth ministry is partnering with parents.

It’s something we started to realize a couple of decades ago. Or maybe re-realize. I’m not sure what the right word is there. But at some point, youth ministry began to reestablish the idea that parents are the primary spiritual influence at home. Research from Barna has shown that most parents believe they are primarily responsible for their child’s spiritual development, even though many also struggle to feel effective in that role.

When youth ministry first started, it was a beautiful thing. Churches created space for teenagers to have something of their own, to encounter the Lord at their own pace, to have their own activities, and to build community outside of their family. That was good. That mattered.

But as these things often go, the pendulum swung too far.

Instead of youth ministry becoming a support to family discipleship, it sometimes became a silo. Students had their thing. Parents had their thing. The church had its thing. And eventually, we realized that something had gotten disconnected. So in recent decades, there has been a swing back toward partnering with parents. And that’s good. But the problem is that partnering with parents is not nearly as easy as we want it to be.

Problems Preventing You From Partnership with Parents

When you actually get down to the nuts and bolts of it, partnering with parents requires a few things that don’t always go your way.

1) Parents don’t always want to be partnered with.

For one, you have to have parents who want to be partnered with. And for many of us, we have not always discovered that to be the case. What we’ve actually discovered is that some parents in our ministry would prefer to outsource the spiritual development of their children to us, the church. That makes it difficult to figure out how to partner with them because partnership requires both sides to participate.

2) Parents don’t read emails.

The second problem is that parents don’t read emails.

That is one of the most frustrating things in the world, but it is reality in almost every church that I know. Parents do not read emails. And if you are a parent, you probably don’t read every email from every activity, sport, school program, or organization your kid is connected to either. So this is part of the over-busy, technologically oversaturated culture we live in. Parents are flooded with information, and that makes communication difficult.

3) You don’t have the right skillset.

The third problem is that, to some extent, some of us do not actually have the skill set to partner with parents well.

We would love to partner with parents. We really would. But we are not always good at communicating with them. If you got into youth ministry, there’s a decent chance you got into it because you connect well with teenagers. But parents are a different thing entirely.

Communicating with them is different. Navigating that line between being on the parent’s team while also representing the student well is difficult. It’s difficult to play both of those roles with wisdom.

So whether it’s age, life stage, personality, communication patterns, or skill set, some of us simply don’t communicate with parents as well as we wish we did. And that makes partnering with them harder.

Whatever the case is, partnering with parents is tricky. But it still matters. So let’s talk about three things we can do to partner with parents better.

Three Steps To Partner Better With Parents in Youth Discipleship

1) Identify Your Strengths

The first way you can partner with parents better is to identify your strengths as a leader. You do not have to be great at every possible version of parent partnership. Fuller Youth Institute similarly encourages youth leaders to partner with parents in simple, relational ways.

Some youth pastors are fantastic communicators from the stage. They are great at preaching, teaching, casting vision, and helping parents understand where the ministry is headed. Others have access to strong curriculum, helpful resources, parent training videos, or devotionals they can pass along. Others are much better in one-on-one relationships, sitting across from a parent at coffee, hearing what they are carrying, and encouraging them in the middle of a difficult season.

Partnering with parents well does not require you to do every possible strategy. It requires you to figure out what you can do well, then lean into that.

Relational Partnership

If you are fantastic at talking with parents one-on-one, then do that. Meet for coffee. Ask how they’re doing. Hear what they’re navigating. Encourage them. You don’t have to have all the answers. Sometimes partnering with parents simply means being a listening ear that is clearly on their team while they walk through the struggle of parenting a teenager.

Resource Partnership

On the other hand, if relational connection with parents is not your strong suit, then don’t pretend it is. Maybe your best contribution is resourcing them. Maybe you find articles, podcasts, books, videos, or training resources that help parents think more clearly about discipleship. Maybe you use a curriculum that includes parent resources or parent training. Maybe your role is to do some of the grunt work of finding helpful resources so parents don’t have to start from scratch.

That is also partnering with parents.

Parents are busy. They don’t always have time to research those resources themselves. But many of them do want help, and many of them expect to find that help at church. So be willing to introduce them to things that will help them parent from a more gospel-oriented place.

You don’t have to be good at every version of parent partnership. Start with the version you can actually sustain.

2) Be on Their Team in Front of Their Kid

The second way we partner with parents well is by always, always being on their team in front of their kid.

When you’re talking with a student, it is one of the easiest things in the world to subtly take their side and bash their parents. And if we’re honest, doing that can earn you points pretty quickly. Students usually love it when an adult validates every frustration they have with their parents.

But in the long run, that hurts the student more than it helps them.

You might see that student for a couple of hours a week. Their parents are still their parents. That relationship matters. It is going to shape them for a long time. So your goal cannot be to win cheap brownie points by making the parent look bad.

Advocate for the student’s development longterm

Your goal is to help the student see things more clearly. That means when a student is frustrated with their parent, we empathize with the student without immediately undermining the parent. We can acknowledge that something feels hard. We can listen. We can ask good questions. But whenever possible, we should help the student see things from their parent’s perspective, give their parent the benefit of the doubt, and focus on the part of the situation they can actually own.

There are exceptions, of course. If there is abuse, neglect, or anything that triggers your responsibility as a mandated reporter, then you need to act. In those situations, the best way to serve the family may be to make sure there is accountability and protection in place.

But most parent-student conflict is not that. Most of it is normal family tension. It’s messy, emotional, frustrating, and complicated, but not abusive.

In those situations, one of the best things you can do is help students move toward peace. Romans 12 tells us, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” That doesn’t mean students pretend everything is fine. It doesn’t mean they ignore real hurt. But it does mean we help them consider what faithfulness looks like on their side of the relationship.

So be on the parent’s team in front of the student. Not because parents are always right. They aren’t. But because helping students honor their parents, understand their parents, and communicate with their parents is part of discipleship.

3) Take the Long Road

The third step we can take to partner with parents well is to take a long-road approach.

Parenting is a marathon, not a sprint. And as an outside observer, you may see plenty of things you wish the parents in your ministry would do differently.

You may wish they were more consistent. You may wish they read your emails. You may wish they prioritized youth group more often. You may wish they had better conversations at home. You may wish they handled conflict differently. You may wish they asked more spiritual questions or took more ownership of discipleship.

Some of those instincts may be right.

But even if they are right, those things usually do not change overnight. So take the long view with parents.

A Gospel Lens for This

This approach to partnering with parents is informed by a gospel lens. God is far more invested in our growth and maturity than we are in the growth and maturity of the parents in our ministry. At the same time, God has infinitely greater ability to affect immediate change in us than we have to affect immediate change in the parents we partner with. And yet, despite greater desire to see change in us and great ability to enact change in us, God in Christ through the Holy Spirit takes the slow train with us. He allows our sanctification to take time. It’s how He chooses to do it. So let’s have that same mindset toward the parents we influence.

Because the parents in your ministry are not finished products. They are navigating jobs, bills, marriage, divorce, grief, stress, aging parents, younger kids, health issues, and all kinds of things you may not even know about. And then on top of that, they are trying to parent teenagers, which is no small thing.

So yes, there will be moments where parents don’t handle things the way you wish they would. There will be times when they frustrate you. There will be moments when they don’t seem to pay attention to the ministry. There will be seasons when it feels like they want you to care more about their teenager’s discipleship than they do.

Partnering With Parents Is Hard, But Worth It

Partnering with parents is tricky. It is difficult. You are probably not going to do all of it perfectly well. There will probably be times when parents are frustrated with you about something. There will be times when you feel like you are communicating clearly and somehow the message still is not getting through. There will be moments when you wonder if any of this is working.

But in the end, one of the best things you can do for the students in your youth group is to positively influence their home environment.

You may not be able to disciple every parent at the level you wish you could. You may not be able to get every parent to read every email or attend every parent meeting. You may not be able to fix every family dynamic. But as much as you have that role, you can help parents follow Jesus more faithfully and parent from a more Christ-centered perspective.

So do the best you can. Don’t feel like you have to do everything.

Figure out how God has wired you to make a difference in the lives of parents. Be on the parents’ team while still empathizing with your students. Take the long road, because God is working on them, and He is working on you too.