Why is it. . .

That we as parents are held accountable for the sins of our children?

We are seeing this played out on the National Political stage right now but I venture to guess that many of us have a child that has strayed from the path of righteousness and others look at us and think, he/she must have raised that child wrong! That home must have been too conservative or too liberal or too indulgent or too strict.

And to be fair and balanced we parents of erring children have asked the same questions of ourselves. What we tend to forget is, we can't live our children's lives, we can't protect them from every mistake and miss-step.


Even the bible says in Proverbs 22:6 Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.

That little promise doesn't say anything about not departing from the way when the child is young and hormonal. We are promised that eventually sanity will rule the child's heart again and the child will find the true path again someday.

Until that day, as St. Monica did for Auggie the Rat, our job as parents is to watch and pray and be a wide safety net. We are not meant to clean up every little slip along the way, but rather to make sure that the child doesn't fall off the side of the big scary mountain all together.

So, when our children don't live up to our expectations, we continue to love; but often we have to use a tougher kind of love. We have to watch them make some mistakes that we would have rather they didn't make. We have to watch them deal with adult situations long before they are probably capable of dealing with them. We have to watch them grow up a little faster than they might have had to. But we stand back and let them, because we love them. And while we are letting them be adult, we are praying for them even harder, because we know that with God all things are possible.

Pax