The Institute (協会)

My siblings and I can a list a lot of those things personally ourselves.

It blew me away as a 17 yr old to discover that my parents simply would not believe they were responsible for such things and demanded an apology from my siblings and I for daring to claim that things such as overly-high expectations, denying differing prefences, comments about apperance, etc, etc were very damaging to us. (After all, our parents never divorced and never fought in a verbally-abusive manner with one another so they couldn't be poor parents or anything.......)

As a 20 yr old, I still don't know really how to deal with living in a world where the two people I should be able to count on (my parents) won't do something as seemingly-simple as owning up to their mistakes and asking their children's forgiveness. It makes it impossible to have a relationship with them beyond "I pretend I'm okay and you pretend you're okay and lie if needed when we ask how the other's day went."

I had a lot more written here, but it got too rambly/hard-to-follow....

Dang, and it seems most of the commentors over at World's blog are with my parents and many "good, Bible believing churches" in not getting it...

Like seriously... how dare anyone speak of the shortcomings of their parents ESPECIALLY when they don't have the kind of relationship needed to talk about it with their own parents...

I'm not a wimp, but sheesh. How has a generation of parents all decided that since they don't beat their kids or scream at their spouse that any kid who says something negative about their parents is whinny and needs to grow up?

That only makes the problem worse as it tends to force people (especially guys) to simply shut off any and all emotion. And that's really damaging.

Cocaine is a helluva drug...

Let me add a few more:

- "You have it way better than I did at your age." Guilt much?

- Being forced to be a surrogate spouse (emotionally). Did any of those kids talk about this (either implicitly or in putting together their complaints)?

- Hearing (divorced) parents complain about or voice their hate for each other.

Haha.... And I never went to church because churches are "places for hypocrites, bad parents, judgmental Christians." I don't think this problem is confined to churches in the suburbs. You are talking about every American family that is fighting for the "American Dream" for their kids... regardless of whether it is their dream or not.

kyle, good words, bro!!

Anthony,
I can tell you from someone who has a wife that is an LPC and works with 'at risk youth', she sees more kids from Night Trains camp then anyone else. She has a lot of kids that probably wish they were being beaten, at least then their parents would pay attention to them.

I never read 'roll over and take it' into honor your father and mother.

I've been sick these last couple of days, so I may be missing something. What does suburban living have to do with any of the issues the teens raised? It seems all of those issues could originate from the city or the suburbs. The only connection I could make was the quote about kids from affluent well-educated families, but I'm sure that suburbia doesn't have the corner on that market. Who knows, maybe the medicine is still messing with me.

Paul asks a great question, and my (pathetic?) attempt to answer it is that it's in the suburbs where the American Dream, and the American Nightmare, flourish the best. See the post Anthony makes about the poor girl caught in MySpace; two incomes to afford the big house & the new Lexus & BMW can't atone for the fact that what a little girl needs a lot of the time is a place on her daddy's lap.

To draw another picture, I absent-mindedly started spinning one of my daughters around at a youth event last weekend. You know, you take their hands/wrists and swing them until you're both dizzy and just about fall down.

I soon had a line, most of which wasn't my kids.

Anthony, you asked "what happened". Here's my response.

As the father of four children, the oldest of whom is 15, the one complaint I did not hear from these "churched" youth is a desire to have their parents help them understand how the gospel speaks to the most pertinent areas of their lives. I suspect that this is not a complaint because it's not a strong enough desire in their hearts. It's also something that parents are neglecting and leaving it to the youth ministry to do.

As I know from relating to my own teenager, this is what youth NEED from their parents, and what parents are biblically responsible to do. All of the complaints above speak to their sense of self and are addressed by what it means to be made in the image of God and, in Christ, be renewed in that image.

I don't care how old or young a Christian is, we all struggle with what it means to be in the world but not of the world, what it means to live as resident aliens. Working this out with our teenage son is more than a notion for my wife and I, and the difficulty of the task is why it is neglected by both suburban and urban Christian parents. It's much easier to give them "stuff" (including a great education) than it is to give them the gospel.

As one who is in his twenties and seeing a counselor now, my counselor has challenged me to ask my parents to pay restitution for the damage they inflicted upon me by footing the bill for my counseling. He thinks it is an opportunity for redemption and I happen to agree and see what he is saying. But the thought of sitting down with my parents and having this conversation is quite intimidating and quite honestly I'm scared of my parents' reaction (thinking it will be similar to the reaction of Kyle's parents).

Anyone have any thoughts on the value of my counselor's challenge?

Stephen, I'd suggest you find another counselor.

Just because someone makes mistakes, or even willfully sins, against you while you're growing up does not entitle you to money as if you'd been put in a POW camp. Sorry. Your parents busted their rear ends to keep you in a house, wiped your rear end to get the poop off of it when you were a baby, and struggled to do their best to give you a decent life. The debt, Biblically speaking, goes the other way.

While parents certainly do make mistakes and sin against their children, at some point people need to grow up and take responsibility for themselves.

I think Irwyn nailed this one:
"All of the complaints above speak to their sense of self and are addressed by what it means to be made in the image of God and, in Christ, be renewed in that image."

Obviously, internalizing that and applying it takes time.

As one who served as a youth pastor (for two years) at a very large, very affluent, suburban StL church, I don't know what's more sad. The struggles the youth are facing or the blind eye most parents turning. Not only do most of those parents want to deny any responsibility for their kid’s problems, they want to deny the problems all together.

Dang, there are some really angry, uptight people commenting on the World blog.

It was probably poor judgment to ask the kids to vent to him, as such venting (in my experience) asks the kids to indulge in emotions they have not yet learned to control effectively.

That said, there is a lot of evil lurking under the veneer of suburban respectability that peeks out whenever it gets the chance. It's the result of the sort of whitewashing that makes emergent types want "authentic" churches, whatever that means.

It's not that churches aren't authentic and the rest of suburbia is - it's that the American Dream encourages a sort of all-is-well-ism that people carry from their subdivisions and bring into church. And if pastors are not tenderly and vigorously disabusing them of their false reality, these problems will only compound.

Stephen,
could it be that your counselor is trying to get you to open an honest conversation with your parents by using payment as the catalyst? I know if I went to my parents and said how they have hurt me in the past, I would get a pat on my head. But if I came to them and said, 'you have hurt me and I have spent $xx.xx trying to understand why' they might listen a little more.
If your counselor is only trying to get your parents to pay the bill, then you may want to get the yellow pages out.

churnock,
yeah, the goal of the challenge is to open a meaningful and hopefully healing dialogue. thanks for your input on how to walk into the situation, that is an encouraging approach.

robert, with all due respect, i can't help but notice that your response was defensive, not very thoughtful, and actually shallow; that is a shallow view of human dignity and it doesn't give appropriate weight to the depths of our sinfulness as creatures gone bad. and Jesus is, and was while he was here on this earth, very concerned and quite protective of children. i would hope that parents are open to the damage that they will inevitably cause and be earnestly ready to receive such honest reproach from their children as a way to deepen the parent-child relationship.

if parents do what they are supposed to do (the stuff Robert mentioned) are they then to be beyond reproach? is that honoring someone?

Robert, I am with you in that I don't think that Stephen ought to approach his parents and ask them to pay for his counseling. Further, the point is not that parent's shouldn't make mistakes but rather, when they do to own up to it and apologize. My dad was always really hard on me but he always would apologize. Nothing speaks of the gospel louder than when we show our need of grace. As parents, those vulnerable times with our kids, can be the sweetest times ever.

I don't see anything reasonable about asking the people who have spent thousands of dollars each year on you for 18+ years to pay for counseling.

Even if they have inflicted damage upon you, they have helped give you (at GREAT expense to them) the ability to make a living for yourself...

Once again it sounds like parents who throw money at their kids cover a multitude of sins. Is that right?

Setting children up to succeed trumps providing a genuine, intimate, loving environment I guess.

I guess I am just weird for actually wanting a relationship of substance with my parents instead of an apprenticeship.

Actually, I appreciate your responses. I freaked when I first heard the advice too. But again, the hope is to bring redemption to a broken relationship. Money is sometimes the only language people really hear.

The classic comment my mom made that summed up all the crap she threw at me; was at age 16 she said, "no girl would ever love me because I just didn't have it(manliness). My dad sat there and listened. Guess what? At age 59 I am still single,an have never had a good relationship with a girlfriend and have struggled with same sex attraction. Harry

Stephen, the response primarily defensive of YOU. I've seen the aftermath of such counselors; my step-dad's first marriage was ended by it, and his relationship with his daughter nearly ended as well.

Now I treasure my relationship with him and his family, but I am fully aware at what it cost for him to be "available" for my mom! Asking for things that don't belong to you torpedoes relationships.

Which is, after all, most likely a great part of what you're getting counseling for in the first place; a relationship that was broken, or was never made in the first place, right?

So build the relationship. Go fishing. Work on his car with him. Talk about what really matters.

Just don't tell him he owes you money.