Parent-Child: The Only Relationship Bound Towards Separation

As a youth, I’ve heard this said over and over: “It is better to have broken your heart in love than to not have loved at all.” For those of us back then who were ready to bust out of childhood but were afraid we’d fall flat on our face at courtship, that was a battlecry.

Courtship, though, when it doesn’t work out, has a merciful exit. You don’t have to live with the loved one that broke your heart. There’s more immediate access to healing at the choice to move on.

Not so with children. They hook your heart with their first cry. They get you slaving night and day through countless feedings and diaper changes. They make you fall in love some more with their firsts: first word, first roll, first crawl, first step...

You treasure in your heart the first time they wave goodbye to you to take their first school bus ride. You toss around in bed the first time you let them spend the night at a friend’s house. And the first time they ask you not to hug them because their friends are around, they break your heart big time.

Then the border wars begin. The boundaries you have set and they have observed faithfully only a few years back get pushed. You hold the line. They test it again and again. Your heart breaks, you grow weary at each wave of push and hold. But you steel your nerve and hang on.

In your mind, you keep remembering that ultimately, you are raising God’s kids. That from day one you have been the earliest example of God to them. Still, there is that part in you that questions whether your tough love is being too hard on them.

Perhaps, not. Our frustrations notwithstanding, we’re probably loving our kids just right. While our kids’ behavior may boggle our minds, it is not totally without explanation:

When teenagers skulk behind slammed doors and turn up their iPods, parents are likely to chalk the behavior up to surging hormones or the need for adolescents to carve out some independence...Teenage brains lack the circuitry adult brains use to reason. The teenage brain is a work in progress. (The Oregonian, Monday, Feb. 21, 2005)

The human decision-making circuitry does not fully function until we are in our early twenties.

Which is why kids need to hear the same truth, the same boundary, over and over again. It gives them security. That’s why they test the boundary repeatedly. They need to see if it will really hold.

One good tool that helps is communication. It's always a win-win. It helps make the boundaries stick when parent and child remain in touch with each other. More importantly, God uses these communications as messages for our kids for their future communications with THEIR kids. Much like we’re saying the same things to them today that we swore we wouldn’t say because we heard them first from OUR parents.

It should also help if we could make collaborators out of our kids’ teachers and coaches and youth leaders in our "border wars."

In the end, when parents fail, God is there. When kids fail, God is there. They were his children first before they were ours.

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it. (Proverbs 22:6)