What to Do with Your Wayward Adult Child (Part 1 of 2)

Focus on the Family with Jim Daly

This episode of Focus on the Family explores the challenges parents face when their adult children stray from faith or values. Dr. Jim Burns

Key takeaways

• Parents can maintain love and respect for their adult child while not accepting their behavior or choices.
• Staying 'in the story' means being present during struggles without enabling poor decisions.

Main topics

• Parenting adult children who have strayed from faith or values
• Setting healthy boundaries without losing connection

Notable quotes

"You can accept them without accepting their behavior."

Conclusion

Parents are encouraged to continue loving their adult children with grace,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:06) 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 Speaker 1 (0:14) them without accepting their behavior. Well, that's Dr. Jim Burns sharing about the complex dynamics that 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. Speaker 3 (0:32) 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, 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 – 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 Speaker 1 (1:59) Burns. And Jim is the founder of Homeward, 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 Speaker 2 (2:27) to be with you. I feel like I'm in a family reunion. Yeah, I can feel Speaker 3 (2:30) light Speaker 2 (2:31) and lifted up. I'm a little disappointed you didn't eat the mustard. pepper and salt thing. Speaker 3 (2:35) Well, no, I would have tried it just a little sip, but they never pressured us, which I thought was great. It's very Speaker 2 (2:42) kind of them. Now I just saw Trent as a 20 something. He's a lot taller than you and a lot bigger than you. He could have forced you at a certain time. He could today. Speaker 3 (2:49) 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 Speaker 2 (3:52) 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 pair an 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, you know, 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 Speaker 3 (4:42) didn't see it coming. We said that's going to be somebody else's kid, not ours. You know, Jean and I, we did foster training. 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 Speaker 1 (5:07) are. Speaker 3 (5:07) 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. 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 Speaker 2 (5:29) 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. So we weren't prepared for it either. Speaker 3 (6:09) You have a story in the book about a woman named Amber. I'm sure you've changed all the names. Yes. Speaker 2 (6:15) But what was Amber's situation? 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, you know, in the junior high was, you know, 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.