About Revive Family

Jeff found that the sudden change put them into culture shock that opened them to bonding with the first people that accepted them on campus. This resulted in the abusive boyfriend, partying, and unhealthy relationships that the students shared they had become trapped in. 

As Jeff dug into why they were so easily moved to do things they had not planned on, he discovered that 70 to 90 % of high school students reported leading an intentionally deceptive dual life that their parents were not aware of, beginning in middle school  It did not harm them because they were around their parents and adults most of the time, so they could only lead this life 5 to 10% of the time. This changed when they left home. The desire for freedom and the dual life pointed in the wrong direction and all it took was the stress, change and loneliness to send them over the edge. 

Jeff then dug into the reason students lead a dual life. This was when the research got challenging for him as a father. He found that the way parents approached their kids was damaging the emotional connection and relationship between them. This began as early as age 4. Due to existing views of parenting, Jeff found that a vast majority of students were afraid to be honest with their parents about their feelings, shortcomings, failures and the things their parents did that pushed them away. 

Jeff also found that every student, even teens, desired to be close to their parents like they once were but had no idea how to get there, given their inability to live up to their parents’ rules, and expectations that left them feeling like they could not please their parents. Their repeated mistakes made them feel like they were not good enough and that their parents were regularly either disappointed, frustrated, or mad with them. As a result, they emotionally distanced from their parents, leaving a void inside that they needed to fill with something. Many students reported that by middle school and especially high school, their families felt like individuals living on separate emotional islands, only increasing their need to fill the void. 

They filled the void with the very things parents blamed for the issues in their lives: social media, influencers, video games, alcohol, marijuana, and relationships with other hurting kids. They shared that they distanced from their parents, hid in their rooms, and felt bored, which is why they turned to screens as early as age 7 or 8. Especially if parents had used screens as a parenting tool to get a break when their kids were young. As parents raised concerns or became upset with them about their screen usage or friends, it drove the wedge deeper between them and their kids, and their desire to escape increased, often leading to some form of addiction. 

Jeff’s research could not have come at a better time for him personally.  He was already seeing the warning signs of distance and hardness of heart in his 8-year-old daughter.  She was escaping into reading novels to the tune of 1,300 pages a week. By the time she was nine, she was hard, and defensive, and would not admit she had hit her sister, broken a rule, or lied. She would blame the sun, the moon, or the dog, anything to not be wrong again.

When Jeff took his research videos home and showed them to his two oldest kids, he asked “Do you see me the way these kids see their parents?” and they responded, “Heck yah!” This harsh reality slapped Jeff in the face, as he realized that his daughter was lying and denying and arguing because she did not want to disappoint him or upset her mom and face conflict.  Jeff found that while students desired to be close to their parents and to please them, many had concluded they could not. This left them putting on an act to keep their parents happy, often the beginning of the dual life. Those who do not just comply and put on an act and adopt a self-protective mindset like Jeff’s daughter, that makes them defensive or reactive to anything negative their parents attempt to address.  While the compliant kids seem like they are doing well they are not and are often developing just as serious a dual life as the defensive/reactive kids.

Jeff leveraged his master’s degree in leadership to research different approaches and methods of leading and found that often high-control, low-trust, authoritative leadership styles did not produce the best results in a cooperative environment. The last thing he expected to find while studying theology was a leadership style and approach that tied everything he learned about leadership and the issues with kids together.  However, he discovered an incredible amount of overlap between alternative successful leadership styles in business journals and those of the Good Shepherd, causing him to strike out in a completely different direction as a parent with his four kids.

Jeff was stunned at how fast his oldest turned around once he began to apply what he learned from his research with kids and study. Below her self-protection, she really did desire to be close to her dad and to please him. She had simply given up and gone into self-protection mode.