As you use family trips and family dinner nights to facilitate your son discovering himself and his purpose, he will learn how to take what he learned under your care and adjust it to those stages of his life when he is under his own care. What will be common to each stage, though, is your gift of encouraging him to be a human being first, and enou

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God intended the family to be an incubator in which we grow the maturity, tools, and abilities we need. Once the incubator has done its job, then, it’s supposed to encourage the young adult to leave the nest and connect to the outside world (Gen. 2:24), to establish a spiritual and emotional family system on one’s own. The adult is free to do whate

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Consider what it takes for a child to develop into a grown-up. We enter our lives in a state of utter dependence on adults. Eventually, God willing, we become adults ourselves, capable of navigating daily life on our own. The journey from the former to the latter, Gill told me, ought to be one of gradually expanding independence. Parents shouldn’t ... See more