Christian parenting of adult children, and step-parenting grown adult children in Christian families, has lead to several questions from readers on the matter of helping vs. enabling adult children. The questions came from numerous parenting articles here, where I discuss the problems many parents and step-parents are having with grown children, especially in regards to the adult children asking for money or needing some kind of monetary “help” on a regular basis.

Mothers, fathers, step-mothers and step-fathers, have emailed me asking for tips and advice on how to handle their parenting problems with their adult children, from a Christian perspective. Some parents even asked for Bible scripture quotes and biblical principles for them to share with their grown kids, to help explain why the parents should not, could not and will not give the grown children money and/or pay their bills. Trust me, if there were ever public speaking opportunities for me to discuss parents enabling adult children, I would not have to be asked twice.

The answers to the questions involve many aspects of parenting adult children and married life, not only for Christians, but for any parent who may be enabling their grown children without realizing the harm done by this behavior. The Christian responsibility of fathers and mothers; the husband’s role in marriage and the wife’s role; the subject of leaving and cleaving; what “giving away the bride” means in Christian wedding ceremonies; traditional wedding vows brides and grooms make to each other, are all involved in these problems. Christian parents of adult children, are you helping or enabling your grown kids?

It came as no surprise that the subject of step-parenting adult children, children who are full-grown married adults with or without kids of their own, challenged parenting skills to the max and were creating marriage problems between the enabling parent and his/her spouse. To me, parenting is parenting, regardless of whether the parents or family are Christian or church-going families or not. There are, of course, scriptures and Bible principles for Christian parents of adult children that offer assistance in these difficult, often emotionally-charged, sensitive matters.

Christian Parenting – Parenting Adult Children

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” – Proverbs 22:6

From infancy to adulthood, Solomon instructs Christian parents of the importance and God-appointed parental responsibility of teaching, training and disciplining children to love and fear God; to obey their parents; to learn how to be a responsible adult in society; and to live a clean, righteous and moral life, to name a few. Parents, Christian believers or not, have an enormous challenge training children in today’s society, with the prevalent attitude of “it’s all about me” often shown in young children, teenagers and grown adult children.

We live in a generation of entitlement, where kids of all ages are growing up as selfish, arrogant, ignorant, rebellious, lazy, immature, disrespectful, profane, foolish, wasteful children, believing the world and parents owe them everything they want. Financially irresponsible adult children and adult step-children continue to drain their parents bank accounts and retirement accounts due to their own poor judgment, poor money-management skills, and an ever-growing want list because the kids refuse to grow up and won’t tell themselves No.

“But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever.” – 1 Timothy 5:8

Husband Role in Christian Marriage

One Christian father emailed me saying his son-in-law would not work, preferring to play video games all day, while the father’s daughter struggled to provide for and feed her family with two young children, which included regularly asking the father for money to pay bills and cover their basic needs. Apparently, no one taught or explained to this young man the husband’s role in the Bible, or about Christian marriage roles and responsibilities for husbands and wives.

Men, when you get married, you immediately become duty-bound in God’s eyes to fulfill the roles and responsibilities of providing for and caring for the needs of your wife and children, something that your wife’s father and/or mother is no longer responsible for. Whether brides and grooms recite the traditional Christian wedding vows or not, before God and witnesses the man and woman getting married promise to “have and to hold from this day forward for better or for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish as long as we both shall live.”

Giving Away the Bride

For Christians, marriage is a covenant relationship, not a simple contract. Some Christian wedding traditions and customs, like the father giving away the bride, cause some people to cringe or wince at the mere mention of this custom. Modern brides and grooms may not like nor allow the traditional words “who gives this woman in marriage to this man?” to be included in their wedding ceremony, because of the historical origin those words came from.

The words “Who gives this bride away?“ or some alternative wording are considered to be so controversial, if not abhorrent, that anyone attending a wedding officiated by a justice of the peace may find those words excluded from the ceremony altogether. For Christian wedding ceremonies, the act of the father walking his daughter down the aisle and “giving the bride away” to the groom, is a very important part of a wedding ceremony for many parents.

The father, as head of the house, is not just presenting his daughter in marriage to a man he approves of. By giving away his daughter in marriage, and placing her hand into the groom’s hand during the ceremony, the bride’s parents are thereby demonstrating their blessing on the marital union AND are symbolizing the transferal of responsibility and care onto the husband. Saying the words “I Do”, right before repeating wedding vows to each other, the bride and the groom thus express their willing acceptance of all responsibilities marriage brings and are duty-bound before God to fulfill them to the best of their ability.

Cutting the Apron Strings

“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” – Genesis 2:24

The scripture quote found above, located at Genesis 2:24, is repeated at Ephesians 5:31, showing God’s pattern for marriage to include a “leaving” of one’s parents and a “cleaving” to one’s spouse. Leaving and cleaving is a shifting of allegiance from the parents before marriage, to a marriage allegiance between husband and wife alone. Psychologists call this “cutting the psychological apron strings”, which requires a letting go of responsibilities, financial support and control that parents previously had with their children.

Single or married adult children living with parents, in-laws or grandparents, cannot develop full independence and adult responsibility that being an adult requires while living with their parents. Dependence on parents or others to give support financially stops when couples marry or move out to live on their own as full grown adults, and parents should help encourage and promote such independence and responsibility.

Mental, emotional and spiritual support, guidance and encouragement for married children need not stop, and occasional financial help when truly needed. God requires parents to “let go” of their adult children, to allow their grown kids the room and space needed to live their lives as adults, to make their mistakes and to find ways to fix their own self-made problems, rather than running to rescue their children from each and every poor decision made. How else will grown kids learn how to be an adult, independent and responsible, except by their own diligent efforts?

How to Be a Good Christian Husband

In the Bible, the Christian husband’s role in marriage to his wife begins with the announcement by the minister or church Pastor that the couple is now pronounced “husband and wife“, during the Christian wedding ceremony. Christian husbands not only assume the primary leadership role in their marriage as “head of the house”, but Ephesians 5: 28-29 tells husbands to love their wives in the same way that they love their own bodies, including feeding and caring for their wives, as good Christian husbands do.

“In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church.” – NIV

Good husbands, especially Christian believers, happily comply with biblical principles to work and make enough money to sufficiently provide for all of life’s basic necessities for his wife and children. A fundamental failure as a husband in marriage is when Christian husbands neglect their God-given responsibility as provider of their family’s needs, leaving their wives to take on the husband role as head of the household, rather than her wifely role as helper or helpmate.

Unfortunately, some Christian ministers fail to discuss in detail the husband’s role and wife’s role in marriage prior to the hectic wedding ceremony, leaving those fine Scriptural principals about marital roles and responsibilities to go unheard. Dating and engaged couples who are considering marriage, or couples already planning their wedding, should carefully ask themselves and each other if they are really ready to be married, before getting married. You’ll be glad you did, and so will your Christian parents who want you to be happy in your marriage, and your mom and dad’s bank account to be left intact.

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• How to Be a Good Son-In-Law: Building a Great Son-In-Law Relationship With Your In-Laws
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“Letting go of adult children. It’s something parents do all the time. At least we’re told that’s what parents are supposed to do about the time their children turn eighteen”, says author Arlene Harder in her book on dealing with grown children who haven’t turned out the way parents hoped and expected. Whether our grown “adult children stayed living under our roof longer than we want, or strike out into the world earlier than anticipated, parents are told they need to cut the apron strings that have kept us focused on our child.”

In other words, says Harder, “when our children reach the age of maturity, we are expected to make a major change in our relationship with them- to transfer responsibility for decisions concerning their lives from us to them. If we successfully complete this transition, we will, says conventional wisdom, accept our children as independent individuals just as they are, including imperfections, values that conflict with ours, and different needs and desires. And they will accept us in return. We will communicate openly and share our values and experiences with one another without believing we have the right, or the power, to change the other person.”

Sound easy? Not if you’re the parent of a grown child who marches to a drum very different from the one you played for your child when he or she was young. You know it would be better for both of you if you could let go. But you can’t. You remain uncomfortably, perhaps painfully, “stuck” because things haven’t turned out the way you expected.

Parenting Adult Children

Letting go of grown adult children can be especially difficult for parents with adult children who have serious problems with drug addiction, alcohol abuse, mental illness, and/or choose to break societal laws and perhaps go to jail or prison for crimes committed. Many such parents have discovered that there are no guarantees that children will turn out the way they were raised, or how the parents expected, hoped and prayed their children would become as adults.

Arlene Harder’s book, “Letting Go of Our Adult Children, When What We Do is Never Enough”, is a FREE online book parents and families struggling to let go can read and receive helpful tips and advice on letting go with love. Having been granted permission to reprint the intro of the free book, parents who enable their grown children, or parents who can’t or won’t let go of their adult kids for various reasons may relate to many of the personal experiences discussed in the book and find the encouragement and support needed. The Introduction to the nine-chapter book, published in 1994, continues with the author saying:

Parents may unintentionally fail their children in some fundamental way so they aren’t really able to meet the standards we hold for them. Even more, because they have minds of their own, they can choose a lifestyle that we don’t approve of or that we feel is less than they are capable of achieving. Being stuck and unable to let go can arise from minor, irritating differences between you and your child or major obstacles that appear to be intractable. For example, you may be unable to get past frequent arguments over relatively unimportant issues that both of you always seem to turn into contests of who is right. Or while you and your daughter don’t often disagree, you can’t shake the disappointment you feel when she loses yet another job.

You want to accept the fact that how well she does at work is her problem. But you know she doesn’t demonstrate the commitment to work that employers want. How can you let go when you blame yourself for not teaching her responsibility? Or perhaps you need the money from the sale of a family house your thirty-eight year old son has been living in rent-free for Fifteen years. The only “problem” is that he doesn’t have money to move else- where; forcing him out would make you feel like Simon Legree.

Or, while you may realize that there is probably nothing you can do to prevent your son’s divorce, you remain entangled in accusations and defenses with your son’s in-laws because you’re afraid you will lose contact with a precious grandchild. And sticky in-law problems are legion in complicated step-family configurations.

Even if your children are happily married, however, you may have a hard time understanding and accepting in-laws who are of a different race, religion, or social group. You hadn’t thought of yourself as prejudiced, but you are having a hard time adjusting. And what if your child is single and living with a member of the opposite sex; or has chosen a member of his or her same sex as a life partner? With less than 25 percent of families made up of father, mother, and dependent children, family constellations aren’t what they used to be.

Letting go may be particularly difficult if the problems you face seem highly resistant to change. This is especially true when your child is mentally ill or is in serious trouble with the law. And if your child is like my son, whose difficulties in relationships and jobs have been compounded by drug and alcohol abuse, the road to letting go can be extremely long and trying. Yet your situation may be even more painful if your child died before you were able to work out the issues that kept you from letting go; all that unfinished business leaves you with pain you are sure will never go away.

You may be a parent who claims you have no choice but to let go when your child refuses to have any contact, or has extremely minimal contact, with you. Don’t kid yourself. On the surface you may look as though you have let go, but anyone probing a centimeter deep can see that your hurt in being excluded from your child’s life penetrates deep into your heart. This may be especially difficult if you are at a loss to understand what went wrong.

Yet the situation isn’t any easier if you recognize all too clearly how you contributed to the rift that has torn the family fabric in half. For example, perhaps you abused alcohol or drugs when your children were small. Today, although you are now clean and sober, your child is unwilling to forgive you, despite your apologies. In that case you may be paralyzed by guilt; concluding that you have permanently injured your child and that the gap between you can never be bridged.

On the other hand, you may be a parent who is perfectly satisfied with how your child has turned out and who thought you had a good relationship with her. Recently, however, she has accused you and her father of being “dysfunctional” and perhaps even “abusive.” Even though you realize you weren’t perfect parents, you are saddened by alienation created by her anger and your hurt.

If you see yourself in any of these situations (or ones uncomfortably similar), you realize that you’ve been unable to let go no matter how hard you try. This is what is meant by the subtitle of this book, “When What We Do Is Never Enough.” No matter what we say, think or do — no matter how hard we try — until we let go with love we remain uncomfortably bound to a child who is legally old enough to make his decisions without parental interference or approval.

As parents of children whose values and lifestyles are in conflict with ours — whether we experience a fairly small amount or a great deal of disappointment in that fact — we have probably already discovered that heavy-handed bullying and significant bribes cannot make our child become what we had hoped he would become. Money may work in the short run, of course, but in the long haul it can’t buy the integrity, honesty, determination, and responsibility we desire for our child.

Yet masking our attempts to change our child through less obvious measures is not unlike trying to run him over with a fuzzy bulldozer; it only leaves him, and us, bruised. Let’s face it — as long as we keep trying to get our child to live according to our values, we don’t stand much chance of having the kind of adult-to-adult relationship we all deserve with our children when they grow up.

The first part of the book, “Getting Caught up in Our Expectations,” deals with what happens when parents discover their child is marching to a different drummer. In it I offer a path to letting go with love and to forming a more positive relationship with your adult child, a path involving five stages of healing. In these chapters you will see that your disappointment and pain are not unique; nor is it unusual for you to keep trying to get your child to change. Most important of all, you will realize why it is essential for you to shift your attention from your adult child to yourself.

If you already know you must change your focus away from whatever stands between you and your child, you may want to go directly to the second part of the book, “Finding Peace by Letting Go.” These five chapters offer suggestions for healing the pain caused by the realization that your child does not share your values or cannot live up to the expectations you once had for him or her. Here you will find motivation to explore the issues that keep you pulling on your end of the rope in the family tug-of-war, to grieve your unfulfilled expectations, to forgive yourself and your child and, finally, to let go with love. And if differences between you and your child are still irreconcilable, you can learn how to bring closure and healing to that situation as well.

The concept of a path of healing for parents first arose for me during the painful years when I struggled with great disappointment in a child who was not living the kind of life I envisioned for him. Gradually I realized that I was moving through a series of stages and turned my attention from my son’s problems to those which I needed to address in my own life. I continued to observe this process and to further develop my theory in working with disappointed parents as part of my practice as a licensed family therapist.

Later these ideas were reinforced in interviews with over seventy-five parents, both those who were disappointed in how things have turned out and those who were very satisfied. To protect confidentiality in sharing the stories of others, I have changed names and identifying characteristics. In a few instances I have combined several elements from more than one situation to emphasize a particular point.

Letting go can be difficult for parents whether they are married, divorced, or widowed; adoptive or biological parents; single or step-parents. Since the specific circumstances in everyone’s life are different, and since we all have somewhat different expectations for our children, we will each experience different reactions to our adult children if those expectations are not met.

Consequently, the act of letting go with love will be easier and go more quickly for some and be more difficult and take longer for others. Yet this book offers to every parent the evidence that it is possible to let go and find peace even in the most difficult of circumstances.

It is my hope that this book will guide you in moving past your disappointment and pain into peace, healing, and acceptance of your child, even if he or she continues to make choices that have, until now, driven you up a wall. We cannot change our grown children. But dealing honestly and openly with our disappointment creates an opportunity to change ourselves — and in the process to let go with love so that our disappointment no longer causes us pain.

Parents, you can begin reading the free online book by Arlene Harder on letting go of grown adult children at Support4Change.com.

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• Support Groups for Parents with Grown Adult Children Living at Home with Parents
• How To Stop Enabling: When Our Grown Children Disappoint Us
• Book Giveaway: Setting Boundaries With Your Adult Children
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• Raising Independent Children-Not Moochers

Numerous emails from parents needing help in finding support groups for parents with grown, adult children living at home have arrived in my inbox, especially after reading How to Stop Enabling: When Our Grown Children Disappoint Us and the “Helping vs. Enabling” articles listed there that deal with the difference between helping and enabling and parenting adult children.

Having grown, adult children at home with the parents, after adult children leave home to attend college, get married and start having families of their own, creates enormous problems and conflicts for many families.

Frustrated parents begin searching for a “child parent contract” with a list of “adult children rules” for grown children and parents to agree on and sign, only to discover the hard way that rules for adult children, parent child contracts and adult children moving back home rarely (if ever) works for either the parent or the adult children.

Having adult children living at home may temporarily ease some of the empty nest feelings and emotions for parents, but thinking that you are truly helping your child by allowing your grown children to move back home, especially lazy adult children who refuse to work, don’t budget or live within their means etc will not cure empty nest syndrome, but your enabling behavior will cripple your adult children.

It’s time to stop enabling, and there are online support groups, forums and/or message boards to help you stop enabling people that can, should and need to be doing things for themselves.

CafeMom is the largest support group/social networking site for moms and moms-to-be. Included amongst the various support groups found at CafeMom are groups for parents with adult children at home (commonly referred to as Boomerang Kids).

There you will experience emotional help and support in setting boundaries between parents and adult children, and groups of women/parents sharing personal stories of their adult children living at home and discussing ideas of getting these kids out of the parent’s house once and for all.

Similar Posts:

• Are Parents Helping Or Enabling Their Adult Children?
• Empty Nest Syndrome-Children Leaving Home, What Do I Do Now?
• Raising Independent Children-Not Moochers
• How To Stop Enabling: When Our Grown Children Disappoint Us
• Meet Other Moms Just Like You At CafeMom

To “let go” does not mean to stop caring,
it means I can’t do it for someone else.

To “let go” is not to cut myself off,
it’s the realization I can’t control another.

To “let go” is not to enable,
but to allow learning from natural consequences.

To “let go” is to admit powerlessness,
which means the outcome is not in my hands.

To “let go” is not to try to change or blame another,
it’s to make the most of myself.

To “let go” is not to care for,
but to care about.

To “let go” is not to fix,
but to be supportive.

To “let go” is not to judge,
but to allow another to be a human being.

To “let go” is not to be in the middle arranging the outcomes,
but to allow others to affect their own destinies.

To “let go” is not to be protective,
it’s to permit another to face reality.

To “let go” is not to deny,
but to accept.

To “let go” it not to nag, scold or argue,
but instead to search out my own shortcomings, and correct them.

To “let go” is not to adjust everything to my desires
but to take each day as it comes,
and cherish myself in it.

To “let go” is not to criticize and regulate anybody
but to try to become what I dream I can be.

To “let go” is not to regret the past,
but to grow and live for the future.

To “let go” is to fear less,
and love more.

(Unknown Author)

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How to Fight Fair in Marriage
Keeping the Fire Alive in Your Marriage

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