Jonathan McKee is not a perfect parent! (just like me) Life In Student Ministry

Jonathan McKee is not a perfect parent! (just like me)

Topic / Leadership

blog, Parents, Reviews

You know how I know? Because he shares story after story about how badly he’s failed in his new book, “Confessions of an Imperfect Parent: Building Relationships, Buying Breakfasts, and Other Secrets for Connecting with your Teenager.” And man, he’s failed bad! He’s even yelled at his kids in public before! *gasp!* haha (Raise your hand if you’ve never done that… no hands? Good.)

In all seriousness, I love how transparent Jonathan is in this book about everything he and his wife and have learned about raising teenagers. He’s definitely not a Ph.D. coming at you with a lot of scientific answers on parenting issues that never work in real life. He’s real, vulnerable, and honest about how he and Lori have raised their kids. Even though my kids are only 7 months and 21 months old, I already feel like I can identify with a lot of what Jonathan writes. His advice is super-helpful even at this stage in my parenting life.

The book is split into three sections, each addressing an issue that is perhaps one of the biggest struggles for parents of teenagers (in my own paraphrase):

How do I build a relationship with my teenager?
How can I teach them to adopt Godly values as a teenager?
Letting go is so hard!

If you have regular parent meetings in your youth ministry, this is a great book to go through together as a group, or even for you, the youth worker, to teach through in those meetings. Each chapter ends with many challenging discussion questions and scripture passages that really help readers transfer the Jonathan’s principles to individual families.

You can pick up a copy of his book from TheSource4Parents.com.