My good friend Floyd works down at Rob’s Ranch, a treatment center in Central Oklahoma for men struggling with chemical dependency. He’s the health and nutrition supervisor, and makes a point to spend time with many of the families each weekend as they arrive for visitation. In conversations around the dining room table, I’ve heard him tell parents this about hundred times…
“The best thing my mom ever did for me was leave me in jail.”
It’s always fun to see the responses, especially those who have loved ones caught up in the grips of addiction. If you’re like that, you’ve probably wondered if you should have followed Floyd’s mom’s lead and done the same thing a time or two.
- Leave them in jail
- Leave them on the street
- Don’t give them any more money
- Take away their car
- Turn their phone off
- Change your locks
What Ms. Carter did, saved her son’s life. But it wasn’t an easy decision. Allowing kids to reap the consequences of their choices never is.
But it’s often the best thing you can do.
A few years ago, my then-eleven-year-old son asked me, with tears in his eyes, if he could quit football. He wasn’t seeing any playing time, and some of the kids had been giving him a hard time.
“Please, Dad!” he pleaded, standing on that field after a just-finished practice, and staring me right in the eyes. “Let me quit!”
In that moment, I wanted to ease my son’s pain, to let him off the hook, and give him a quick way to find relief. It seemed like the right decision; after all, he was hurting.
Letting him quit would’ve been the convenient decision. But it was not the RIGHT decision.
Yes, I could have let him walk off the field that night and instantly relieved the hurt and embarrassment he was feeling, but it would’ve only done so temporarily. Instead, all I would have done was bailed him out, set him up to be a quitter the rest of his life, or, worse yet, potentially crippled his ability to work through pain.
I’m so glad I didn’t. Instead, I had a talk with him about pushing through difficult things, the power of perseverance, and all the ways he could grow if he just stuck with it for a little while longer.
He went back to practice the next day, and though not a lot changed for him in terms of the game of football, the character in his heart grew stronger, even if he didn’t realize it.
Bailing our kids out is a natural reaction, and just to be clear: sometimes it makes sense. There are times when we do, as parents, need to rescue or advocate for our kids.
But I would say that, more often than not, we probably don’t need to slap the training wheels back on our kids’ lives.
It’s tempting, though, because our brains and hearts justify that as love. We feel like the savior, the hero…. “Daddy or Mommy to the rescue!”
But what are we really saving them from?
Are we saving them from pain? Poisonous relationships? Prison time? Or are we just keeping them from learning vitally important life lessons—the types of lessons that will help them arrive at that crucial place where reality sets in, and help begins to make sense.
You see, each time we step in and take away the pleasure of earned consequences, we take one step closer to enabling, and they take one step closer to addiction.
The weight of enabling grows heavier and heavier as our kids turn to adults. And when you begin to enable your children, you begin to walk a fine line that typically doesn’t end well.
I speak with families every week who look me in the eyes and say, “I know I’ve enabled him; I know we bailed him out one too many times.” Each time I hear this, it scares me to my core.
Why?
Because this is a recipe for years of pain, guilt, and possibly an early death.
I get it—no one wants to watch their kids suffer. But if you are faced with a situation, as Ms. Carter was, when time and time again your child has made destructive choices while consistently looking to you to bail them out, I urge you to follow her lead.
Will that be easy? I’ve never had to go through it personally, but I can imagine it’s one of the most difficult choices a parent might have to make. I know for a fact that Ms. Carter hated to see Floyd suffer, but look what happened: that suffering was temporary, and now on the other side of it there stands a man of character, endurance, and hope; a man who can testify that he came through the suffering and it turned out okay.
Sometimes the best thing a parent can do is to let go and let God do what he needs to do.
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For more on enabling, setting boundaries and learning how to live with addict in your family, pick up my new book: Finding Hope.