In 2022, two heartbreaking stories made national headlines and shook parents to their core.
Jordan DeMay was a 17-year-old high school student from Michigan. One day, he received a message on Instagram from someone pretending to be a teenage girl who solicited explicit photos from him. Once Jordan sent the photos, the pretender threatened to share them publicly unless he paid money. Under extreme pressure from the extortionists, Jordan took his own life within just six hours of the cruel scam beginning. His parents had no idea about the extortion until the FBI began investigating after their son's death. (Michigan teen's suicide highlights growing dangers of online sextortion plots - ABC News (go.com)
An eerily similar tragedy unfolded that same year in Mississippi with 16-year-old Walker Montgomery. He was messaged by someone masquerading as a girl on Instagram. They recorded a sexual encounter with Walker and then demanded $1,000, threatening to send the video to his family and friends if he didn't pay up. For hours, Walker begged with no resolution. Then the scammers told him that since his life was over anyway, he should just kill himself. Walker tragically heeded those words in the early morning hours. (Starkville dad talks of social media dangers after son's death, sextortion (clarionledger.com)
These heartbreaking stories represent the depths of darkness that kids and teenagers can face in today's world. Jordan and Walker came from loving homes with parents who cared deeply for them. It's unknown exactly what went through their minds in those final moments, but one can't help but think they felt so overwhelmed by shame and embarrassment that ending their lives seemed preferable to seeking help.
As parents, we want nothing more than to protect our children and be a source of unconditional love and support, a safe haven where they can confide in us about any struggle or trouble without fear of rejection. No parent on earth would shame their child in such a dire circumstance as Jordan and Walker faced. We would do anything to take away their pain and remind them that nothing could make us stop loving them.
But what about the "smaller," less dramatic situations and battles our kids go through on a daily basis? The lies they start believing about themselves, the insecurities that wear them down, the temptations they face, the sins that ensnare them over and over again? When our children come to us seeking help, have we created an environment where they feel truly loved and accepted, or might they actually find that our reaction only pushes them further into darkness?
Don’t prevent your kids from opening up
Responding to our kids' sins and failures with harshness and condemnation is a sure way to make them feel alone and break any trust. Berating them and making them feel worthless for their shortcomings only represents God as harsh and cruel – is that the same loving God we found when we went to Him with our sins? Yes, we have biblical standards we uphold and don't want to ignore or condone sinful patterns. Yes, we preach the gospel and redemptive truth to our kids. But we must be careful not to take on God's role in dealing with the depths of their sin and brokenness. If we approach them as moralistic drill instructors, we'll only push them away. We'll make them feel more inadequate, more alienated, and more despairing that the darkness inside them can never be overcome.
Maybe we aren’t harsh, but instead find ourselves being impersonal and deflecting real heart issues with religious platitudes. Trying to soften our kids' hardened hearts by throwing Bible verses and “Christian-ese” at them often does more harm than good. It sends the message that we don't really want to understand and enter into the messy realities of what they're going through. By reducing God to a magical spiritual formula for warding off evil, we depict Him as impersonal rather than a loving Father intimately concerned about their daily battles.
Or perhaps the way we stiff-arm our kids in their struggles is by being a trustworthy parent in words only. We can talk all we want about God's grace and our open-door policy for our kids to confide in us without fear. But if our actions don't back it up, if there's still an undercurrent of judgment or discomfort with making ourselves too vulnerable to their struggles, then our words fall flat. Our kids will pick up on the unspoken subtext that their problems are still too messy for us to really want to go there.
Building trust with our children
When we come to God with our struggles, He meets us with grace, love, and compassion, and He intimately understands our hurts and battles. Hebrews 4:15 tells us, “For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.” (NASB1995)
This is the model Christian parents need to embody in how we relate to our kids. Our job is not to fashion our children into the people we want them to be through controlling or forceful measures but rather to allow God to use us as vessels to pour out His transformative grace into their lives.
We need to meet them where they are in their darkness, love them unconditionally, let them know they aren't alone, and truly seek to understand the reasons behind their struggles. We can point them to the hope of the gospel, and model the transformative grace of that gospel through our lives. Let them see us vulnerably wrestling with our own sins and shortcomings, and constantly finding forgiveness and strength in Christ.
God willing, our children may never face such situations as Jordan DeMay and Walker Montgomery did, and the feelings of shame that drove them to take their lives. But we can be certain they will go through their own darkness.
When our kids open up to us about their temptations, failures, and inner battles, the Christ-like response isn't to condemn or apply trite spiritual band-aids. It's to enter into the messiness, to become a safe place for our kids to process their struggles and not have to pretend like everything is okay on the surface. It's to listen, to empathize, to provide wise and biblical counsel, but more than anything to point our kids to the God who intimately understands our weaknesses, loves us anyway, and provides a way to redemption.
