I read an article this week, thanks to my new subscription to the Atlantic, about the modern day rise in family estrangement. It is a problem close to my heart for various reasons, and apparently I am not alone. The article states that the rise in estranged families skews heavily toward the adult child being the initiator of the break in relationship, and the explanation for this is new. “Never before have family relationships been seen as so interwoven with the search for personal growth, the pursuit of happiness, and the need to confront and overcome psychological obstacles,” the article states.
Our family relationships have never been so fraught, so weighed down with the burden of responsibility to bring fulfillment, happiness and psychological health to the other. It’s no wonder we’re failing.
As I read the article, nodding along almost perceptibly, I couldn’t help but think of my own role as a parent. Though our children may range in age, Josh and I have decidedly put our feet in the waters of launching adult children into the world. Our oldest is in college, calling home when he can but living his own life away from us. Our second will graduate in a few short months and head off to college soon after. We may still have toddlers and elementary age kids at home, but I also feel squarely in the midst of middle age parenting. And middle age parenting is a season all its own.
For me, the questions that rise to the surface most often these days are strangely future oriented. It’s not so much, how do we do this here and now, or what do we do about this or that problem or decision, but more along the lines of how will I handle it IF? If my kid goes off the rails, or makes choices I don’t agree with and maybe even disapprove of? If they don’t do all the things we’ve raised them to do or do all the things we raised them not to? If they decide I’m a toxic presence in their life and want nothing to do with me?
How do I maintain a relationship with these adults who have all their own agency and yet into whom I have poured so much effort into forming? In a word, how do I let go of all my hopes and dreams and prayers and expectations? Maybe for some people that seems easy to do, as though by saying, “I just want them to be happy” you can erase any of your own skin in the game.
I think if I’m honest, I am just trying to get brutally real with myself, to face what I know is there under the surface in the form of All The Things I Want For My Kids and Of Course Also Think Is Best. We all have our own versions of what we imagine living their best life looks like, and I know I have mine. If I can be honest about what that vision is, maybe I can also begin to be honest about what it means if that vision is not realized. And maybe, if needed, I can be given a different vision, a different kind of hope.
I wonder if this is especially heavy or complicated for Christian parents. As Christ-followers, most of want nothing more than for our kids to live their lives in obedience to Jesus, and when they don’t it is devastating on multiple levels. Not only is there a rift between us because of belief, but often lifestyle choices follow that bring additional sorrow. How does a Christian parent respond? And even if we come up with concrete ways to interact and continue to have relationship with our children, it’s the internal questions that seem harder to answer, the existential angst of it all that seems so threatening.
Some of the Christian messages around parenting don’t help. One popular Christian writer and mother I see often encourages parents to be faithful in the day to day and all the seemingly monotonous discipling of our kids because (cut to pictures of growing kids doing all the amazing things) the fruit does indeed show itself one day. She often uses examples of her own young adult children and all the ways she sees them becoming the godly young men as a way of validating this principle.
It’s not that I don’t think we should be encouraged to be faithful in our parenting, or in believing that many years of planting seeds as it were, will produce fruit one day. These are very biblical concepts that Jesus himself teaches, though mostly in regards to the way God will work. It is just that seed planting and faithfulness are not scripts to follow with promised happy endings, at least in this life. There are no guarantees for exactly how the story in any individual life will turn out. And I wonder if this kind of message makes many Christian parents even more anxious about getting their discipling and their faithfulness right so that their kids will turn out right in the end.
What if they don’t? What does that mean?
Another mother I know recently shared her testimony, which consisted in a large part about how none of her children currently walk with the Lord. She was heartbroken about this, of course. She and her husband inevitably ask, what did we do wrong? What did we miss? They tried to do all the right things, they tried to be faithful. Instead these questions haunt them.
I have not braved these waters yet, and I don’t know that I will have to. But I do find myself haunted by the questions still. And I need to hear more from parents like this. As much as I run to the feet of those who have “done well” and whose parenting I admire, mostly seen by the way their kids have turned out, I find myself wanting to hear as much or more from those who do not have a glory story.
“Every Christian story is a freedom story,” writes Eugene Peterson in The Message’s introduction to Galatians. “Each tells how a person has been set free from the confines of… [insert anything that imprisons us], separated from God by sin. We’re free to change. The process of that change is always a story, but it’s never a neat formula.”
The Bible is less full of parenting advice than it is of many many stories… and not one of them is neat or formulaic. Could it be that for Christian parents, our call is not so much to produce fruit in our kids but in ourselves? Perhaps it is more a call to be faithful, and to be filled with faith about the God who is working in them, and less about producing faithful kids.
I was re-reading the opening section of Karen Swallow Prior’s, On Reading Well this week, mining for material related to another issue and wanting to look again at the way she talks about virtue. But as I thought about all of my parenting angst, it made me wonder if I shouldn’t be using this age old wisdom as a guide. The classical meaning of virtue, according to Aristotle is the middle ground between the two extremes—excess on the one end and deficiency on the other. The pursuit of virtue is also understood most importantly as being within the context of a telos or purpose to life, an end towards which it believes and lives and hopes.
Without this telos, our pursuit of virtue turns in on itself. It becomes about outcomes in the here and now, a doing of the right and good for the fruit it produces, a means to a end, a temptation every parent faces.
To be virtuous as a parent is to pursue faith, hope, and love, courage and prudence and patience and all the fruits of the Spirit as I raise my kids, but only because I know that God sees and hears and holds the end of the all my strivings in His hands. To be virtuous as a parent is to pursue these things regardless of outcome, and never with outcomes as the end goal. To be virtuous as parent is to care to the uttermost, but also to leave the uttermost to God.
I asked my dad, as he sat across from me one morning last week, we who have miles of parenting wins and woes between us, how do you raise your kids and care enough about the right things, but also not care too much? We were both quiet.
Because, who can do this?
Even the word virtuous can raise your hackles, bringing to mind yet another standard that feels too high to attain.
We live in a time when family relationships, and parent-child ones especially, are more burdened than ever by expectations; by the things we ask of one another, the things we ask of ourselves, maybe even the things we think God asks of us.
Sometimes I think that I’m like one of those squirrels running around outside my kitchen window, frittering and leaping and scrambling with all my thoughts and efforts. And then, ever so slowly and gently, the great hand of God quietly descends over my frantic self, like one of those weighted blankets that soothes you with its heaviness. We need to lighten up, he says.
The story is a long one, and it’s not all up to us.
I admit I'm one of *those* parents who only cares about my children's future... "happiness" is the wrong word, if one has studied a bit of philosophy, but it's the one easiest to understand. The only lifechoice that I can think of that would upset me is getting involved in a relationship that was abusive. I would do anything to help them get out of there. Or becoming addicted to something. And again, I'd do anything to help them. Those are my only worries. Obviously if any of them would intentionally hurt someone else, that would be upsetting too, but I can't imagine either of them actually doing that. They're kindhearted.
I always come here if I have a moment with a cuppa for your words. Thank you so much for sharing your journey. This helped me all the way in Scotland as I raise my 3 children.