Parenting Potholes

If we're going to have a good relationship with our kids when they become adults, there's a transition that has to happen in the teen years. We have to move from being their caretaker to being their coach.

Here's Ann Wilson. We call that phase the years of living in the question, where our kids would come and ask a question like, can we do this or whatever? And we know what the answer is.

The answer will be no. But instead of saying no, we would say things like, well, tell us about it. You know, you want to go see this movie? Tell us what it is. Tell us all about that. So we would just refrain from saying no immediately, but we would help them to come to that conclusion. Sometimes we would just have to say no, but we'd have a conversation because we're coaching them. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com.

If we want our children to thrive as young adults, we have to teach them how to start making choices on their own while they're still at home. We'll talk more about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us. I'm thinking a lot of moms and dads are looking forward to having the extended family back together at Christmas time.

And I think some moms and dads are going, and it could get tense. It's been kind of a tense year with politics and everything that's going on. So we got to go into this prayerfully and carefully. Ooh, that's good.

Prayerfully and carefully. I think that's really needed because it can also be a time of anxiety because we don't know what to expect in our conversations. I mean, in some ways, obviously it's wonderful. It's so fun. So great that they could come over, you go over there, but there's also you're tiptoeing around. You're like, don't talk about this. In fact, you say that on the drive over, right? As a mom and dad, like, hey, remember, do not bring this up. Yeah.

We go to one of our kids' houses the other day and Dave's like, okay, so let's talk about politics. And I'm like, let's not. Let's not.

Are you crazy? Let's have a nice time together. Yes. I thought we could have an honest conversation, but you know. Yeah. Some things you got to be careful about.

We had an opportunity, the three of us recently, to speak to a number of parents who have adult kids about how we navigate this relationship and how we continue to pursue what Ephesians 4, 3 says, pursue the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace, even when there are secondary things about which we disagree. And we're going to hear another portion of that presentation today. But before we dive into that, we got a couple weeks left in 2020. And I think a lot of listeners are going, yeah, yeah, couple weeks left. And I don't know that when we flip the calendar, everything gets fixed. But we have new hope, Bob. We do. And it's been a challenging year for all of us here at Family Life. We are praying a lot about the next couple of weeks, because what happens over the next couple of weeks as our listeners make year-end gifts to Family Life, that's going to determine how much ministry we can do next year and how effective that ministry is going to be.

Yeah. And I don't know if listeners understand that that's how we do what we do. We have people like you that say, I'm in.

And I would just say this. If you've been blessed by Family Life in any way, I invite you to be a blessing back. It's amazing. We have a group of families that's going to match your donations up to $2 million, which is just a miracle. So just think whatever you give is sort of doubled.

It is doubled. And boy, boy, I hope in all the darkness of this year, we've been like pointing you to Jesus and helping you and your family and your legacy. And if that's true, I hope you join us and say, I'm going to donate. Maybe you've never donated before.

This would be the first time and maybe you have many times. We thank you and we ask you to step up and say, I want to be a part of this and I want this ministry to keep going. And I know I'm a part of that, so I'm going to play my part. And we want to help your marriages. We want to help your families. We want to help your kids' families. And we have a lot of things that we want to do. We have a lot of plans that we want to make happen that will really be investments in your family.

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And thanks in advance for whatever you're able to do. Now, we're going to dive back into a presentation that we made recently to a group of moms and dads, all of whom have adult children, talking about relating to our adult children. And we were talking about some of the dos and don'ts, some of the principles we need to keep in mind as we interact with our adult kids. If we give advice before they ask for advice, like unsolicited advice, it's received as criticism. Anybody? Amen.

Yeah. And we've learned, don't give advice. Unless we're asked.

If they ask, it's the welcome mat, put it out. And you know, one of our goals was that they'd want to run home when they're 30 and 40. And you know, they'd want to come home because they feel like it's a place they're loved and accepted. And there's a bearing with them, even if they're not exactly lining up with the mom and dad's values and living that way. And yet, I tell you, it's hard to have that patience, isn't it?

Because it could be decades. Well, one of our boys, they had a baby. It was their first baby. And they're getting, he said, we're going to give our baby a bath tonight.

And we didn't even get any instructions in the hospital. And I was about to say, I'll help you. Oh, I can help you with that. And I was about to say, they said, we're just going to watch a YouTube, how to bathe a baby. And I was like, oh, you guys, I just kind of walked out.

I was so depressed. Like I wanted to help. And I think if they wanted to do it all by themselves, they didn't want me to help. But that's hard with adult kids. Mom's been replaced by YouTube.

Wow. That's depressing, Bob. It is depressing. I mean, it's true, though, isn't it?

They have never asked us how to get a child to sleep through the night. They went to YouTube. And when we said, hey, you know, they're like, no, no, no. The latest studies say this.

Brain does this. Of course, we know nothing. And yet if we jump in there and give it, it's received its criticism. So it's that gentleness, that patience, that humility, that bearing to say, OK, when asked, we'll be there.

I mean, we'll be there, but not until asked. Have your kids asked you and Mary Ann like advice on getting their kids to sleep? Not nearly enough. We have so much wisdom to share with them. I have hosted a nationally syndicated radio program on this for twenty seven years. Yes, you have.

And they're reading other books. How many interviews do you think you and Dennis did? We've done more than 6000 interviews. But what do you know? Yeah, but what do I know? Exactly. Well, I mean, Bob and I, we've never talked about this. I'm thinking you think the same thing. You know, again, we've been in this role just over a year. So Bob's done a lot longer. But we've had in this last year at least a half dozen or so interviews with younger parents writing parenting books.

Right. And we're interviewing them like we know nothing. It's sort of like talking to your kids like, hey, so what are you doing this? And we just sit there and it's rare that they'll ask us what we think. It's like we have grandkids that have kids. You know, it's crazy. So but so let's talk about this. What what do you think trips up? What are the potholes that trip up parents with adult kids?

Well, I think one of the big ones is that parents don't make the transition comfortably from parents of little kids to parents of teens to parents of adults. OK. I borrowed this.

It is hard. You're right. It was a radio guest we had who talked about this. He said, when your kids are tiny, you are the caretaker for your kids. That means your job is to keep them alive. They're depending on you for everything. He said, as they grow older, you move from caretaker to cop and you follow them around and you write tickets.

And you put them in jail for a little while. When they get to be teenagers, if you don't move from cop to coach, they're just going to tune you out. But you have to move to coach. You've been a coach and a coach can still pull a guy out of the game and bench him. But a coach most of the time is not benching people. He's not being a cop. What's he doing? He's letting them play.

He's coached them to the point where they can do it without him. And you know they're going to make a mistake on this play and you let them make that mistake. The great thing about this stage is still that we have some control. Right.

In the coaching phase. You can call a time out. You can pull them out of the game.

Right. Listen, you want them to make bad choices and bad mistakes while they're still living with you. Rather than you controlling everything and then they move out. Now they're making the bad choices, bad mistakes.

So you have to let your kids go out and do some wrong things and fail. We called that phase the years of living in the question where our kids would come and ask a question like, can we do this or whatever? And we know what the answer is.

The answer will be no. But instead of saying no, we would say things like, well, tell us about it. You know, you want to go see this movie? Tell us all about that. So we would just refrain from saying no immediately. But we would help them to come to that conclusion. Sometimes we would just have to say no. But we'd have a conversation because we're coaching them.

Yeah. The last phase that you move, so it's caretaker to cop to coach to consultant. So with your adult kids, you're a consultant. Now, if you're in business as a consultant, you go to somebody and say, hey, if we can ever help you out, I'm available. You can hire me.

Right. And you wait for them to hire you. And then when they hire you, you come in, you say, OK, based on my experience, you do this and this and this and this. And you write up the report and you hand it to them. And whether they implement it or not, that's up to them. You're the consultant. You don't come back around and say, did you do what I told you to do?

Right. Consultants don't do that. As a consultant, you're there to say to your kids, hey, if we can ever help you with any of this stuff, we've got questions about this. You're struggling with some money issues. If we can ever help you with that. I think it's fine to offer your services in those situations and then share with them whatever wisdom you've got and then be ready to step back and let them figure out whether they're going to implement any of that or not.

I'm just glad one of the C's was not a co-signer. They don't do that. They're on their own.

So I think that's a big trap. As parents, we get so used to being a cop that we don't know how to transition to coach when they're in the teen years. Or we get so used to being a coach in the teen years that we think we're still supposed to be coaching them after they're married.

And we've got to figure out how to transition and how to pull back and let them be the young people that God's made them to be. Second thing, I think, is too many of us have our identity wrapped up in how our kids are acting or performing. So when our kids are making bad choices, we want them to fix it because it looks bad for us. If our friends hear about it or when we're with our friends and they say, so how are your kids doing? And we don't want to say how our kids are doing because they're going to think we were the worst parents ever because our kids are doing this kind of stuff, right?

We think that their behavior is all on us. Well, my behavior when I was a teenager and a young adult wasn't all on my parents. I was making my own choices, good or bad. It wasn't what my parents did or didn't do.

It was I'm an autonomous, self-functioning human being and our kids are going to do the same thing. We have to find our identity in the fact that we are sons and daughters of God who are trying to walk faithfully. We mess up. When we mess up, we seek God's forgiveness. God pours grace on all of that. And so we have to find our identity in who we are with him, not in how our kids are living or performing. I don't know about you, but I've seen that we carry more guilt and shame in this area than many others. And I don't know what you have been like as parents, but sometimes I would go to bed at night and I feel that shame or guilt. I wonder, have I done something or what did Dave do that did this?

I never go to bed worried about anything. You don't, actually. But I also think there's a spiritual battle that goes on in the midst of that as well, where we have an enemy and he's called the accuser. And he's always whispering those lies in our head that it's your fault.

You didn't do enough. And I'm glad that we have a Father God who's the one that is continually loving, caring for, pushing for, and rescuing our kids. I think the third trap a lot of us fall into when our kids get married is we don't let them leave. So the Bible says a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. There's a new union that got formed, and if there is ongoing emotional dependence on you, financial dependence on you, if you're not giving them the space to form an us, you're interfering. Dan Allender, who's a counselor and author who we've had on Family Life today, made a shocking statement early on.

I've never forgotten it. He said, 90% of marital problems that I'm dealing with can be traced back to a failure to leave father and mother. Now, he's not talking about just moving out. He's saying the daughter is still emotionally dependent on how her mom's going to view this.

Or the son is still concerned about what his parents will think. There's still the emotional attachment and dependence. We have to be the ones who are the adults here and say, you need to leave. Some of us are still drawn too much of our own life from how our kids are doing, and we need to let them have space and let them live their own lives. So I think these three things are kind of the pitfalls, the traps we've all...

Okay, I have a question for you with that area, since you're our expert. What if the wife has a harder time letting go of those adult kids and is wanting to, like, let's give them money, let's do that, and the husband's saying, no, we need to just let them go. What about that conflict between the two of them? Because sometimes, as parents, we're on different pages with that. So sometimes that's it.

They're so needy that they're drawn too much life from it. Sometimes it is, who wants to see your kids suffer? Who wants to see your kids go through hard times?

Let me ask you a question. When have you grown the most spiritually in your lives? When you've gone through hard times and when you've suffered.

Jesus meets you there. You learn how to draw life from him, how to grow with him. A lot of parents are short-circuiting their kids' spiritual growth by stepping in to try to cushion. They need to have some hard times. They need to suffer. They need to face financial challenges and not get bailed out all the time.

They need to face some... So sad. But you remember Dave saying this to you, right?

Yes. Oh, and I agree with everything you've said. It's just really hard. It is really hard.

Who wants to feel that way? But if we can pull back and go, God's there. God's meeting them. God's doing a work in their life in the midst of this.

And teach them how to grow up and respond. And there are times you're going to help out. There are times we've helped out with our kids. But we've tried to be really smart and prayerful about when those times are. And not just make it the default, oh, you have a need here.

We can help you. I think Dennis and Barbara really modeled that well. They did. They did on the art of parenting when Deborah talked about how Dennis and Barbara used love, but tough love at times. And how she needed to go through some of those things and God used it.

Yeah, and I know for me, and I bet all of us could say this, the most growth happened in my life through the hardest times. And my mom, bless her heart, didn't step in. And I thought she was a bad mom.

You know, where were you? We think God's a bad God. That He's not bailing us out. And He does, but He doesn't always the way we want. And we grow and it's the best thing that ever happened.

And I was the dad that always said, I want my kids to sin while they're still under my roof. I don't want them to. I know they will. Right. But like Bob said earlier, they're going to do it later.

So how would it be better if they did now and we could help pick up the pieces? But it's hard, isn't it? Because you want to rush in.

You want to save the day. And I love what Jim Burns says. One of his principles about adult kids is they will never know how far the town is if you carry them on your back. And so you've got to let them walk their own journey. And one day they'll be thanking you for it. We know that some of you here, your kids are at different places in terms of how you interact with them, where they are spiritually. So let's talk about what you do if you've got kids who have completely walked away from the faith. Maybe they never embraced it in the first place.

They grew up in your home. They just said, that's what you believe. I don't believe that. They don't profess to be Christians. Or maybe they went to youth group and all of that was fine. And then today they would say, that's your thing. We don't believe that anymore.

What do you do? How do you relate to those kids? I think the first thing you have to ask is how did the father of the prodigal son relate to his son when he wandered off into the far country? And he did that by, we don't know everything about what he did, but we know that he did not put up any barriers to his son ever coming back home. And when he saw his son starting to move in that direction, he ran to him. He didn't go out and chase him out of the far country. He didn't go out and pull him out of the pigsty. He waited. He trusted. He prayed, we presume, in the midst of all of this. And he was ready when his son came back. And of course when he came back he lavished grace on his son rather than lavishing shame on his son for all the things he'd done. We had a guest on Family Life Today years ago.

This podcast is still available. There's a lot on prodigals on Family Life Today that you can go listen to, listen to some of these podcasts. But Phil Waldrop wrote a book on principles for getting your son or daughter back to God if you've got a prodigal.

And here are where he's six. First of all, you have to learn to live guilt-free in your Christian life. So as parents we beat ourselves up. I've got a prodigal.

It's because I didn't do this as a parent or that as a parent. God has prodigals, right? The first two in the garden were prodigals.

The father of the prodigal son is a picture of God. We are prodigals. So you have to learn to live guilt-free. Don't embrace the shame. Number two, you have to ask your prodigal for forgiveness for things you've done. You've got to find a way to humble yourself and go just pray and say, What did I do or not do that I should have done? Try and get time with that prodigal and say, I just want to confess some things or ask your forgiveness for things I should have done or didn't do.

I think that's really good. I think to ask our adult kids, Is there anything that I'm doing that is really hurting you or bothering you? I think that's a very humble question.

It is a humble question. Number three, you must love your prodigal unconditionally. So even when they're in the far country, you've got to love them. That doesn't mean that you prop them up or that you support their sin, right? So if you've got a kid who's using drugs, an adult kid who's a drug addict, that doesn't mean that you go get the needles, but it means that you love that child unconditionally, faithfully, over and over again. Number four, you have to allow sin to run its course. So they've got to get to the pigsty before they get out. Not always. Sometimes God will rescue them before that, right? But you've got to let sin run its course. You've got to guard your words and then you've got to pray for your prodigal.

So I think if this is what you've got, this is how you care for them. John Piper has been open in talking about the fact that one of his sons was off in the far country for a period of time. And he, I remember when we interviewed him, he said, I prayed for my son every day, and he said, I sent him just a short email every day. I want you to know I love you. I'm thinking about you. I'm praying for you today.

And I might include something other than that, just a thought. He said, I went for years with no response to that. But I just sent the email every day and just said, I want you to know. He said, when his son came back, he said, I read every one of those. I never responded. I wasn't in a place to respond. Your kids might respond and say, quit sending me those emails.

And if they do, you quit sending them the emails, right? Well, I don't, you guys remember when we interviewed Chip Ingram this past year? During lunch, he was talking about a son that came to them. Chip is an author and he was a pastor, and he came to them and said, I no longer believe. And he walked away from his faith, and later he came back. It was a way, a time, wasn't it?

But he came back and his dad asked him, what brought you back? And he said, I can't deny your faith and mom's faith and your lives, how you've lived it. I can't deny that.

It's stark. I see it every single day. And then he talked about how his son had a part in writing this great song by Lauren Daigle, You Say. Remember that?

I mean, that's been so popular, but he was one that wrote the words to that song. Isn't that beautiful how God's used even the journey away? Yeah. So for some of us, we've got prodigals who are, it's clear, some of us, we've got kids who profess faith but don't live it.

Right? So these are kids who would say, oh yeah, I'm a Christian, but you know that the moral choices they're making or their interaction, they're not going to church, they quit going to church, they still say they believe, but church isn't a value for them. Maybe their language, maybe the way they interact with other people, you just say, I don't know that they're really Christians. Let me just say this, they may not be. Whatever their earlier profession of faith was, if your four-year-old asked Jesus into his heart, your four-year-old also wanted to be a dinosaur when he grew up, okay?

Now, I'm not trying to discount that. There are kids who get saved at four. There are also kids who want to please mommy and daddy and pray a prayer. So don't presume that they're not genuinely saved and just living apart from the Lord, but don't presume that they are just because they prayed a prayer once or just because they say, you know, I'm grateful for the man upstairs.

In fact, if that's what they say, you can probably wonder if they even know who's up there, right? So be aware of what's the fruit you see in their life. Here's the thing I would say, just keep sharing the gospel with them. And by that, not this is what you need to pray to get saved. When I say share the gospel, I say keep reminding them of the goodness of God demonstrated in the death and resurrection of Jesus. I need to hear that message over and over again in my life. Whether you're saved or not, that's the message of life for all of us. So I'd go back to your kids and I'd just keep talking about, you know, they say, yeah, you know, I'm grateful for the Lord. And I'd just say, I'm grateful for the fact that He gave His Son to die on a cross for us and then His Son was raised again from the dead and we have the power to live completely different lives as a result of that.

Isn't that great news? I'd just keep repeating that over and over again until the gospel breaks through and all of a sudden they either re-believe it or they believe it for the first time. And I think we all know this, but I think it's just as important, maybe more important to live it, not just say it. I think it was St. Augustine, right, said, share the gospel at all times and sometimes use words. And it's like they're watching and they're looking for and hoping for humility and grace and bearing within all the things we talked about in Ephesians 4.

When they see that, I don't know anybody not drawn to that. Well, again, we've been listening to a conversation we had not long ago with a group of moms and dads, parents of adult kids, about how we navigate our relationships with our adult children. And some of those relationships can be hard, especially if our kids, if they're not in a good place spiritually, either they've totally abandoned the faith or they're living nominal lives as Christians. That's a hard thing for parents and we have to keep praying and we have to keep sharing the gospel and we have to keep living lives of integrity, as we just said. I mean, obviously one of the hardest things and you're on your knees. I mean, you think that's going to end at some point, you know, they're a baby and you're praying and then they get their driver's license. It never ends. You're still praying. I feel like I'm praying more these days. Yeah, even with our grandkids.

Yeah, there's so much at stake and we are living in a time when it's ever more important. This workshop that the three of us did is available. The audio is available for download. You can go to our website, familylifetoday.com and download the entire presentation if you'd like. We also have a link to a couple of podcasts we did. I think we did three episodes with Jim Burns, who wrote a book called Doing Life with Your Adult Children.

Keep Your Mouth Shut and The Welcome Mat Out. And there's a link to those podcasts on our website as well. And of course, Jim's book is available in our Family Life Today Resource Center, so you can order the book from us online. Our website, again, is familylifetoday.com for links to all of these resources. You can also call us to order Jim's book. The number to call is 1-800-FL-TODAY. 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. Now, we mentioned this earlier, but please be praying for us here at Family Life. We still have a ways to go to take full advantage of the $2 million matching gift offer that's been made to us here at Family Life during the month of December. We're asking Family Life Today listeners to be as generous as you can be in making a year-end donation. When you make your donation, it's going to be matched dollar for dollar up to a total of $2 million. We still have a ways to go, so pray that we would be able to take full advantage of all of the funds in this matching gift fund. If you're able to make a year-end donation, we'd love to have you get in touch with us. In fact, we know there are some listeners who this year simply can't donate at the end of the year.

We understand that, so we're asking those who can maybe do a little extra this year to help out those who can't pitch in. When you make a donation, we're going to send you as a thank you gift two items. We'll send you a copy of my book, Love Like You Mean It, that is all about what we can learn from the biblical definition of love found in 1 Corinthians 13, how we apply that in our marriage relationship. And we'll send you a flash drive that has more than 100 of the top Family Life Today radio programs from the last 28 years, programs that deal with marriage-related issues, parenting, all kinds of relationship issues, some great stories, great guests over the years. We'll hear from Dennis and Barbara Rainey, Dave and Ann Wilson.

It's just a great collection of the top programs from the last 28 years. The book and the flash drive are our gift to you when you make a year-end donation. Do it online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. And we're grateful for your participation and grateful for your prayers as well. Thank you. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to talk about those hot potato subjects, those subjects that maybe it's just better that we don't bring them up when we're talking with our adult kids.

How do we deal with those kinds of issues? We'll talk more about that tomorrow. Hope you can tune in. 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.