When your child is “prodigal”

From H. Norman Wright, interviewed by Carla Barnhill:

So if a child does rebel, despite the parent’s best efforts, it must be devastating. How can parents deal with the emotions that come with a prodigal child?

I counsel parents to start by allowing themselves to grieve the loss they’re experiencing. This is a major upset. Your family is not turning out the way you hoped it would and that brings on a whole myriad of emotions—guilt, anger, blame, confusion, doubt. Those emotions have to be dealt with in order for the family to stay healthy and deal with the crisis in an effective way.

I encourage parents to find a support group through their church or a community organization. When parents withdraw into themselves, the only people they’re talking to about this is each other, and they aren’t experts. They’re people in pain. They need comfort. They need encouragement. They need guidance.

After a while, I think parents simply have to relinquish their child and give him or her to God. This should be the first thing we do; but for many parents, we’ll exhaust our own resources before recognizing that God will be the one to bring change. You almost have to detach yourself from the child and realize that you can’t control him and bring him back. What you can do is what we ended up doing. We prayed that, since Sheryl wouldn’t listen to us, God would connect her with people she would listen to. And that’s what ended up happening. God used a friend of Sheryl’s to get her to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where she finally saw that she had a problem. We never could have gotten her to go to AA, but her friend did.