I have been working until midnight recently wrestling with a problem that has beset a friend, but is more common than that. It is the retreat of some women into a kind of hyper religious state at the time of divorce, dragging their children with them. The mother isalmost continually at church or using religious terms. The father is basically called evil. The mother is seen as a good woman, and the father driven out of the church.
This led Sheldon, that wonderful character from the Big Bang Theory to panic when couple separate as “My father turned to the bottle and my mother to her church”
Now this is a disaster for the father, for it tests his faith (It tested mine — I have lived through this with my boys) and it stops the parents praying. And, as Terri notes, this may be the bigger disaster.
So let me be clear: we absolutely embrace the role of the father as his unmarried daughter’s covering. Unmarried daughters (and sons) should seek their parents’ blessing when making major life decisions. However, I believe that a young adult who is following God needs to have the freedom to follow God’s path for his or her life. Our roles as parents of young adults are to be prayerful and guard our own hearts so that our desire to keep our children near doesn’t cause us to fight against God’s direction in their life.
via My Problem With Christian Movements « Traditional Christianity.
One of the things that Christian parents have to do is allow their children to come to God. We have to trust that God will honour our vows when we baptized our children: we a duty to bring them up in a Godly home, but in the end there are no grandchildren in God’s family. Each person has to have their own faith. And we only have our children for a short time. As Terri says, we are not parents forever… since my boys are teenagers, it will only be five or six years and they will be young men and should be striking out on their own.
I will not like that day. But that day will come. We cannot hide ourselves from this grief, nor from the questions our children will have about our behaviour and our faith. Part of our job is containing these anxieties and issues — letting our children relax enough to work through these issues without being over punitive and rigid nor being a doormat or jellyfish parent. Because running to religion or the bottle is to abandon our duty.