Seeking Help

Parents of prodigals face hard choices.

Craig Svensson knows about that firsthand. His son started wandering from the faith and making destructive choices when he was still in high school. It became a point when he got older and was an adult. We simply couldn't have him in our home when he would come home and be intoxicated and put us at risk because of things he might do. And you have to think about that.

You have to think about your own safety, the safety of your spouse. And so once he became an adult, that reality is if you're going to use drugs, you're going to come into our home and use drugs, you're going to come home intoxicated, we can have you continuing to live here. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at FamilyLifeToday.com. What are the right boundaries to put in place when you have a son or a daughter who is a prodigal, who's making choices that violate your value system or put your family at risk?

We'll talk more with Craig Svensson about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. As I've talked to couples over the years about subjects we've addressed on Family Life Today, the thing that we come back to all the time when it comes to parenting is that whenever we start talking about issues related to kids being prodigals, parents are paying particular attention. Parents who don't have kids who are acting out want to do whatever they can to try to head that off if there's anything they can do. And parents where it's going on, this is dominating a marriage and a family.

When you've got a child who's making bad decisions, everything else kind of gets on hold until you can try to get your arms around this situation. I have many friends that have been and are in those situations and they feel desperate for help. They're looking everywhere and especially to God for help because they're at a loss to know exactly what to do. And it's a lot more families than you think. You know, they're all over your church. And they don't want to be known by this.

There's some shame and there's privacy and there's all of that going on and yet they need help and support and encouragement and the prayers of others. And we get to give them help today. We've got a friend joining us this week on Family Life Today to talk about this. Craig Svenson is here. Craig, welcome back.

Great to be with you. Craig has written a book called The Painful Path of a Prodigal. Craig and his wife have been married for 36 years. They have three children, including one who spent a long season as a prodigal. And we've already heard this week about how your son at age 12, 13 starts acting out disobedient, self-willed in school.

At age 15, you find him smoking marijuana over on the side of the house. You intervene, you get involved, try to figure out how are we going to get our arms around all of this. You got a job transfer in the middle of this.

You went from teaching at one university to teaching at University of Iowa. So your family now moves to Iowa and you guys were thinking change of scenery, change of location, maybe this is the thing that will break the spell. That was our hope. That was our prayer. It looked like God was opening a door to help for that. And you know, as a parent, you want to do what you can, you know, ultimately it takes God to do a work in their hearts and until it happens, nothing is going to happen. But yet the Bible teaches us as parents, we want to fulfill our parental responsibility. We want to create the best environment for them.

We want to try to give them the resources and the environment that will best allow them to flourish. And that seemed like a great opportunity for us. It did not turn out that way. But we know as parents, we took that step to try to be able to give him the opportunity to turn in a new direction. Did you arrive in Iowa and Eric just started seeking out the same kind of folks he had been hanging out with in Michigan?

Very quickly. And this actually came as a surprise to us, but the drug problem was actually worse in Iowa City than it was in metropolitan Detroit. It took us a while before we realized that.

And it was really our son who said to us, you know, you don't understand what's different here. My friends' parents use drugs with them. That never happened in metro Detroit. Now, I don't want to disparage all of Iowa City.

It's a wonderful place to live. But in the people that he engaged with, and of course he sought out the drug-using people, it was just pretty shocking to us how many parents were using drugs with their children. In fact, ultimately, to fast forward a little bit, things just kept getting worse. Then he got involved in legal difficulties. Ultimately, he was sentenced to a residential program in Iowa, and he was placed into a center that was mostly filled with kids who were addicts. He was only experimenting still really at that time.

He wouldn't meet anybody's criteria for being an addict. But in that center, he shared 10 months residential with 24 other kids, and they would have these sessions where parents would come. And it appeared that we were the only parents where at least one of us was not currently or had not recently been in prison for drugs.

It was just a very different environment, and it turned out to be in some ways a worse environment than he had come from. Had he graduated from marijuana to other things by this point? Yes, he had started using stimulants and some other drugs. Meth?

Not to our knowledge. He was using stimulants that were available over the counter that he could gain access to. One of the challenges that we found is what the courts decide to do when they intervene. And one of the things that they did was they forced him to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. And as a teenager going to Alcoholics Anonymous, what that unfortunately does is it introduces you to a whole lot of people that have access to drugs in the community that you might not necessarily have. A large portion of the people that were in the Alcoholics Anonymous group that he went to were just there to fulfill their legal responsibilities. Some judge had told them, you've got to go to so many sessions for so long or whatever.

They weren't there because they wanted to change themselves. They were just filling their court mandated requirements. And so what it did is it introduced him to a network that he could get a supply of all kinds of different drugs.

You're, by training, you're a pharmacologist. Yes. You can spot when eyes are red and blood shot. Yes.

You can spot when people aren't acting the way they ought to be acting. Yes. Was your son coming home and you go, he's high? Sure, there were times of that. Definitely.

What do you do? By the point in time that we began seeing him coming home like that, there was already judicial action and he was on probation. And the difficulty with that is you have a probation officer and when you violate that probation by using drugs, et cetera, then the courts ramp up what their action is going to be. And that's ultimately what happened with him. But we certainly, over the years and even beyond that, it became a point when he got older and was an adult. We simply couldn't have him in our home when he would come home and be intoxicated and put us at risk because of things he might do. And you have to think about that. You have to think about your own safety, the safety of your spouse. And so once he became an adult, that reality is if you're going to use drugs, you're going to come into our home and use drugs, you're going to come home intoxicated, we can't have you continuing to live here and put us in danger. How was that? I mean, that's the right decision, but had to be extremely hard to do.

Oh, it is incredibly hard to do. As a parent, what you want to do is protect them because, you know, putting them out into the street is not a good thing. There were periods of times over the years that our son was homeless.

We were then had moved on to Purdue University and he was in Iowa. And of course, like any kid, he would call us and say, I don't have a place to live. Can you pay for an apartment?

Can you put me up in a hotel? But we knew any resources that we would send him would ultimately be used for drugs. And it's an incredibly difficult decision to allow your kid to be homeless. In fact, what we did is I think it's important for parents when you come to hard decisions. You need to have someone that can check your emotions and make sure you're not making decisions in anger. Because by that point in time, your child has hurt you terribly.

I was going to say, like, I'm crying for you guys thinking about the pain you've gone through. But I also think it probably happens so much that your heart starts to protect itself and become a little bit hardened to the pleas or the things. Does that happen? It can happen. And you can even, I have one chapter in my book, you lose affection for your child. And it seems like a strange thing.

And maybe some people hearing that say, how could that ever happen? But when your kid has hurt you again and again and again, it's hard. And those are times when you need people that you can turn to in confidence and they can check your heart. Or you can talk through decisions when you're going to face some of those really hard decisions and say, listen, I just want you to listen. And I want you to tell us if we need to be thinking of something that we're not. If there's warning flags, if you think we're responding in emotional ways that we shouldn't. And everybody is going to need someone to turn to in those moments where they can get some advice and get some insight. I'm curious, as you and your wife sat down with Eric and you just said, what's happening?

Like, what's going on in your heart? How would he respond? You know, he would acknowledge that he was making destructive choices and that he was making choices that he knew hurt us, hurt him. The most baffling thing with his repeated response is, but I like using drugs. Now, that's very hard to see, especially as the consequences were piling up in jail.

Ultimately, he ended up spending three years in a maximum security prison in Iowa. Health consequences over and over and over. And you sit back and you say, how can you say you like taking drugs when you see what it has done to your life? And it was so baffling to us. But at the same time, my wife and I work in our community with the homeless.

We've been working for over a decade. And a significant portion of the homeless community are serious drug users and their lives are shambles because of drugs. But yet they don't want to walk away.

The way they see consequences has become so distorted that they don't recognize the magnitude of destruction in their life that the drugs have brought. I want to ask you about two things. First, I want to ask you about how you processed the shame and the personal responsibility that comes with our son is doing this. We must be bad parents. We must be responsible at some level for what he's doing. The guilt. Yeah. And then secondly, as a pharmacologist, talk about how you understand addictive personality and addictive biology.

And was there something going on with him biologically that was causing him to be predisposed in this direction? Talk about the shame and the guilt side first, can you? Sure. Well, first of all, you feel like a failure when your child goes south, right? When they're making rebellious and destructive choices. The reality is that every child has to make their own choices and you realize that. As a parent, we all make mistakes. However our children turn out, we've all made mistakes. And I think that's an important point to remember because we can take a very formulaic approach to parenting.

If I do A, B, and C, everything will turn out all right. Well, we know that's not true. There's many biblical examples. I mean, where did Jesus fail in his discipleship with Judas?

That Judas would not only turn from him, but literally turn on him and betray him unto death. And there's many other examples of that in the Bible. And you have to recognize that an individual, their choices in life is not driven just by what they're taught. That doesn't mean we shouldn't desire to teach them rightly as parents.

We have that responsibility, but it doesn't guarantee everything. And you have to recognize that as a parent. Second, you have to realize that your failures do not determine their destiny. You know, God's the one that does the redemptive work in a heart. And if God is drawing your child to himself, it will happen no matter how good or how poor a parent you are.

And God is the one that has to do that work. And there is forgiveness in where we might fail as a parent. And we need to be able to embrace that forgiveness. And there may be times when you have done things that you need to seek forgiveness from your child. And we shouldn't be hesitant to do that because that's actually a very important teaching moment, is to help them see how to respond when we sin. And when we sin against them and seek their forgiveness, they learn that.

And so, as parents, we should do that. What you can't do is beat yourself up over your failures, whether they're real failures or not. We have to embrace the forgiveness that God gives and move on. Just as God gives us forgiveness, we realize that that's what another person should do, but we can't be held hostage if they refuse to forgive us.

Now, is that hard to do? Because I'm sitting here thinking I could say the same words, and I've laid in bed at night over decisions I've made that affected my sons, not even very tragically, but just missed opportunities, whatever. And I'd lay there thinking, oh, if I'd only, if I'd only, they would have. And I know in my head I can let that shame go. I can let that regret go.

I can receive God's forgiveness, but I lay there and I can't. You ever been there? Our hardest time was the first time our son appeared in court. And to see him walk into that courtroom in an orange jumpsuit with his wrist and his ankle shackled and his wrist shackled to a big, thick leather belt that was around his waist, my wife and I went home and just said, where did we go so wrong?

And just cried ourselves to sleep. So, sure, we have been there. To me, the most important thing is a solid belief in the sovereignty of God. That's what gives you confidence and peace to know that God is sovereign and a trust in his sovereign work. And I like the fact that you acknowledge parents may make mistakes, and those mistakes may have consequences in the life of a child. We've got to own the fact that our parenting is not inconsequential to the lives of our kids. And there's not a parent in the universe that hasn't made a mistake.

That's right. But by the same token, your child's choices are not solely your responsibility. Every child has to make his own choices and mix in the providence and sovereignty of God on the top of all of this. And as parents, we can say, Lord, forgive me for the mistakes I've made. Lord, pour grace on this.

Lord, bring beauty from these ashes and walk in confidence that God is sovereign over the affairs of men. There was a time at church that you were seeking prayer. Share about that what happened when, at one point at the beginning, you were asking for prayer for Eric. This was early on in a prayer with the rebellion of our son. And I just asked at a prayer meeting for prayers for a son who was beginning to rebel. And a man came up to be much taller than I and stuck his finger in my face and said, the Bible says that if you train up a child in the way he should go, when he is old, he will not depart from it.

And if your child isn't following the Lord, it's your fault and nobody else's. And they turned on his heels and walked away. I'm sure that was very helpful. Yeah.

It was shocking as much as anything else. You know, here I was looking for help. I was looking for others to pray. And what I ended up being was condemned. I think that that was probably an extreme example of being judged by others, but we experienced some other cases. And we have gotten to know other parents of prodigals. And they talk about that's one of the most painful experiences is the way they're judged by other people with the actions of their children. And this is obviously an area where sometimes the church falls short, where the church should be there to help and to support.

And we can gratefully say more often than not, people were there to help and support us and comfort and to guide us and to be there with us. But a good word to every parent who's listening. You don't have a prodigal. Maybe your kids are doing fine. You see something going on in somebody else's family. Pray for them. Encourage them. Support them. Help them.

Don't come up with some kind of self-righteous, this is all your fault thing. Craig, I always wonder if I know a family struggling with something, do they want us to approach and ask, how can I pray or do we avoid it? I don't want it to be awkward and embarrassing. What's the best approach to help other parents? It probably depends on your relationship with them. If you have no relationship with all coming up out of the blue, asking them that is probably going to be hard. But you can always pray for them if you know.

But if you know them, sometimes just simply saying, we continue to pray for you, just giving them that assurance and that knowledge can be encouragement. If you've got a close relationship, then you might even be able to ask specifically, and maybe there's ways you can actually reach out to their child. What you don't want to do is create an environment where parents are probed about, okay, so what's going on? We can fall under the guise of wanting to praise wisely, getting into the details of something that we don't really need to know. And it's not helpful for the parent to rehearse that either, because as you rehearse that over and over and over again, it can strike against your affection for that child. So as a parent, you don't want to be running around rehearsing. As a parent, there's also a sense in which you want to protect your child.

Your desire is to see them come to faith in Christ, to turn, to be like the prodigal child in Luke chapter 15 and to come back, right? And so you want to protect their reputation as much as they can. You don't want to share things unnecessarily. I know this is somewhat controversial, but talk about the biology of addiction and are certain people predisposed in this direction? Well, it's interesting you ask that. I've just finished writing the draft of a book on the subject of addiction that I've spent the last several years writing.

And of course, my professional background and everything. Addiction is a choice. It is mostly, and there's no one model that's going to explain all addiction, it's mostly an acculturation.

It's a process of people using drugs with peers and getting deeper and deeper into it as they go deeper and deeper into a peer group that's using drugs. Are there biological effects of it? There certainly are because it's not all drugs that are addictive, so biology is important. The science on whether there are people who are predisposed is not very strong, quite frankly.

The best evidence is with alcohol. And it does seem that there's some predisposition, but no one is a predetermined alcoholic. No one becomes an addict because they take a drug once, because they take a drink once. There might be some people who are more inclined because of their personality. There's no such thing, though, as an addictive personality. There might be personality traits that make you more inclined to get into drug use. But it really is an acculturation process where over a period of time you enter into a drug-using culture getting into a wider array of drugs and getting into using drugs more frequently.

And it becomes a part of your life. And one of the reasons why it's hard for people to leave it is because that's their culture now. And it would be like us moving to a foreign culture. You probably know that most missionaries only serve one term.

Why? Because it's really hard to go live in a foreign culture. That's not the only reason, but that's a big part of it, right? It's trying to live in a culture that's very different than your heart. So taking somebody who's become very entrenched in drug abuse and drug use and all of the things associated with a part of the culture and now asking them to step away from that and leaving it, what you're asking them to do is now live in a new culture. And that's why it is so very difficult to leave drug use behind. So you're saying set the biology aside, the sociology of drug use may be more powerful than the biology of drug use.

There's no question. Biology certainly has a role because there are biological changes that happen. But far more important is the acculturation process. Oftentimes we hear that addiction is really trying to escape. Is that a part of it? Again, I don't think we can explain all addiction by one model. Right. It sounds complicated.

It is complicated. If you think about most addiction begins in the teen years. In fact, 90% of heroin addicts follow the exact same pattern. At 12 or 13, they start using intoxicating substances that are legal but not for them.

It starts with tobacco and then alcohol, things that often might be available for them to get hold of in the home. Then it moves to marijuana. Then it generally moves to some type of stimulant, some type of tablets, and then ultimately heroin. 90% of heroin addicts have that absolute same pattern.

So you can see it's an acculturation process. And normally what it is, it's an accumulation of drug use. In other words, they don't use only heroin.

They use a variety of different drugs. So they're getting absorbed and drawn and drawn into a culture over time. That's happening at a time when people are trying to figure out their lives. Teens are confused by the world whose expectations for them are not written down and real clear. They've got all these biological changes going on and they're trying to find their place in the world. And sometimes they find a place of acceptance in the drug-using culture.

And that can be a magnet for them, particularly if a child is finding a hard time locating their place outside of that. It's interesting as I hear you talk about that sort of from a scientist in a sense and a biological side. There's the spiritual side. God warns us the sins of the Father will visit through the legacy, through the generations. And so I'm a guy who comes from two alcoholic parents.

I don't know about the biology part. I just know if I'm not careful, I'm going to continue that addiction. And I've always thought of that as a spiritual sense is like, man, I got to protect myself from alcohol because it's in my family legacy and my boys. So in our house, we didn't have it in our house because I was like, I don't know all the biology of this, but I know the sins of the Father thing. I got to be very careful. So I'm thinking of parents listening right now. Be very careful. Know your biology, know your spiritual lineage and legacy.

Right. And be careful because we don't know all the aspects of it, but it could pass through you. So be careful. Well, I'm thinking of parents listening, thinking that's it. I'm going to homeschool my kids. Not going to let them out of the house ever.

In the middle of Montana, right, where they never meet another human being. Really? And the thing is, you can try to protect all you want. Exactly. You can separate yourself from the world, but you can't separate yourself from the flesh and the devil. You know, the Bible also tells us that a blessed man doesn't sit in the sea of scoffers.

You know, who you hang out with is going to have an impact in your life, right? And the Proverbs are filled with warnings about who you hang out with. If you walk with the wise, you'll be wise. The friend of fools comes to shame, right? Yes. I mean, people can't find trouble where they want to find it, but the Bible is filled with wisdom about being careful where you go, what you do. Love not the world, know the things of the world. And I'm sure you tried to point Eric toward this group of friends.

Play on the team, the kids who go to youth groups, and he just wasn't interested, right? That's correct. That's correct. And you can't create that hunger in them. You can try to provide an opportunity if God begins to move in their heart, that there are people that will help them. But again, ultimately it comes that God has to do that work. Jesus said that that work is as mysterious as the wind, right?

When he took to Nicodemus. And so it's really important to realize that the greatest thing that we need to do is be in prayer, that God will do a work in their lives. We do everything else we should as parents, but ultimately it comes to whether God is going to do a work in their lives.

And that's what I think all of us as parents need to remember today. It's what you point us to in the book you've written, The Painful Path of a Prodigal, Biblical Help and Hope for Those Who Love the Wayward and Rebellious. We have copies of Craig's book available in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can order it from us online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word today to get a copy of Craig's book. Again, the title is The Painful Path of a Prodigal.

Order online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get a copy. You know, we've said this before, but it bears repeating. Kids make their own choices. Parents can do the best job they know how to do, discipling their kids, and kids can still make destructive choices.

There are no guarantees that come with parenting. And yet we have a responsibility to raise our kids like you and your wife did, Craig, to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, to point them toward Jesus, to talk to them about the Bible. The holidays provide us with kind of a ready-made opportunity to be able to reinforce biblical truth. This week we can be talking about gratitude and thanksgiving and why it's good to have a thankful heart, memorize some Bible verses about gratitude or thanksgiving. And then as we head into the Christmas season, there are plenty of opportunities to talk about Jesus coming and why he came and why we celebrate that. Family Life has created a resource called The Twelve Names of Christmas, a dozen Christmas ornaments designed for young children, each one pointing to a different name or title of Jesus.

So there's an ornament that portrays him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, another one that portrays him as the Good Shepherd or the Bread of Life or the Living Water. All of these ornaments are designed to help stimulate engagement with your kids around spiritual themes during the Christmas season. And we're making this resource, The Twelve Names of Christmas, available to those of you who can help support the ministry of Family Life with a donation this week. When you go to familylifetoday.com to donate online or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to make a donation over the phone, you can ask for your copy of The Twelve Names of Christmas. We're happy to send it out to you. And let me just remind you, what you're investing in when you donate to Family Life Today is the spiritual health of marriages and families all around the world. You are expanding the reach of this ministry so that more people can more often receive practical biblical help and hope for their marriages and for their families.

Thanks in advance for your donations. We look forward to hearing from you and we appreciate your partnership. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to hear from Craig Svensson about the phone call that no parent wants to receive, especially when they have a prodigal. We'll hear that story tomorrow and I hope you can be with us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas. A crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.