Just last week, our women’s ministry offered a new intergenerational series called Common Grounds Café. During the first session, we discussed “Waking Habits.” It was sweet to hear the different perspectives of moms with young children and older women who’ve finally reached retirement age. The older women wanted to reassure the moms of littles that a day would come when they were not awakened by a screaming baby or a fretful toddler, when they would enter the day more smoothly, with more capacity to focus first on reading God’s Word and praying.
The older women also assured the younger women that we want to learn from them in these conversations. One older woman posed a particularly insightful question: “I’d like for you to help me understand what is helpful to say to my adult children and grandchildren—and what’s not.” What a great question!
I have that same question, and perhaps you do too. Since I don’t feel fully qualified to answer (I have some guesses), I turned to trusted resources. Drawing from two gospel-centered books about parenting adult children, I’ve gathered eight key principles to get us started. (You may have some of your own to add, and we’d love to hear them, so please share in the comments!).
1. Praying before saying.
Okay, I admit, I invented this somewhat awkward phrase. It’s based in wisdom I’ve gained—through both failure and success—through forgetting to pray before I say and through spending much time praying for our adult children and grandchildren. We must heed the apostle Paul’s call to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) and “not be anxious about anything”(Philippians 4:6). Then watch and wait to see how the Lord answers in the details.
2. Remembering the love of our Father.
To truly love our adult children well, we must grasp how deeply our Heavenly Father loves us. Indeed, his sacrificial love, sending his own sinless Son to suffer and die for us, is what empowers us to love our adult children sacrificially (See 1 John 4:7-12).
3. Hunting for idolatry.
Additionally, to love our adult children well, we must remember that Christ is our life, and we must hunt for the subtle ways we make our children into idols (See Colossians 1:27). In her excellent book, Loving Your Adult Children, Gaye Clark quotes Paul Tripp, “We begin to need [our children] to be what they should be so that we can feel a sense of achievement and success. We begin to look at our children as trophies rather than God’s creatures.”1 If we notice ourselves becoming angry about our adult children’s choices or their treatment of us, we should pay attention, because that may be a sign we’ve begun to put them in the place of God.
4. Listening more than we speak.
Gaye Clark observes that we often complain that our adult children don’t listen to us, but she encourages us to ask if we have failed to listen to them. Author Jim Burns notes, ““Unsolicited advice is usually taken as criticism.”2 He suggests that we ask for permission before giving advice, and accept their answer graciously, even if it’s “no.”
5. Confessing our sins and turning away from them.
When we fail to listen before we speak, or when we offer unsolicited advice, or even when we feel deeply wronged by our adult children, we do well to start by asking God to search our hearts and show us any sin we need to confess (See Psalm 139:23-24).
When we go first in confessing our sin to our adult children (“Forgive me for not listening”; “Forgive me for criticizing your parenting choices,” etc.), they learn that God’s grace and forgiveness enable and empower them to ask forgiveness when they have sinned.
6. Remembering that when we are weak, we are strong.
We recognize the “divine trap” set for us. Long ago, we felt overwhelmed and underprepared for a baby wailing for hours despite being fed, changed, and snuggled, or a three-year-old throwing herself on the filthy floor of the grocery store because we said “no” to her demand for a second free cookie. Now we feel overwhelmed when our 22-year-old daughter calls to say she’s moving across the country without a job or when our 30-year-old son announces his marriage to a young woman he met only a month before.
The “divine trap” is actually a safe haven: the Lord allows us to feel incompetent or overwhelmed in order for us to depend on him, our Heavenly Father, for the wisdom, grace, and endurance, we need in parenting adult children.
7. Loving the “prodigal” with the love of the waiting Father.
In a wonderful chapter on “Loving the Unlovely,” Gaye Clark reminds us of the parable Jesus told about the “waiting Father,” also known as “the prodigal son.” In this chapter, she shares an encouraging and empowering quote from Jack Miller about how he and Rosemarie responded when their daughter Barbara wandered widely:
“If you struggle with a rebellious child, ask God to show you the power of God in human relationships. From him you will learn the power of God does not consist in the capacity to control others…. Instead, it begins with the release of love as you forgive your erring child. It expresses itself in the capacity to endure when your love is ignored or even rejected. It is the power to mount a love offensive by doing good right on the heels of being wronged. It is also the power to confront sin with tears and great humility and wait until the day when you see a familiar figure coming down the road toward home.⁷”3
An adult child wandering far from God and far from home brings deep grief. Taking that grief to the Lord in lament and seeking out wisdom from those who have walked this path faithfully can help us to find hope in such painful stories.
8. Praying to become grace-filled grandparents who richly bless grandchildren.
Three key areas help us in this goal: praying, being present, and praising. As already noted, we should devote much time to praying for our adult children and our grandchildren. Furthermore, we should seek to be present to our children and grandchildren. For aging Baby Boomers who now “spend more than half of their daily leisure time, four hours and 16 minutes, in front of screens,”4 we must put away the devices in order to be fully present to our grandchildren. Being present may also require traveling—sacrificing sleep and spending money on airfare, gas, hotels, and meals. Finally, praising and supporting our adult children in their parenting and our grandchildren in their growth is another significant way to be grace-filled grandparents.
As I come to the end of this list, I recognize, as I imagine you do, how utterly impossible it is to live out. And I’m sure the younger women will have more ideas to offer when we gather for that conversation in our Common Grounds Café. The truth is, what we need is grace, lots and lots of it. The good news is—for those who trust Christ as our Savior, we have access to the riches of an endless supply of grace. Our Father who loves us and has saved us from our sin provides us with everything we need to parent our adult children well.
What hope we have in this challenging task!
Hi! I’m Elizabeth, and I love learning about older adulthood! I’m a writer, speaker, and coach who helps people navigate the issues of aging, caregiving, legacy, grief, and end-of-life. I wrote Preparing for Glory: Biblical Answers to 40 Questions about Living & Dying in Hope of Heaven and several devotionals. Every month, I send out an email with free and paid resources for aging graciously. If you’d like to get this email on the first of the month, sign up here: http://eepurl.com/b__teX.
Resources
Gaye B. Clark, Loving Your Adult Children: The Heartache of Parenting and the Hope of the Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2024). I read more of this book than the other and look forward to finishing. It is wisely laid out and Scripturally supported. Clark also shares many stories that show rather than tell the principles she lays out.
Jim Burns, Doing Life with Your Adult Children: Keep Your Mouth Shut and the Welcome Mat Out (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019). I read less of this one, but The Gospel Coalition offered a helpful review. Positively, they said, “This book is very gracious in tone with a real ‘fellow traveller’ feel.” Negatively, the reviewer felt that Burns needed to provide more Scriptural support.
The above are affiliate links, which means if you purchase from them, I earn (a very) small commission.
1 Paul Tripp, “The Idol of Success,” Paul Tripp Ministries (blog), May 3, 2013, https://www.paultripp.com/, quoted in Gaye Clark, Loving Your Adult Children: The Heartache of Parenting and the Hope of the Gospel Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2024, page 27.
2 Jim Burns, Doing Life with Your Adult Children: Keep Your Mouth Shut and the Welcome Mat Out, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019, 37.
3 C. John Miller, Come Back Barbara, quoted in Gaye B. Clark, 173.
4 [https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/18/americans-60-and-older-are-spending-more-time-in-front-of-their-screens-than-a-decade-ago/]
