This is the third installment in my series, “The Things We Were Never Meant to Carry,” and this may be one of the hardest burdens for a parent to recognize because the pain itself feels so much like responsibility.
The Things We Were Never Meant to Carry:
Our Adult Children’s Choices
For most of our children’s early lives, responsibility really does belong heavily to us.
We decide what they are taught, what influences are allowed into the home, where they go, how they are corrected, and what kind of example they see in us.
We pray over them, teach them Scripture, warn them about foolishness, and spend years trying to give them something solid enough to stand on when they eventually leave our direct care.
Then adulthood arrives, and with it comes one of the most difficult truths a parent will ever have to accept.
Your grown child has a will of his own.
My pastor has said something for years that I think deserves to be remembered by every parent who has ever lain awake wondering where they went wrong:
“A good rule does not override a free will.”
You can provide a good home and still raise a child who eventually rejects what he was taught.
You can get many things right and still watch an adult son or daughter choose something you would have given anything to spare them from.
We have all seen it.
Sometimes we have seen it in families we deeply respect, which should make us much slower to assume that a wayward adult child is proof of some terrible failure hidden inside the home.
Some of the parents I respect most have known the grief of watching a child walk away from the very things they spent years trying to give them.
And some parents are living that grief inside their own house right now.
The story of the prodigal son has always struck me differently as I have grown older because I find myself thinking more about the father.
His son made a decision the father clearly would not have chosen for him.
He took his inheritance, left home, went into a far country, and “wasted his substance with riotous living.”
There came a point where the father could no longer direct the son’s life.
He could not follow him into the far country and force wisdom into him.
He could not make repentance happen sooner.
He could not arrange circumstances so carefully that his son would never experience the consequences of foolishness.
The son had to reach his own moment of awakening.
Luke 15:17 says, “And when he came to himself…”
I think those words contain a lesson some parents desperately need.
There are things your adult child must come to for himself.
You may have already said everything you know to say.
You may have warned him.
You may have cried through prayers nobody else heard.
You may have looked back through childhood a hundred times trying to locate the moment when everything began going wrong.
There is value in honest reflection, because none of us parent perfectly.
If something belongs to us, we should have enough humility to admit it.
If we wounded our children, we should be willing to apologize.
If pride, harshness, inconsistency, or neglect played a part in the story, age does not excuse us from dealing honestly with it.
But honest reflection can become self-punishment when a parent begins accepting ownership for every decision an adult child presently makes.
That burden becomes crushing because there is no end to it.
Every new mistake becomes another question about your parenting.
Every foolish choice becomes another piece of evidence you use against yourself.
Eventually you begin looking at your grown child’s entire life as though it were the final grade on yours.
Scripture gives adults personal responsibility before God.
Romans 14:12 says, “So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.”
That includes our children.
At some point, the truth we taught them has to become truth they choose to obey.
The convictions of their parents cannot permanently substitute for convictions formed in their own hearts.
A child can grow up surrounded by faith and still decide to leave it behind for a season, or perhaps much longer.
“A good rule does not override a free will.”
Accepting that does not remove the ache.
I do not think anything could.
There is a peculiar sorrow in watching someone you love participate in his own destruction, especially when you remember the child he used to be.
You remember the prayers beside the bed, the conversations in the car, the verses memorized, the moments when you thought something had really taken root.
Then one day you find yourself loving an adult whose decisions you hardly recognize.
That hurts.
Parents may carry that pain for years, and I would never tell them to pretend otherwise.
What they do not have to carry is the responsibility for choices they did not make.
The father of the prodigal did not travel into the far country to finance his son’s rebellion or remove every consequence before it became painful enough to teach him something.
Eventually the son became hungry, and somewhere inside that misery he remembered home.
Sometimes consequences are part of the road back.
That is terribly difficult for parents because our instinct is to rescue.
We want to pay the bill, fix the situation, explain away the behavior, make one more phone call, or protect the child from whatever is coming next.
There are times when wisdom may require help.
There are also times when help becomes participation in a pattern that needs to break.
Knowing the difference requires prayer and sometimes counsel from people who know the situation well, but love does not require us to prevent every consequence an adult child has chosen.
The prodigal’s father remained a father while his son was away.
When the boy finally came home, Scripture says that “when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion.”
The father had never stopped loving.
He had not hardened himself so thoroughly that repentance could no longer find a welcome.
Yet he had allowed his son to walk the road he had chosen until the son himself wanted to come home.
There are parents who need to hear that today.
You can keep loving your child while allowing God to deal with him.
You can keep praying while admitting that you cannot manufacture conviction.
You can keep the door open to genuine repentance without following your child into every destructive place he decides to go.
Perhaps you have already done what you know to do, and the hardest thing left is surrendering someone you love to a God who can reach places in that heart you cannot.
He can use memories you assume have been forgotten.
He can bring conviction in a room where you are not present.
He can use consequences you would have tried desperately to prevent.
And He can work on a timetable that feels unbearably slow to a parent watching the road.
If your adult child is wandering, examine your own heart honestly and make right whatever truly belongs to you.
Then stop taking ownership of what belongs to them.
Their choices may still break your heart, and their name may remain one of the most frequent words in your prayers.
That pain is part of loving someone.
The guilt may not be.
You raised a human being with a will.
Eventually that human being has to decide what he will do with God, truth, wisdom, consequences, and the life placed in his hands.
Sometimes being a faithful parent of an adult child means standing farther back than your heart wants to stand, praying harder than you ever expected to pray, and trusting that the God who loves your child sees all the way into the far country.
“A good rule does not override a free will.”
And the choices made by that free will were never yours to carry as though they were your own.
Biblical Womanhood
“When You Can’t Control It: A 6-Week Bible Study for Those Who Are Tired of Worrying, Overthinking, and Carrying Everything” for the friend whose mind has been working three shifts while the rest of the house sleeps.
You love your people, take your duties seriously, and have slowly begun carrying outcomes, hearts, decisions, and futures that God never placed under your authority.
This study keeps the Bible open.
Each week remains inside one primary passage long enough to see what is actually happening there before rushing toward a comforting application.
We sit with Moses while Jethro tells him the load will wear him away, listen to Christ speak about the tomorrow we keep trying to live today, watch Sarah reach for an outcome after years of waiting, walk beside Jairus through an interruption, separate the spies’ facts from the report fear wrote around them, and finish with Hannah pouring out her soul before anything visible changes.
There are questions to answer honestly, passages to mark, and one practical act of release for each week.
This is meant to be worked through with a Bible and a notebook, because worry grows vague and enormous when it is never required to finish a sentence.
If you are tired of carrying what was never yours to govern, this study is the right next step.
I also want to explain why I am releasing it differently.
I am making this a fundraiser-style purchase for this ministry.
The minimum is $5.25, and anyone who wants the study at that amount can take it at that amount.
