A four-part blog series
Life Disrupted: Transitions in Your Family Journey that Disrupt the Peace
I grew up in a God-loving and God-fearing Christian family, deeply devoted to Christ and His Church. My mom and dad worked secular jobs until I reached middle school and then they went into full-time ministry. I saw them minister as lay pastors in my early upbringing and in full-time vocational ministry ever since. They were the same people in front of others as they were behind closed doors. My childhood was the epitome of stability.
This was my reality, so naturally I assumed every family had this same type of stability. It wasn’t until I was in 4th grade when my aunt and uncle divorced that I got an up-close picture of the impact of divorce on a family and that stability was not everyone’s reality. My cousins started to act out in rebellion, and life changed so much for them from that point on. Their school, their home, their relationship with their parents, and their relationship with God and the church changed drastically in that season.
To God be the glory, God did what He does. He redeemed each of their stories, and they now all serve God faithfully and have beautiful God-honoring families. The stable structure of the home was disrupted and so with it, the rhythms of life. Studies have come to show that these disruptions in relational connection to bonded caregivers have a significant impact on a child’s life outcome.
Recently, clinical psychologist and professor Todd Hall summarized the impacts of broken bonds of attachment with a person’s ability to connect with God. It’s no secret that half of all divorces in America end in divorce. He notes the impact of divorce in America as leaving children with a “legacy of disconnection” and asking, “if I can’t trust my parents who I can see, how can I trust the God who I can’t see.”[1] Divorce is one of many factors that have impacted our world and created an epidemic of disconnection. Individualism and materialism can be added to the factors we reviewed in the section on the current culture.
A Christian family begins with a man and a woman entering into a holy covenant with God and one another in holy matrimony. “As parents model covenant love to their children, they expose them to a way of seeing and being in the world. Their provision of a safe, trustworthy environment allows the child to experience loyal and faithful connection, which opens up a meaningful structure for the child.[2] The reality is the most godly and intentional parents will leave gaps of stability due to their imperfection, and every child will step into adulthood trying alternate and insufficient ways of connecting to God.
A Series of Transitions
For the past three years my family has been in what many seasoned parents have called a “sweet spot.” At first, I didn’t understand what they meant when they said this, but as the season wore on, I felt it and loved every single minute of it. It was a season out of diapers and past the “terrible twos” yet pre-puberty for our oldest son Beckett. Innocence and silliness abound much in this season. Outside of normal sibling shenanigans, there is an overall harmony to our family.
My oldest son went to middle school this year, and I see the horizon of a setting sun on this sweet spot of a season in our parenting journey. I’ve come to realize that parenting is navigating a lifelong journey with a series of major transitions that disrupt the family homeostasis in both subtle and significant ways.
These transitions have become known in psychology as separation-individuation. Separation-individuation describes at least three major transitional phases that take places in infancy, adolescence, and early/emerging adulthood.[3] Individuation speaks of the process of breaking away, separation, or maturing from a previous more dependent phase and into a more independent phase.
For example, in infancy and into the classic “terrible-twos” a child transitions from happily being fed to throwing food in your face and determined to feed themselves on their own terms. In the adolescent phase of separation-individuation the child must “establish a sense of self that is distinct and individuated” and “learn to take over for oneself the tasks of self-esteem regulation and self-definition.”[4] In the early/emerging adulthood, a young adult should mature into full adult independence while not completely disconnecting into isolation.
While we don’t have space to unpack separation-individuation thoroughly here, I felt it’s important enough to note that the journey of parenting is navigating this series of transitions that disrupt family norms in meaningful ways. Will this knowledge help us navigate the transitions? Somewhat but not entirely. The simple word of wisdom as we navigate these transitions is practical in nature, slow down. Most families these days are overly busy trying to survive and are hustling just to keep up. The simple advice is to slow down in the curves. In these seasons of transition, slow down. Just as you would when you make a sharp turn in your vehicle, tap the brakes, reflect, draw your children closer, pay attention to steep cliffs, stay on the path marked out for you, and keep your eyes on the road ahead. It’s simple advice, but in the middle of often turbulent transitions that have upset our homeostasis it’s the exact type of advice we need.
Teaching as We Grow
As Chip Dodd and Stephen James say in their book Parenting with Heart, “clumsy is as good as it gets” when it comes to parenting. Their point is to remove the noble facade to be or become the perfect parent, for it has never, nor will ever exist among fallen humanity. They personify being a parent as a “giraffe on ice skates,” clumsily making our way through the journey.[5] Parenting is not for the faint of heart – that is for sure. It is a series not only of transitions but of failures. Failures that we must learn to repent of, get up and learn from in the quest to honor God with this holy responsibility we have been entrusted.
I remember the day we buckled our first-born son into the car seat to head home from the hospital, and I thought to myself, “are they seriously just going to let us take him home?” I felt thoroughly unprepared, somewhat terrified, and excited all at the same time. There simply isn’t a training manual for parenting, and you don’t get your education to parent in a classroom but in the school of hard knocks. Through waiting up past midnight for a teen to come home and waking up to the sounds of screaming in those same wee hours, we learn what it means to love unconditionally.
The family unit, however it is constructed, is ever evolving and growing as each person, young and old, is growing and changing. Each member of the family co-mingles, and their lives intersect. The covenantal relationship of the marriage and the family reflect the trinitarian nature of God Himself (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).
Christian family members must strive to mutually indwell with one another in unity while allowing each to remain in their distinctive identity. Miroslav Volf explores this concept and calls it a “divine dance.”[6] A relational and spiritual journey of connectedness, intermingling, and growth. It’s never really perfected but practiced over and over again until there is a bit of a flow to it. The steps begin to feel more familiar and less clumsy, though never quite as graceful as we might wish they were. A Christian parent must resolve to learn as we go, to teach them as we learn.
We not only teach as we grow, but we are teaching them as they grow. As a child grows they naturally move from more concrete thinking and learning to more abstract thought and understanding. As a child moves through the phases of separation-individuation they tend to move from maternal dependence toward paternal dependence. An infant is more likely to be connected to mom, and an emerging adult is more likely to be searching for paternal wisdom and direction in this transitional phase. That is a broad strokes summarization of course, but these scenarios are more likely.
The point is that while there are natural tendencies to the seasons, every single family journey is as unique as the members that make it up. A Christian parent must determine to grow as they go and teach as they grow. In fact, the most beautiful testimony a parent might have to share with their children is evidence of transformation from who they were when they began parenting to whom they became on the journey.
[1] Hall, Todd. The Connected Life, 29.
[2] Balswick, Jack O., Blaswick, Judith K. The Family: A Christian Perspective on the Contemporary Home, 149.
[3] Kins, Evie & Soenens, Bart & Beyers, Wim. (2012). Parental psychological control and dysfunctional separation-individuation: A tale of two different dynamics. Journal of adolescence. 35. 1099-109. 10.1016/j.adolescence.2012.02.017.
[4] Lapsey, Daniel K., Stey, Paul. Weiner, I. & Craighead, E. (Eds.), Corsini’s Encyclopedia of Psychology. NY: Wiley
[5] James, Stephen, Dodd, Chip, Parenting with Heart, 20-21.
[6] Blaswick & Blaswick, The Family, 5.
Written by: Kyle and Taran Nelson. Kyle and Taran pastor in Jacksonville, FL with their three children.
