Preparing Your Teens for College is a comprehensive survival manual on getting teens ready for whatever comes after high school. I tried to cover the gamut of issues that parents need to consider. The book is broken up into six sections: Character, Faith, Relationships, Finances, Academics, and the College Decision itself. I talk about training teens to take initiative, accept correction, delay gratification, and be firm in their Christian convictions while gracious towards those with other beliefs. I write about the importance of exercising discernment in relationships and establishing faith-sustaining friendships. There’s a chapter on the importance of purity and intentionality with the opposite sex. I discuss how to help teens manage their money and practice financial stewardship so that they can avoid the pitfalls of consumer debt and excessive student loan debt. And there are several chapters on teaching teens to work unto the Lord and use their high school years to discover and nurture their academic talents and interests, all of which lead up to making an informed decision on whether to pursue a four-year college, a two-year college, or some other form of post-high school training.
The chapters have a few different kinds of special features that I’m really excited about. First of all, there are practical sidebars, tips, and links to other resources for studying specific topics in more detail. Second, I had a team of parents and pastors that were kind enough to read the book while I was writing it. They supplied testimonies from the lives of real teens which speak to the principles in the book. Each chapter has one of these testimonies. They also provided specific questions that they thought a book like this should answer. Each chapter contains one of their questions along with my answer.