You’ve done all the right things. You took your child to church from birth, sending them to Sunday school, VBS, and children’s worship. You gave them kids’ devotionals for Christmas and answered all of their childlike theological questions. You made sure that Jesus was the focus of Christmas and Easter. You talked about Jesus openly and frequently in your home, prayed with your child, and involved them in service projects and other outward extensions of your faith.

And yet.

And yet now they’re drifting … drifting away from the faith, heads turned by secular and worldly beliefs and temptations, questioning at least some aspects of what they’ve been taught about God, about Jesus, about Christianity in general.

This probably causes you great concern, especially if you never went through a questioning period in your own life. Maybe your own adolescence and young adulthood were solid as a rock, resting on the foundation of Jesus Christ and the things you had been taught in your church and by your parents. Maybe you never strayed, and you can honestly say that you’ve never known a day when you didn’t know Jesus.

Or maybe you weren’t a Christian until you were an adult, and you were determined to raise your kids in the faith so they would never experience that kind of confusion and wandering. Maybe you were told that if you just followed Proverbs 22:6 and “trained up a child in the way he should go,” your child would not depart from the faith. Maybe you see your own wanderings echoed in your child and you wonder why your sincere, prayerful efforts seemingly didn’t work.

I have many friends who are raising Gen Z (born 1997 to 2012) kids. As the mother of three Gen Zs and one late-model Millennial, I’ve heard a lot of stories, sat with a lot of moms, and prayed a lot of prayers over kids who are drifting from God, questioning what they’ve been taught, and seemingly turning from the faith in which they were raised. Often these changes, for both boys and girls, come about between the impressionable ages of 16 and 21.

Many years ago when I was a young mom with an intense and challenging preschooler, I was getting coffee at Bible study next to an older, well-respected woman in the church. She had heard through the church grapevine that I was having trouble with my son, and  she casually said to me, out of nowhere, “Isn’t it great, Rebekah, that we can get all the parenting help we need right there in the Bible?”

That out-of-the-blue comment really threw me. Even though I was a fairly new Christian, I was pretty sure there was not a lot of direct parenting advice in the Bible that dealt with my specific issues with my young son. I honestly didn’t have a clue what she was even talking about. Feeling awkward, I smiled and nodded, and she went on her way, never mentioning it again.

To be honest, I didn’t take her comment very well. Her well-meaning advice had no follow-through, so it felt a little like I’d been the victim of a hit-and-run. But as the years went by, and I grew in spiritual maturity and Bible knowledge, I found that God did indeed offer parenting hope and help to me in his Word. I just needed to learn how to recognize it.

I cry easily. I cry over movies, books, and commercials … I cry on behalf of total strangers I read about online … I cry when animals are rescued from a cruel fate … I cry when I laugh really hard … you get the picture.

I also cry when I feel overwhelmed. Including feeling overwhelmed with joy.

When each of my children was around 5 years old, we did a “Names of Jesus” unit together during our Advent homeschool time. Each day we would focus on a different name that Jesus is called in the Bible, such as shepherd, king, Alpha and Omega, or light of the world. Each lesson had an activity, craft, or lesson associated with it, most of which I’ve forgotten now … except for the object lesson I used for “Light of the World.”

To begin this lesson, we would look at Bible verses together such as John 9:5, where Jesus says, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” It was very clear to even a young child that Jesus understood his role in the world as a light to shine in the darkness. I then proposed that we go into the darkest room in the house, a small bathroom with no windows. Always eager to get up and move, and intrigued by continuing the lesson in the bathroom (of all places!), each child would eagerly comply.

In one of the most famous first lines in literature, Leo Tolstoy boldly states, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Now, I haven’t read Anna Karenina, but I can say with confidence that, while he certainly captured our attention and still has us quoting him after nearly 150 years, he is wrong about happy families being all alike (although they may look that way from the outside). But he has a point about unhappy families.

Unhappy families can have an endless number of reasons why they are unhappy, and many of us are sadly familiar with one of them: generational sins (a.k.a. generational trauma or generational dysfunction). This is the tendency of persistent sinful behaviors to be repeated or “handed down” from one generation to the next, contributing to the unhappiness of that family and its individual members. This might be a particular problem with one member of the family, or an overall environment that permeates the day-to-day life and outlook of each person.