Word to the Wise

Doyle Roth says he's a firm believer in premarital counseling, but... I think a lot of the premarital counseling focuses on the couple, and that's good news. But they need to talk about what happens in relation to your mother and father-in-law. What does that love look like?

What does that respect look like? This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. The Bible says that a man should leave his father and mother, cleave to his wife. The two become one flesh. That's what marriage is. That doesn't mean that our extended families don't play a role in the success of our union.

We're going to talk more about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. It was a couple of months ago we aired on Family Life Today a series that the three of us did where we had been talking to people about dealing with adult children. For those of us who are old enough to have adult children, there can be some challenges that come into those relationships. And more and more, as we're talking with moms and dads all around the country, we're hearing about sharp divisions that are taking place in families between parents and their adult kids. And we didn't really get into the fine points that we're going to talk about today. But one of the areas where this can get challenging is with sons and daughters-in-laws, those new grafted-in members of the family. Sometimes that graft is not as easy as you thought it was going to be. And it's one of those topics nobody wants to talk about.

It's real, but it's not an easy one to talk about. I led a Bible study with the Detroit Lions Wives for 33 seasons. And when this topic came up, like we're just talking, and suddenly the topic of in-laws came up. It was like a volcano went off in the room. People were expressing and loud and angry.

And I would have to slow things down because there was so much emotion. And you were talking to the daughters-in-law. So you were talking about their in-law parents. Here we're talking to the moms and dads about looking back the other direction and looking at the new grafted-in sons or daughters and going, wow. And that's because we're all the parents and we're perfect.

So it's all the in-sons and son-in-law, daughter-in-laws that are a problem. I think a listener is going to say, finally, we are addressing this. We found a brave man who would help us navigate this. Doyle Roth is back with us on Family Life today. Doyle, welcome back. Thank you so much for having me come. It's great to see you all, Bob. Dave, Ann, nice to see you all.

Doyle has been with us before. Doyle wrote a book called Oops, I Forgot My Wife. That's a great title. Such a good title. Well, not unless you're the wife.

I don't know if she likes that very much. It's about husbands who don't know what it means to love their wives. I'm going to read that. Or maybe I should have Dave read that.

Dave would be a good one for Dave. You followed that up with Oops, I Forgot the Children about parenting. And did you think about, oops, we got a son-in-law?

We tried to bring it into that, but this subject was too hot. Instead, you've written a book called Toxic Sons and Daughters-in-Law, Untangling Difficult Relationships. And there's a fence post with barbed wire all tangled around it on the front cover, which is what it can feel like for some of these parents. Boy, absolutely.

This is a very, very interesting and a very difficult problem. What I wanted to highlight in the book is that this is about good parents. It's not just about toxic sons and daughters-in-laws. I'm dealing with good parents, parents that have been raised really under the teaching of family life. They love Jesus. They're trying to bring godly parenting into their families. They're raising kids in a God-honoring way. But when these kids grow up, a lot of things begin to change for this lovely Christ-honoring family. And when you bring an outsider, which I call the son or daughter-in-law, that comes into the family, when an outsider comes into the family, it can create a lot of turbulence in a family. In fact, it can be very, very divisive. And that can be sort of disconcerting because, as you mentioned, I think there is sort of a belief by a lot of us, if we do the right things, if we honor God, if we follow Jesus and we raise our kids that way, you know, there's sort of this built-in belief it'll be pretty there won't be barbed wire in our future. It'll go pretty well. And yet great families, as you said, sometimes end up with toxic family breakdowns, right?

That's exactly right. It's unexpected. These things show up in the times when it's just surprising to you.

Your son or your daughter leaves home, goes off to school, or maybe in high school meets somebody, and before you know it, they're in an in-depth relationship, and all of a sudden the writing is on the wall. What do you mean by toxic? Toxic is the kind of person that is uncompromising, self-willed, self-defensive, self-righteous. I hear a lot of self in there. Yes, very self-focused.

Yeah. To the point of extreme, they can be also addictive people, addicted to alcohol, addicted to pornography. A lot of people fall into that toxic class, and it comes in through those various means that this all of a sudden finds itself in a good, wholesome family. And there's a continuum here of toxicity. I mean, there's everything from it's an unpleasant relationship all the way to it's a dangerous relationship. When you use the word toxic, you're talking about both ends of that continuum, right? Yes, correct. And we should start off by making clear, for your children's sake, that you're not writing this because your four kids wound up marrying toxic spouses. No, thank you for putting in that headline. It'll protect me when this is all over. In fact, if there was any part of this book that related to your own family, you at the very beginning say, your wife's parents had to deal with a toxic son-in-law when your wife got married to you.

Exactly right, Bob. We started our marriage very young, but I brought into our marriage a lot of these self-oriented issues. I remember fighting my mother and father-in-law, who were great people. I have come to love them and respect them. They were very patient with me as a very immature young man. I was married at 19. The things that they did to try to help us, I resisted the way they wanted to handle and be with our grandchildren.

I didn't want them to do that and actually created a lot of turbulence in the family because of that. But God in His grace really helped me to grow and mature and be taught through the Scriptures, what it really means to be a loving husband, and also to honor not just my mom and dad, but to honor mom and dad in laws is part of this as well. I had to learn that biblically that that was important.

How did you learn that? I'm like, Bob, when I started reading your book, I did not expect chapter one to be about you. I really did.

I was like, oh, here we go. And then you're like, I know about toxic son-in-laws because I is one. I was one. But something changed. I mean, how did you mature out of that? The main thing is that I appreciate what God has in His word. And one of the problems that I find in my own heart in the lives of people that I counsel with is a lack of application of biblical truths to their lives. They can read the scriptures, memorize the scriptures, but application is not always on their radar. And for me as a young Christian guy, I felt like that was the thing that I was learning. I was learning to take actually husbands, love your wives, honor your parents. I was taking those things much more seriously.

And my Christian character, thank God, was growing. What would you imagine? Or maybe you've talked about this with them. Your in-laws are now in glory, but in the first years of Nancy's marriage to you, what kinds of private conversations do you think they were having about Doyle and the choice Nancy made to marry you? Well, I know for a fact that they were saying, why did my daughter marry this idiot?

He was a gymnast and all he did was do stand on his head. I mean, they really did not embrace our spiritual convictions. We were religious, not spiritual, I should say, and they were in a church, but they didn't appreciate some of the regulations that I brought into the family, some of those things.

You were a legalist? Oh, yes. So what did that dynamic look like in your relationship with them?

Like, were you saying you need to believe this and trying to tell them? Oh, yes. When I spoke of my first grandchild as being a sinner, they about hit the fence. So it didn't go over very good, Bob. A little prickly.

Yes, right. Well, let me pull it back because this doesn't start after our kids get married. This whole issue starts to emerge when we see our son or our daughter starting to develop an interest in a young man or a young woman, and we start to go, who is this young man or this young woman? And sometimes as parents, we're a little concerned about where our children's affections are being drawn.

So take us back to the headwaters of this. When your kids are in high school or in college and you start to see them pairing off with somebody and you start to have concerns, what's the right approach to take as a parent in that situation? Well, you've entered into some pretty dangerous water because when your kids are of the age to start dating or they're off at college, they're in an age where your opinion is not quite as strong as it was when they were in elementary school.

And so there's a lot of resistance. And especially if you're trying to describe the one that they care about in unfavorable or negative terms, they start to bristle real badly about that. And you'll find that the relationship that you have with your son or daughter begins to diminish because they care for this person. And the more that you talk about that, the more distance will come between you and your future daughter and son-in-law. And the thing gets more and more complicated the closer they get to the marital ceremony. And then afterwards is where the real break begins when that son-in-law or that daughter-in-law says, we are not going to get together at family meetings or we're not going to share the grandchildren or we're going to this or that.

And it makes things just very, very difficult. But I, Bob and Dave and Anne, I'm a real believer in premarital counseling. But I think a lot of the premarital counseling focuses on the couple. And that's good news, right?

We should do that. But this is an additional piece that I think is really significant. They need to talk about what happens in relation to your mother and father-in-law. What does that love look like?

What does that respect look like? Those things come out in the premarital context. So if you're a parent, you know, you're just talking about that and you're watching your daughter or son start to date somebody that shows real signs of being toxic. You know, maybe addictions or uncontrolled anger, control. You see this as a mom and dad or what do you do? You just said, man, if you step into it, it can really cause so you can't just step out of it.

So there's that tension. What would you counsel a parent to do? Well, I have a section in my book on the preventative resources that are available to people because a dad and mom don't always communicate effectively with their son or daughter at this age about things like this.

And almost can't because of who they are. I mean, a young person, an adolescent, whether they're in their late teens, early 20s, they are wanting to demonstrate to themselves and to others, I'm my own person. And so for mom and dad to come and say, here's what we think, it's almost like, well, then I have to think differently to be my own person. And this is where I thought this was a great insight in your book. You're saying mom and dad need to lean into a broader community and get right, get some mentor help.

No, that's the protective resources, the preventative or protective resources. A good mentor, a youth leader, someone from crew, someone from this or that, a pastor, a counselor. These are people that need to come into this relationship and they help describe and define what the relationship really looks like in a way that's more receivable by the kids. And so I think that's a very important piece of where this thing goes because if the parents are out front, I've had parents say things to their kids premaritally that those kids have never forgotten into the marriage and they hold those things against mom and dad. And that's the distance that we as Christian parents don't want. Now that I'm older and a lot of my friends' kids are now getting married or even in high school and they're dating someone, the mom will describe this horrible relationship that their son or daughter is in and they're expressing that to their son or daughter. Like you shouldn't be dating them. And I said, be very, very careful with what you're saying because they could end up marrying that person.

And you have no idea what the future brings. So I would pray before you have those conversations because they're not always received readily and kids can really push back. And you're right, I've seen that sometimes if those words are spoken, they are never forgotten. Even when the parent comes back. And I shouldn't have said that, but it's still hard. Even Christian families and Christian people that are suffering like we're talking, when something is said, they can say, I forgive you or they can say, I confess that I did wrong.

But those things burn in the brain and they're still there. I had one family, he called a girlfriend a slut and that girl never, ever forgot that. Well, how could she? How could she? That'll burn on any young woman's soul. And so there can be forgiveness.

But that wound, there's going to be a scar patch there for a long time. And yet in some ways, you know, I'm sitting here obviously as the dad, you know, thinking again as a parent, how do you not say the wrong thing? Like you said, you got to be so careful. Maybe you shouldn't say anything.

And I think at the end of the day, you sort of have to trust that there's a God that can speak into it. I'm literally thinking of my own experience growing up. I was dating a girl. I had no reason to marry. Guess who told me that? My mom.

Single mom who I love. And I know she's praying about this, but she said to me several times, I don't think she and she said it really gentle. So there was never this. I remember her chopping her. It was very gentle. I don't think she's the one I just it was just like you said, Bob, before. It's like, OK, if you say that, then she is the one.

Right. That was sort of in my heart. High school. Now in college, junior year in college, a year from now, we're probably going to get married. And I know she was praying because I wasn't listening to her that God would somehow show me.

And as I look back now, I'm sitting here literally going, oh, my goodness. I remember I was going to see her at her college. I was a different school and I bump into her sister, younger sister, and she says to me, hey, I just need to tell you something. Yeah, what's that?

My sister's not who you think she is. Right. What do you tell me that for? Blew it off.

Right. I was at a New Year's Eve party and I shouldn't even talk about this at some frat house. Don't know anybody. This stranger dude walks up to me at the party close to midnight. My girlfriend had just gone to the bathroom, so she's not standing beside me.

He goes, dude, I respect you. I believe you're a good guy. You should not marry that girl. She is not who you think you are. She is.

I literally yelled at him and pushed him. Right. Get away from me.

You have no idea what you're talking about. I'm like, oh, my goodness. I'm looking back now.

God's given me sign after sign until the day I walk in and surprise her at her dorm room and catch her with another guy. And that's when I went, oh, my goodness. And now I'm like, my mom tried to tell me, you know, three years before. Strangers tried to tell you. Yeah. And I'm sitting beside the most incredible woman ever. And I've said this as a preacher many times. If I would have made the choice to marry her.

Now, I don't know this 100 percent, but I would bet 98 percent were divorced. Right. Because who she was was not the woman of character I thought she was. And I'm not even here right now.

My entire legacy, every job I've ever had, everything would have been changed by that one decision. Exactly. And my mom told me. Well, guys. And I wouldn't listen. That's kind of depressing as parents. I know. That we have no power, that we have no say.

So what should we do as parents? Well, I can tell you that I'm a hard head. I'm a stubborn hard head. And if my dad or my mom would have said, don't marry Nancy, it would have pushed us closer together. It wouldn't have worked. And if Nancy's parents would have said, don't marry that flathead guy, that would not have worked. It would have pushed us closer together.

I think we have to be realistic and understand the limits of what we can do as parents with adult kids. We had the opportunity to interview R.C. Sproul, the famous author and theologian who has now gone to heaven. And we found out before we did the interview that his son, R.C. Jr., had been engaged to an unbeliever at one point prior to his getting married. R.C. Jr. eventually broke off the engagement, married somebody else. But we asked R.C.

about that. We said, what was it like for you and your wife, Vesta, when your son is now engaged to be married to somebody who is not a believer? What did you do? And he said, well, he said, Vesta wore out the rug in the bedroom with her knees.

She was praying passionately. And he said, and I knew well enough that I better not say too much, but I needed to say something. So he said, I went to my son and I said, son, remember who you are. And he didn't mean you're a Sproul. He meant you're a believer. You're a believer. You're a child of God.

Remember who you are. And we had the opportunity to talk to his son and say, you remember that conversation? And R.C. Jr. said, yeah. He said, that stuck with me. And he said, I know he was being cautious not to say too much because just like we've confessed here, if he just said too much, R.C.

Jr. would have bowed his back a little bit. Oh, I can relate to this. One of our sons was dating a girl. And Dave and I do marriage stuff. So we see all these red flags.

She was a great girl. But there were just some things that we thought you can just foresee the future of what could happen in this. And so I did the same thing. I was praying I would fast.

When people talked about this, I'm like, have you fasted about this for your child? And so I was fasting and the son calls and he's on his way to see this girl in college. And he said, Mom, I just I feel like we're always fighting. I feel like this stuff's going on. And then he said the magic words.

What do you think? I'm like, oh, oh, finally. I'm going to say something.

Yes, but I'm super cautious. And so I say that little prayer in my head. Lord, help me to know how to say this in a way that it can be received. And so I asked him a few questions. I said, do you feel like this fighting is something like you guys are in the honeymoon stage of just dating?

This is the fun part. Has this been going on for a while that you're continually fighting? And I think asking those questions is a good thing to let them come up with the answer. He says, yeah, it feels like we're always doing that. And I said, do you think that it would get better when you get married? Or do you think it could get worse with all the strain that you have with kids and jobs?

And he goes, oh, yeah, it would probably be harder. I said, well, I think those are some things to think about because as somebody that's been married a while, I'm telling you that the stress and strain of life that just pushes on your marriage and your relationship. And so I think those are things to just think about and pray about. But you've got a great head on your shoulders and I know you're praying, so I'm sure that you'll make the right decision. They broke up. Thank you, Jesus.

And I'm not saying she wasn't a great girl, but I'm saying it probably would have been hard. We've got to speak to this because there are some folks who are listening and they're saying we had those conversations. And they got married. Our daughter married an unbeliever or he said he was a believer or he's toxic.

They're believers. And now they've got problems. Sometimes parents got to be really careful.

And I used to speak to this in the book. I've seen parents who now it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and they find themselves saying this is what I thought was going to happen. And it's almost justification or validation instead of parents at that point pivoting and saying, no, I've got to be here to help this marriage endure. They're almost like I need this marriage to fail so that I'm vindicated.

I told you. And so if parents are in a situation where a son or a daughter has married somebody and it's not been what you wanted and they knew it wasn't what you wanted, how can the mom and dad start to do some repair work and try to build it as healthy as possible going forward? Well, I think you've got to stay below the radar. I think you've got to be able to encourage them, love them, come alongside of them. But I think you better be careful correcting them. I think you step too far into the weeds. If you're talking about their marriage, if they invite you to do something like that, that's one thing.

If they are not inviting you to help them with their marriage, I would stay away from that. In fact, even if they ask me, I would be careful. I'd be careful about doing that.

It's so hard. Even if they ask you, you'd be careful. I would be careful. I would again recommend that they find somebody to talk to because you're prejudiced. The mom and dad are prejudiced. They've got their kid involved here.

We're biased. And our kids are really at risk in these things. And my goal is to try to encourage parents to see their child as the ultimate win. Keep the relationship with your child.

Keep that functioning. Talk with them about the blessings of what's going on in their lives. Try to connect with your child continually because that's really what this is about. A toxic person wants to break that relationship. They want to pull you away from that. That's why a lot of isolation goes on. They try to isolate your son or daughter from the parents. They try to win that argument.

And I don't think it's healthy to be a part of that argument. I think it's better to be an example of what God wants us to be in love and affection for them and stay strong. I have a saying in my book, and I see it over and over and over again.

Smile, keep your mouth shut, and pray. Yeah. That's the basic thing. Is that what your in-laws did?

Because you were that guy. They did. And that's why I dedicated the book to them. They walked a very, very difficult line. And they smiled. They kept their mouth shut. And they prayed. And I might add, they fixed roast a lot on Sunday mornings. So they had a cowboy's heart. And there's some hope there because your in-laws had a son-in-law that they were concerned about. And over time, God did a work. And that's what our listeners need to hear. Wherever you are in this continuum, whether you're on the front end and your son or daughter is headlong into a relationship that you're concerned about, or whether they've already gotten married and now you're starting to see the red flags, God is still God and he's in the business of transforming, bringing beauty from ashes, making all things new.

And he can do that with relationships and with marriage. And I would say wear out the rug. Wear out the rug.

That's right. And maybe get a copy of Doyle's book and read through this together. Pray through this book is what I'd say. We're making Doyle's book available this week to those of you who are regular Family Life Today listeners who want to help extend the reach of this ministry through a donation. When you help us reach more people more often through your donations, we want to help you by providing resources like Doyle's book, Toxic Sons and Daughters-in-Law, Untangling Difficult Relationships.

You can order the book from us online at FamilyLifeToday.com or you can receive a copy of the book when you make a donation to help support the mission of Family Life Today to help us effectively develop godly marriages and families that change the world one home at a time. Your financial support extends the reach of this ministry. You make it possible for us to reach more people more often. In fact, when you donate, there are hundreds of thousands of people every day who benefit from the practical biblical help and hope they receive from this radio program, from this podcast. So thank you in advance for whatever you're able to do and be sure to ask for your copy of Doyle Roth's book, Toxic Sons and Daughters-in-Law, as our thank you gift in exchange for your donation. Donate online at FamilyLifeToday.com or donate by calling 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. One other quick note, I want to remind you we've got an event coming up next month that many of you are going to be interested in. It's a virtual event. It's our 2021 Blended and Blessed event for couples who are in blended families or step families. This is set for April 24th, and you can get more information about how you can view this in your home or in your church. Go to FamilyLifeToday.com for more information. It's a one-day event on a Saturday, April 24th.

It starts at 8.30 in the morning Central Time and wraps up about 3.30 in the afternoon. Again, get more information when you go to our website, FamilyLifeToday.com. There's a link there. If you're in a blended family or if your church has a lot of blended families in it, consider hosting this event as a help to couples who are facing challenges in the dynamic of their blended family. Again, more information online at FamilyLifeToday.com. Now, tomorrow we're going to continue our conversation with Doyle Roth about how we deal with disruptive sons or daughters-in-law when they come into a family and it fractures things. What do we do? We'll continue that conversation tomorrow. Hope you can join us. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch. We got some help from Bruce Goff this week. I also want to thank 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.