Blessing Your Grown Children: Affirming, Helping, and Establishing Boundaries

by Debra Evans

Being a parent of an adult child is a delicate balance of loving and accepting the child while maintaining healthy boundaries. Many parents find releasing their grown children a challenge, and while parents usually want to be supportive, the choices adult children make are sometimes unacceptable to them, leading to disappointment, anger, and guilt feelings. Both parents and grown kids have many adjustments to make as the child separates from the parents’ control. With this book, parents will learn to move forward into a new type of relationship with their kids.

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2012

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book and felt it offered many great ideas on being a blessing to your adult kids rather than a drag on them.

From my notes --
* Knowing that the way our grown children's lives appear at any particular moment in time is a single, temporary snapshot, that the pleasure or pain they feel today is only one small part of God's much larger design for their lives, encourages us to keep adjusting and enlarging our perspective.

* We find ourselves in the position of shielding our adult children not so much from themselves as from our own fears and frustrations concerning their lives. 'If you become a necessity to someone else's life, you are out of God's will,' Oswald Chambers cautions us. 'Over and over again, we try to be amateur providences in someone's life. We are indeed amateurs, coming in and actually preventing God's will and saying, 'This person should not have to experience this difficulty.'

* Do we treasure our grown children's God-given freedom? If so, our powerlessness, rather than hindering us from accepting, affirming, appreciating, and attending to them as they are, can lead us toward loving them with our eyes wide open.

* Prayer is our most valuable behind-the-scenes parenting action in relation to blessing our grown children, especially when we don't have any ability whatsoever to control a particular problem or situation. We know this. Yet it's not necessarily our first response.

* It's their time, their turn, their journey now.

[Janet Reeves · Rating 4 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book to any parent of a grown child. It may have been intended for parents new to this stage of life, but I believe that parents of older grown children will benefit from the material in this book.

Using examples from her own life and the lives of people she knows, Debra Evans helps parents understand the new boundaries between parent and child that go with this change in the relationship. She helps parents consider what they are and aren't responsible for, when to help--and when not to, and how to keep the relationship strong even when/if kids make choices that parents don't agree with.

Each chapter contains a testimony from an adult child about something they've struggled with their parents over, appreciate in their parents, or wish their parents would do. Chapters also contain Scripture prayers, Bible verses to reflect on, questions to consider, actions steps (called "Blessings Now") and a few pages of review questions for discussion or journaling. Blessing Your Grown Children is definitely a worthwhile read.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute 5 star! Debra Evans hits it out of the park with this book for Christian parents of adult children. She demonstrates through examples, Bible verses and prayer how to have a good relationship with your adult child. She gently reminds that it is all in God's hands. Real life applications and prayer examples offer ways to rely on God while improving your relationship with your child.
I cannot recommend this book enough.

[Stephany · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Carol Manthei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book. A quote from the last chapter sums it up: " It's time to believe they really do belong to God, not us."

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hearing that one of the young people in our family is sharing with his son a book about Fathers and Sons, I was inspired to open up to ideas about the job of parenting adults. Much of my life I've spent growing into one new challenge after another, and have learned from some surprising sources.

Unfortunately, this is not the book for such inspiration.

I can't bear the melodrama in the stories she tells and I can't stomach the smarmy tone of it all.

I know, I know, what should I expect from Focus on the Family. But I continue to find the occasional jewel of christian thought that has the ring of truth, so every now and again I take a chance.

If you're a christian woman from Texas you might find this worthwhile. After all, Mrs Evans has written 22 other books.

But I ain't and I didn't.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved, loved, loved this book! I've highlighted so much. Going to go back through and copy down my highlights so I get these firmly planted in my brain!