The older I get—and the more time I spend around adolescent boys (35 years teaching, coaching, admin)—the more convinced I am that there is a unique psychological ecosystem that exists only inside the mind of a teenage male. A place where impulses override logic, where humor is currency, where embarrassment is deadly, and where the prefrontal cortex hasn’t yet been invited to the party. I call it the Beevis/Butthead mind of an adolescent boy.
Parents know it. Teachers know it. Coaches know it. Youth pastors know it. And every so often, the boys themselves know it—but usually only long after the fact.
Working with adolescent boys requires patience, resilience, discernment, and a good sense of humor. But more than anything, it requires an understanding that their minds are still under construction. They OFTEN don’t know why they do what they do. And as much as we want to believe otherwise, they truly aren’t thinking. So I eventually stopped using the phrase, “You would think…” because I realized—no, they wouldn’t think. Not yet.
When I served as Dean of Students, one young man (MANY years ago) repeatedly drew crude male anatomy around campus—on desks, bathroom stalls, notebooks, anywhere his imagination felt inspired. When I finally brought him in, I asked him, “Even in my most heathen days, I never felt the urge to do this. Can you help me understand why you keep doing it?”
He shrugged. Not belligerently. Not defensively. He truly didn’t know.
It hit me then: even he didn’t have access to the interior logic of his own behavior. He wasn’t a future criminal mastermind. He wasn’t malicious. He was an adolescent boy with a Beevis/Butthead brain.
So instead of lecturing him, I gave him a task:
Find and remove every inappropriate drawing on campus. All of it. His job for the next week was to scrub, repair, and erase the very thing he found so amusing.
I told him that depending on how well he did, I would determine the severity of the consequences—possibly even a multi-day suspension.
He worked hard. He cleaned everything. He took ownership. And I counted that week of work as a ‘served Saturday school’.
It is always MESSY- a soup of discipline and discipleship, consequence and compassion, all in one process. And it reminded me again how challenging it is to teach boys things that feel so basic:
Clean up after yourself.
Flush the toilet.
Respect your teacher.
Consider your future.
None of this comes preloaded in the adolescent male operating system.
During those years, Coach Fred Yancey became one of the most important voices in my own growth. I’d go to him with situations—frustrating, confusing, borderline ridiculous—and he always had a story. Sometimes an example of what he had done well. Sometimes a cautionary tale of what he wished he had done differently.
Over time, I realized something that no textbook ever teaches:
I don’t care what degrees you have or how many books you’ve read—there is NO substitute for a mentor.
Mentors shorten the learning curve.They keep us steady and supply the wisdom we didn’t know we needed.
And one day, standing in front of our team, he gave a phrase that summed up my entire job in the simplest terms possible:
“The ministry of mess up, fess up, and grow up.”
It clicked like a light bulb.
MESS UP
My job back then as Dean of Students (2011-2016) was remarkably predictable. Not unlike funeral services, the work never stopped. Each morning I walked in with a short to-do list, and by 9:00 AM the list was irrelevant. Emails, phone calls, parent concerns, teachers stopping by—all related to the infinite ways boys can find to create chaos.
Dress code. Inappropriate jokes. Cheating (or as I learned to say ‘violating test protocols’).
Excessive Tardies.Social Media issues. Parking disasters.Skipping class. Family issues.
Some cases were light and forgettable. Others were heavy and heartbreaking. But in those 7 years, I never had a single day where everyone got it right. Sadly, I never went an entire year where I wasn’t working a case that ended in withdrawal. It took a toll physically, mentally, and spiritually.
And that’s the point.
We are all mess-up people. We cannot even consistently follow the clear and reasonable boundaries of school rules—how much more do we fall short of God’s? Some kids stumble in one area and excel in another, but everyone struggles somewhere.
Even the best students and the strongest athletes are works in progress.
FESS UP
Confession is not natural. It never has been.
It goes back to Eden: lying, deflecting, blaming, hiding. It’s human instinct to cover rather than come clean.
One of the most surprising things I discovered was how much I admired certain students—not for their good behavior, but for their honesty. Some of the ones who broke the most rules were the first to look me in the eye and say, “I did it. I’m sorry.” Those moments took courage. Strength. Humility. Sometimes it was even humorous. I called a student in one year to ask him about ‘violating test protocols’ and he just said, “The way I looked at it was that it was a crime of opportunity”.
I also learned to guard against the false confession, where a student tries to guess what I want to hear or take responsibility for something they didn’t do just to make the meeting end. So part of my work was coaching them in how to tell the truth, not merely in how to avoid punishment.
A good apology is learned, not inherited. And even more, so is integrity.
GROW UP
This is where the ministry becomes discipleship. I often read Hebrews 12 with my students—particularly the reminder that discipline is not punishment but love, shaping, training, and protection.
They listened closely when I pointed out verse 10:
earthly fathers sometimes get discipline wrong…
but God never does.
I reminded them that discipline is a process—“for those who have been trained by it.”
Training takes repetition, time, patience, failures, and victory- the key is never giving up!
Growth rarely looks dramatic in the moment. But I saw fruit over time. Not the spectacular kind. The slow kind. The subtle kind. The kind that shows up in better decisions, quieter classrooms, thoughtful apologies, repaired relationships, and the deepening strength of character.
This isn’t just about teenage boys. It applies to all of us.
Personally
I need to fess up before the Lord—daily. I need more self-control, more consistency in the disciplines of grace: Scripture, prayer, obedience. I am still growing up too.
As a Dad
Discipline is love. With little children, discipline is obvious. As they get older, it becomes easier to avoid… and far more necessary. If I do not address laziness, disrespect, or attitude, then I’m not loving them. Growth requires guidance. Authority must be taught, not assumed. And now that my children are adults, I have to learn a different type of relationship.
The discipline days—the repeated conversations, the hard lines, the consequences that none of us enjoyed—are mostly behind us. The energy required in those early years was immense, but I see now how necessary it was. And I see the fruit of it. What remains today is a different kind of relationship, one built on respect, trust, and love, not enforcement.
I’m grateful beyond words that we didn’t parent alone. My wife and I had partners: a faithful church, a solid Christian school community, and mentors who anchored us when we weren’t sure what to do next. That shared effort—the alignment of home, church, and school—created a network of consistency for our kids, a web of voices all saying the same thing: walk in wisdom, walk in grace, walk in truth.
I look at who my children are now, and I’m thankful. Not because we got everything right—we didn’t—but because God used that partnership to shape them in ways we could never have managed on our own.
As a Church Member
Matthew 18 matters. Loving correction matters. So does humility to receive rebuke when appropriate. Community is formed not just by shared worship but by shared accountability.
The adolescent male mind is fragile, funny, frustrating, and full of potential. It doesn’t need shaming; it needs shaping. It doesn’t need ridicule; it needs relationship. And it certainly doesn’t need adults who give up on it because the path is rocky.
Boys become men through a long apprenticeship of patience, truth, correction, and grace.
The Beevis/Butthead stage is not a problem to eliminate but a season to steward.
Behind every shrug, every stupid decision, every sloppy mistake, every graffiti sketch, and every impulsive joke is a young man who is trying to figure out who he is and where he is going.
Our job—parents, teachers, coaches, pastors—is to walk with him:
when he messes up,
when he fesses up,
and as he slowly, steadily, learns to grow up.
And this is where Hebrews 12 steadies us.
God’s discipline does not flare with irritation, nor does it fade with exhaustion. It is purposeful. Loving. Forward-leaning. He is shaping us “for our good, that we may share His holiness.”
And though “no discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful,” Scripture promises that “later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness” for those trained by it.
2 Corinthians 5:18–20
“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation… We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”
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