Parenting and Guilt
One
When Your Kids Are Far from God
There’s no greater pain for a parent than having your kids leave the faith, reject Christ and His Church and His Mother, and follow a trajectory that is, ultimately, a trajectory towards unhappiness and loneliness. The really hard thing is that you know that you haven’t been the best parent, and you certainly haven’t been the best Christian. And maybe, if you’d been better, if you’d been more diligent about instilling the faith in your kids, or just being a good example yourself, your kids would still be in the fold, still be on the right path.
At some level, there’s no denying that. We parents have an enormous influence on the lives and characters of our children. We are supposed to be their first formers in the faith. We are supposed to be the models of truth and charity. And we have failed and that failure has surely made it harder for our kids to find God and the happiness He wants for them.
But there are two further things to remember. First, God has given our kids freedom, just like He’s given us freedom. And second, we can still help our kids. There are still things we can do to help them return to the Heavenly Father.
Two
Our Kids’ Freedom
God has made us free, because there’s no such thing as love without freedom, and God wants us to be able to really love. But if we’re free to love, then the corollary is that we’re also free not to love.
Now, human freedom means that no upbringing, no perfect example, and no perfectly healthy environment, can compel our children to take the right path. Look at Adam and Eve. They are God’s children (that’s what it means when they’re made in His image and likeness). So they have the perfect parent. He gave them the perfect environment. The perfect example. And yet, the first chance they get, they reject His parenting and set themselves on a trajectory of misery and self-destruction.
So you can’t always blame a child’s bad choices on parenting, otherwise you’d have to blame God for the sin of Adam and Eve. No more can we just blame ourselves for our kids’ bad choices. God made them free. And that entails the risk that they’ll use their freedom badly.
Three
Free to Surpass the Limitations of Our Poor Parenting
If people are free to choose wrongly, even when they have good parenting, then it follows that they’re also free to choose rightly, even when they have bad parenting.
Over the last hundred years or so, everybody has become so fixated on how our parents affect our character, that we’ve lost sight of the fact that there are plenty of cases where people come from horrendous backgrounds and become incredibly virtuous people. Our Gospel is not a Gospel of social or psychological or genetic determinism. Nature is important. Nurture is important. Environment, culture, and family of origin are important. But at the end of the day, the story of our lives is not written in advance by society or even by family.
The story of our lives is co-written by us and by God. The story of our lives is the product of that mysterious dynamic between human freedom and divine grace. So yes, we haven’t been the best parents. But our kids have freedom and the offer of God’s grace. Which means they don’t have to be limited by our poor parenting choices.
We are not their creators. We are not their God. The authors of their story are still, primarily, the Lord and themselves. And that story is still being written.
Four
You Need to Worry More About Your Own Soul than Your Kids’
Here’s another important point: sometimes, worrying about our kids can be like worrying about the Church’s leadership, global politics, or the economy. It can become an excuse for not worrying about the one thing we need to worry about most, and over which we have the most control: our own spiritual state. We’re always tempted, like the Pharisees, to worry more about other peoples’ sinfulness than about our own. But that’s a distraction, and a very dangerous one.
You’re supposed to be the most solicitous for that over which you have most control. And you have the most control not over your kids’ spiritual state, but over your own. Your kids’ relationship with God can’t be based primarily on you. In fact, sometimes it’s the challenges involved in their relationship with their own parents that prompts children to seek intimacy with their true and ultimate parent, the Heavenly Father Himself.
Sometimes, God can use your failings to lead your kids beyond you to Him, which is, of course, where they really need to be. And, by the same token, your primary job is actually not being a parent. It’s being God’s child. That’s where our peace has to come from. That’s where our energies have to be primarily directed. That’s the best thing we can do for our kids anyway.
Five
Helping Our Kids through Holiness and Humility
Our failings towards our kids can actually prompt us to greater holiness, which in turn can prompt us to be of greater spiritual assistance to our kids than we would have otherwise been. For instance, when we think about how we’ve failed as parents, it should make us more humble, more compassionate and forgiving towards others, more reliant on God, more committed to prayer, fasting, and the sacraments.
If we’re broken, humbled, and compassionate, if we pray for our kids and fast for them, then we’ll be that much more likely to help draw our kids back to the faith, and to the only true path to happiness.
Suggested Resolutions:
Choose one resolution for today to help you grow closer to God, or create your own. Here are some ideas to inspire you.
Instead of focusing on the spiritual lives of your loved ones, spend time focusing on your own spiritual life.
Find something to sacrifice for the conversion of your loved ones, such as fasting on Wednesdays or Fridays or giving up some comfort.