“My oldest daughter is so distant and angry. I don’t know what to do. She’s so sweet and kind to her friends and the people at church, but when she’s home she gives us all the silent treatment and refuses to do anything but stay in her room alone working on things and facebooking with her friends. All in all she’s a good kid. She does well with all her school assignments and she’s really responsible in her babysitting jobs with the neighbors and she’s really creative and artistic. It’s not like she’s doing anything drastic or immoral or anything like that, I just wish she wasn’t so sour all the time. My husband keeps telling me not to worry about it. He thinks she’ll grow out of it and it will be better when she’s older, but I just don’t know what to do right now.” ~ Waiting for Better
Immorality Common in Christian Homes
It’s interesting that although your daughter is sour, angry, and independent you feel relieved that she’s not doing anything immoral. I’ve been very interested to know what morality, and therefore immorality actually is.
From the Dictionary “morality” is about the habitual manners or conduct and personal behavior of people in relation to one another whose actions have a bearing on each other’s rights and happiness, and with reference to right and wrong.
This means that morality is about our customary actions in how we treat other people, and whether those actions are good or bad. It’s the quality of how people relate with each other, telling us that morality or immorality can be detected in all of our relational patterns of behavior. Your daughter’s angry, sour relational habits with the family indicate that she is actually habitually involved in immorality. Christians tend to think in error that immorality is limited to sexual sin or societal sin such as abortion.
In truth, very common relational interchanges reveal that immorality is at work in our homes, even Christian homes—bickering among the kids, offense and bitterness, irritation expressed in emotional distance or punishing gestures and facial features from you or from your kids, frustration expressed in angry outbursts, or teens doing small or large things against their parent’s wishes, resisting their instruction—all of these unloving relational behaviors are immoral.
Marilyn Howshall’s new book Empowering the Transfer of Moral Values and Faith will help you understand what biblical morality is and what needs to be done in order to effectively transfer biblical morality to our children, reconciling our relationships with our family and with the Lord. No one simply grows out of immoral relational behavior by getting older. We must instead repent and change the way we relate with one another, and lead our children to do the same.
Learn more about the book including the 8 challenging ideas presented, and sign up to receive email special offers at TransferMoralValues.com.
~Barbie Poling