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So you can have standards, you can have biblical standards, but you do it in the midst of showing an incredible depth of love. You can accept them without accepting their behavior.
Well, that's Dr. Jim Burns sharing about the complex dynamics the parents and their adult children often experience. And if you've got grown kids, you're going to find this conversation to be of great interest. Welcome to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller.
Let me just speak to the parents directly. Are there days you're going, what am I doing? Everything I do is wrong. And just filling yourself up with guilt and trying to figure out a better pathway. I think parenting, it's not easy, but it is rewarding.
And I can tell you now with two boys in their 20s, I've really enjoyed every aspect of it. When they were little, man, watching those home videos now and laughing, them pretending to be French chefs, working with pepper, water, and mustard and mayonnaise. It was delicious, I'm sure. The best part was they didn't turn to Gene and I and say, would you like a bite? We didn't have to do that part.
But man, it is so funny watching those videos. Up until now, we're, you know, the 20-somethings, it's full of serious questions. About school and about vocation and about spouses and other things.
So it's really been great, but it isn't easy. And I'm sure some of you are dealing with even greater difficulties with your adult children. It's one of the most common calls that we get here at Focus on the Family for counselors, and we welcome those calls. We want you to get in touch with us, call us. John will give details to do that in just a minute.
But that is the question. My kids aren't following the Lord. They're not walking with the Lord. What do I do? And it's almost as if the more control you want to administer, you'll probably drive them further away.
And we'll talk about that today with our great guest, Jim Burns. And Jim is the founder of Homeword, which is all about educating, equipping, and encouraging parents to build God-honoring families from generation to generation. He's got a book on this topic called When Your Adult Child Strays: Trading Heartache for Hope. And by the way, Jim mentioned our counseling team, and they're a phone call away. 800, the letter A and the word family.
Jim, welcome back to Focus. It's so good to see you. Always great to be with you. I feel like I'm in a family reunion when I get to it. Yeah, I can feel light and lifted up.
I'm a little disappointed you didn't eat the mustard, pepper, salt thing.
Well, no, I would have tried it, just a little sip. Yeah. But they never pressured us, which I thought was great. It's very kind of them. Yeah, now I just saw Trent as a 20-something, and he's a lot taller than you and a lot bigger than you.
He could have forced you at a certain time. He couldn't today. Eat this. But again, you're developing character in your sons and daughters that won't do that. That's what we're trying.
And I'm proud to say he's never done that. But hey, let's go there. When parents think about raising toddlers or teenagers, they can expect challenges. What I said was true. I loved somebody gave us great advice, Gene and I.
They said, love every stage. And we were kind of like, okay, what will that mean?
Well, I think now on the back end, we get it. And there are different. Challenges. Man, terrible twos are terrible. It's like, kid, do you not hear me?
You know, about the tantrums and getting their own way and all that. Then they get to teenagerhood and they want to be independent. And you work through all those things, and then it happens. They go off for their vocation or for college or for whatever they're going to do. And there seems to be, in some situations, this great drift that occurs.
So let's go there. Why do you say parenting adult children can actually be one of the hardest seasons compared to? Terrible twos and teens. Right.
Well, we do have to embrace that stage, but they're moving from dependence to independence very rapidly.
So they get to a stage, it might be even 18, and they say, Well, I'm an adult. And you're going, Yeah, and I'm paying for their cell phone and I'm paying for college and I'm still paying for the insurance. And they're saying, But I want freedom. And at that stage, when they go into adulthood, a lot of times they don't know how to be. An adult, so they're making some goofy decisions.
And we don't know how to parent adult because we got these other stages down, but now we're in a new stage. And I don't think most of us saw that coming. Most of us, again, who raised kids in the church or who had kids who are great. And all of a sudden, they started violating values and they started straying from their faith and they started drifting from the family. You know, story, and we didn't see it coming.
Yeah, or we said that's going to be somebody else's kid, not ours. You know, Gene and I, we did foster training. Uh, John, you and Dina have done that as well. And, you know, one of the things I was amazed at, and you know, we probably started this when our boys were nine and 11, that we did foster care. But the requirement was 40 hours of parental training every year.
Right.
And I'm thinking, man, they don't do that with bio kids, whoever they are. No. But I mean, we sit there and do, you know, in-home videos, and we had to check them off, and we had little quizzes that we had to respond to about parenting children. I thought that, and it was good stuff. It wasn't far afield.
It was really good, basic stuff about how to build in resiliency and character into your children. I thought every parent should have this, but we don't. No, we weren't sent to parenting school.
So, you know what? We're having parenting school. This is what happens at Focus on the Family every day. It's not just you're talking about marriage, you're talking about other issues too, but it's parenting school.
So when people. Like my wife says, I raised my kids the way Focus on the Family told me to in some ways.
Well, that's parenting school. And that's the incredible thing about this place, but it's also the fact that we have to keep learning. And so, as parents, we're going, great, they're going away. Maybe we're going into the empty nest.
Some are very depressed about that.
Some are thinking it's good. But now we have to learn a whole new language. We have a whole new way of doing it. And so we weren't prepared for it either. You have a story in the book about a woman named Amber.
I'm sure you've changed all the names, but what was Amber's situation? Yeah, her dad is one of my best friends.
Okay. And a great guy. He's actually been in the office with me here at Focus talking with you. And Amber, beautiful, wonderful, had some tough things happen that they didn't know about when she was in junior high. And the way she coped with that was to do some drugs and got to become sexually promiscuous and, you know, just a tough life and rebelled.
I mean, this was the kid who was in the junior. Junior high was leading the Bible study type of a thing. And she went from drug rehab to drug rehab. They stayed in her story. And today, I happened to have breakfast with him last week.
She's 40 months sober, and she's actually working for the drug rehab center. And it's not perfect. But just, you know, through that process, and I thought this was a neat thing that they did, her parents did, they gave her a necklace. And the necklace said, peace. Joy.
Hope. Peace. From your past. Joy for today and hope for the future. And I said, that's beautiful.
He said, you know, that was for her, but it's also for us.
So, what they did was they stayed in her story. And it wasn't easy. What does that mean, though? Yeah, stay in the story means that there's a mess and they're in the messy middle. They don't just agree with her.
And so they're not parenting to just go, hey, whatever you want to do. But they're also allowing, it was tough love. They were allowing, and tough love just means you allow the circumstances of her poor choices to actually take place.
So they had to allow this beautiful kid. And I've known this girl all of her life, this beautiful girl to almost be homeless and make some horrible decisions that go against the grain of their belief system, but they still stayed in the story. They didn't agree with her.
So they said, here's what we believe, here's what our boundaries are. But they stayed in the story of the mess.
So, guess what? They were always safe.
So, if she had a problem, she was going to call that.
Now, she might not call that day, but she would call back, she would come back into the situation, and they didn't enable her. You know, you can enable kids like Amber to dependency on you, but they didn't enable her. They helped her, they loved her. Yeah, Jim, let me, you know, we need to ask these questions on behalf of those listening and watching. And so, I'm thinking of Amber's situation, but how do parents balance?
You know, what we've tried to express to them, unconditional love, the love of Christ. With this idea that affirming that destructive behavior or not addressing it or not speaking to it. Our temperaments as parents can be legalistic or the opposite. Just love at all costs. And either one of those are good, Jim.
You have rigid parenting. What does that equal? Rebellion. You have lenient parenting. That equals no, they're rudderless.
So there's times we're going to have to take the hit. My friends had to with Amber and sometimes say this is not appropriate and actually you can't bring that into our home. Because of the other kids. And that was hard for them. But, you know, and you mentioned Christ.
Christ led with love, he practiced kindness, but he also had no patience for hypocrisy, and he had boundaries around there.
So it's weird to think that we're talking about boundaries with your adult kids. But yeah, we need to have some boundaries sometimes with our adult kids. And that means we've got to talk to them about expectations. Here's what we're expecting. If you're going to live in our house, here's what we're expecting.
And You know, it's better when you do that not in the heat of the battle, but when you've kind of thought through it and when you've done it, when, you know, you're having a good conversation. Adult children also, they will support what they help create.
So if you can bring them into the picture, that's really beneficial. Yeah, talk with them, get their opinion. You mentioned this transition, you know, from kind of hands-on parenting up, you know, through kind of 17, 18. Hopefully as a parent, you've been giving them more and more independence as they've gotten older. And then there's this massive transition where you're no longer, hopefully, the handholder and the all-in parent, but you're now coach or influencer in their 20s.
Some parents struggle with that. I remember a story we received here at Focus where a professor had contacted us and they were complaining that the classroom, this is a university where, you know, a parent, it's illegal for the. professor to share Test results with a parent at that age because they're an adult, right? But this one young man in a class didn't like the grade and got his mom on the phone during class and gave the phone to the professor and began to chew the professor out to say, My son would have done better than that. And he's like, I cannot talk to you.
What an again, describe that situation and what the error is. Like she's ready to fight every fight for her son. Exactly. And she might have helped write that paper. You never know.
I mean, honestly, I couldn't have done that for Lily. I have an MBA from him. No, so we, you know, again, parents have to be careful. I mean, a woman said to me, she said, you know, I don't understand why my son won't make his own pediatrician appointments. He's 22 years old.
And I thought, on two levels, why is he going to the pediatrician? But why we have to allow our kids to sometimes fail. And that's really hard for us. But that's a generation of parenting that was what we called in 1989, it came out helicopter parenting. We've just continued to try to do that.
With their adult children, and we can't do that.
So sometimes we have to allow our kids. To fail. A five-year-old, they're going to fall off the bike and they're going to get a skinned knee and they're going to learn how to ride that bike. And sometimes, and they're tougher issues, but sometimes we have to allow our adult children to fall off the bike, skin their knee, and still be there to pick them up and love on them, but in a different manner. You know, and I so agree.
It is hard because we want to be protector, provider. And the point is, you can overdo that. And to their detriment, then they have a failure to launch. We have a generation of some. Adult kids who are kind of entitled and they're not launching, and they're not launching because we literally have continued to enable.
There's a difference between helping and enabling. And most parents would say that I'm helping, I'm not enabling. But if you're buying them a new house and they can't afford the payments in the house, you're actually enabling them to be dependent on you. You can help them. With different ways.
And that's the big difference.
So, as parents, we have to have that mindset. What does it mean to come alongside them? Yeah. Jim, how do we do that? How do we, I mean, because we're talking about the relationship with adult kids, and sometimes I think we put it all on them, but it's really us that you're talking about here.
So, how do we make that shift to being kind of an influence, a mentor, not the person saying you should do this or you shouldn't do this? For one thing, we have to give our kids what I call the passport to adulthood, and that's not easy for them, and it's not easy necessarily for us. But in doing that, we need, it's almost a ritual of, okay, they're now going to be in charge. And so, for us to do that right, We then move to mentor. We've been, you know, as older teens.
I mean, we're their consultant. Most of their day-to-day decisions are done by themselves. They're not always around. We were coaching them at younger and obviously in control, but we're not in control anymore.
So when we now give them the passport to adulthood, We have to take a deep breath and keep a welcoming mat. You know Type of a relationship with them. At the same time, we have to be strong with what we believe our values are. But it's very possible to, in the context of this culture, be in a relationship with people who we don't agree with. We do that in every aspect of life.
That's going to be the case we do with our adult children at times, too. Yeah. So is it ideal then for that child to be out of the house if we have different values? Yeah. That's a great question.
And I think you personally tailor it. I think some kids do need to get out on their own and feel it. Experience it a bit. And I think other kids, it would be better for them to, you know, stay a little bit longer. And so that's where parents need the discernment.
But, you know, the Bible says where there's no counsel, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors, there is safety. That's why we need what I call a circle of support around us to give us wisdom and counsel. And when we do that, each kid is different. Jim, you describe in the book a couple, and you say they're church leaders who tried to fix their daughter when she made some bad relational choices. What strained the relationship between them and their daughter, and then what helped their relationship?
And I think critically here, it's really the spiritual element to it. You said they're church leaders for a reason. Right.
Church leaders, meaning a lead pastor of a major church in America and his wife. And this girl went everywhere. I mean, she tried a same-sex relationship. She was involved with other things. She rebelled.
She walked away from Jesus. And we kind of teased because they said, guy, we didn't like the guy that was doing cocaine. But at least this guy only does marijuana. You know, we would kind of tease as a couple. But what happened was they still stayed in her story, even though she knew that they were not happy about the choices she was making.
And they had to make some of those hard decisions, John, that you talked about. Maybe she's not going to live here. And to do that, is she going to go move in with the guy or whatever it might be?
So they stayed in the story, and she ended up actually being with a guy who was addicted to marijuana. He was open to faith. And they kind of cut a deal that he would start coming to church. And You know, he's just, he was so different than they were. And they had one, two things in common.
He loved the daughter, and they could see that. Two. The Los Angeles Dodgers. My friend, who's the pastor, loved the Dodgers, and this guy loved the Dodgers. And you know what he did?
He started spending time with him and taking them into Dodgers game, and they got to know each other. And the story is that this young man made a commitment to Christ. He kept going to the church, and they wanted her to marry a youth pastor. They didn't want this guy, and he stopped smoking marijuana, but now he's their youth pastor and he's doing a great job. He's all tatted out, and you know, he looks so different than what they assume.
But he's living for the Lord. But he's living for the Lord. And yeah, are there bumps and bruises in this thing? Sure. There's actually some stepchildren in this thing.
But what I appreciated about them was they said, Look, we have one thing in common. We both love this young woman.
So we're not going to just bag on this thing. And, you know, the ending of the story is a great ending. It's not always an easy ending. I mean, I wish I could say every time there's going to be an easy ending. There's not, but they stayed in the story, as we talk about.
They showed love. And actually, my friend, the pastor, honored. The relationship with this young man, and the young man appreciated it and was open to it. And again, the net net, they were praying for, hoping for their son-in-law to be a youth pastor, and then ended up with this guy smoking pot. But boom, then he becomes the youth pastor.
We didn't think he was going to be that. And by the way, he's a great youth pastor. Oh, that's good. Yeah. It does beg the question about parental expectation.
I mean, this happens in marriage, it happens in parenting, and it certainly happens with 20-somethings because you have your perspective on who they will be. And you've thought of this since you held them as a beautiful bundle on your chest, and you knew what the story would be, but all of a sudden, they're not following that blueprint. And speak to the angst that begins to create, and how we, as the parents, you got to let go. We have to let go, but we also have to deal with the grief. You know, it's a necessary loss.
When a child becomes an adult, It's a loss. You know, you spend two decades of your life basically in control or semi-control as they get older, and then now you're letting them go. And so you have to embrace that grief. C.S. Lewis says that change is loss.
Change is good. I mean, we've all changed. I've known you guys for enough years where, you know, I've changed on my weight, but I don't want to talk about that. But the point being is that change is loss. And so, as a parent, you have to deal with the grief.
And sometimes we feel, and you talked about this at the beginning of the broadcast: we feel pain, we feel shame, we should have prayed more, we should have done Bible studies around the table, we should have gone on more mission trips, all these, we should have, shoulda, shoulda. And so, in the middle of that, we do that, and then we do it quietly when everybody else in the church is also going through these same things, but they're not talking.
So, it goes back to us making sure that we have an authentic relationship with people who will, you know, help us get through it. It's a very important aspect of it. As a pastor and speaker, And of course, Homeward, you've worked with thousands of couples as well in a whole variety of ways in their marriage and their parenting. And in many ways, we see it here too. I think I'm going to know the answer to this, but I'll leave my eyes open and heart open to your perspective.
But it seems there's a bit of a formula that occurs that when you're a stringent parent as a Christian, and we do have expectations for our own lives and for those of our children to live to a higher standard. And sometimes I think we even expect our. Teens and our 20-somethings to certainly live at a standard that we may not have been living up to at that age. You know what I mean? Right.
But it can be so counterproductive for the rebellious child that they are sending a message. And in your experience in those situations, what are those common things that you see that the children are actually rebelling against, if we're honest?
Well, I think a lot of them Felt like we were doing shame-based parenting. We didn't think we were doing shame-based parenting, but I think a lot of times when we have high, you know, the focus on the family. Parent has high standards, has beautiful standards, has God-honoring standards, has biblical standards.
So we need to share those. But at the same time, in doing that, it's how we share them. We need to make it attractive. We need to make living life with faith and living life in alignment with God more attractive. And we have to be careful that we're not making it so rigid that they break those standards.
So when they break the standards, then they change their morality or they change their belief system.
So, really, only two things happen. If a kid strays, violates values, sins, goes off whatever the biblical worldview is, they either come back to Jesus or they change their values. in their mind.
So now they don't believe In the morality that we have, because they had to rebel because they're going to live that out.
So, it's important for us to understand that as the father in the prodigal son story that Jesus told was so great, is he showed a depth of love to his son who had wasted money on prostitutes and parting, so says the living Bible. He didn't change the deal with his elder son. You know that he showed love. But if the son says, Hey, so I've been working with you this whole time, he said, All that I have is yours.
So, he didn't change the financial. Setup and we miss that sometimes.
So you can have standards, you can have biblical standards, but you do it in the midst of showing an incredible depth of love. You can accept them without accepting their behavior.
But again, the problem is in our control as parents, our control issues, our anxiety issues, our guilt issues, those start dominating our reactions to them. And it's totally opposite what the Lord, I think, would want. What some of these kids are telling me, adult kids, is they're saying, my parents just a one-topic parent. I moved in with my boyfriend, and I still want a relationship with my mom, but she's only a one-topic parent. That's all she talks about.
I'd like to go shopping with her. I'd like to do some other things. And you know what I would say to the woman? Does she know how you feel? Does she know what you believe?
Yes. Then expand the relationship because probably the relationship that your daughter's in right now isn't going to last, and you want her to come back. To you, and you want her to come back to your values. And we're seeing that with a lot of young adults today. I mean, you guys know this so well.
I mean, there's some things happening in the Gen Z movement. You know, five years ago, I probably was on this broadcast saying, you know, it's really quite possible that, you know, twice as many atheists in Gen Z, and who are we seeing coming back into the church? Gen Z, especially guys.
Well, you know, God is doing a work, God's not going to let this go.
So we just have to stay in that. You know, messy story. And again, going back to it, we've got to have our help. Moses is battling the Amalekites, and Moses has the rod, and he picks up the rod, and then the Israelites start winning, and then he gets weary and tired. We, as parents, get weary and tired.
So then he has to sit down, and then the Amalekites start winning.
So, what does he do? He brings people around him in his weariness and helps him by holding up the rod, and Israel wins the battle.
Well, we have a battle for our kids' soul, and our kids are forfeiting their spiritual purpose at times, sure, but You know, the battle belongs to the Lord. They should do a song on that. That'd sound good. But secondly, the battle is a long-term battle.
So, you know, I led my brother to the Lord three days before he died. I mean, I wish he forfeited a lot of things in a negative way, but he came back.
Okay. And I think that sometimes happens too.
Well, and that's the desire to have this, again, expectation that as an extended family, we're all in Christ. We're all experiencing the joy of this life together. Let me ask you this in terms of that scripture. I don't think these words are lost. I don't think the Lord misplaces a word in scripture.
So when the scripture says, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. Isn't that interesting that that. Word old is in there.
Now, we want something to happen sooner. But it's almost like if you've done your job, if you have pointed them toward the Lord, you've given them a compass, you've made known what it is you believe, hopefully in the context of love, not demanding it in some kind of militaristic thing. But you've done that, then you know what? The Lord is going to honor this. And what we have to say, I want to cup every listener on their face and just say, really good parents have kids who make poor choices.
And that's true.
So there are parents who have made great. They've done a great job. Not a perfect job because nobody's perfect. They've done a great job and their kids are making poor choices. I'm seeing some of those kids come back, especially you mentioned the 20s.
It's an interesting time because some of them come back and then they meander toward marriage or they meander toward some responsibility. But once they get married and have kids, guess where they come? They come back to the community that they had once in the church. They come back to faith.
Now, they may not come back to our church. Fantastic. They're just going to church. But what we have to understand is that if we do the training, and nobody thinks they're perfect parents, so nobody trained them perfect, but when we do the training, that I honestly think God honors that in a beautiful way. I don't know what it looks like.
I'm not God. That's way beyond my pay grade. But I honestly think that. You know, for the people who have younger kids, no, we do that. We do the training.
And we forget, you know, training is an athletic term. You know, Paul and others, and the Bible in that particular scripture is Old Testament, but they use the word training much more as an athletic term. It's run the race. Run the race.
So it's perseverance, it's endurance.
So we need a dose of perseverance and endurance. As we're running the race with our adult kids.
Well, I hope this is a drop of water for your thirsty parenting souls, the listeners and the viewers, because we're going to continue. If Jim, you'll stick with us and we'll come back for a day too. But we're scratching the surface. We want to get into more of the detail about how to do this and how to do it well. And again, Jim's great book, When Your Adult Child Strays, Trading Heartache for Hope.
That's a better place to be. Heartache is not a good place to just land and sit there. And I think Jim's book can equip you to have a better attitude, that loving attitude that we're talking about today, so that you don't lose the tether. with your child, your adult child. And that will be the hope of the future.
So get a hold of us, as we often do. Make a gift of any amount. If you can do it monthly to help us with our budget, that's great. A one-time gift is also great. And as our way of saying thank you, we'll send you a copy of Jim's book.
Donate today, our number is 800, the letter A in the word family, or visit the show notes where we have the links to donate and to get that book. And on behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for joining us today. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we continue the conversation with Jim Burns and once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Pastors, if you're struggling to help couples in your church whose marriage is in trouble, we can help. Marriage 911 by Focus on the Family trains lay people to mentor married couples.
Each kit includes two training guides, four workbooks, and all the training necessary to meet with couples who need help. Go to marriage911.com. That's marriage, the numbers911.com.
