Isolation, Shame, and Off-Script Kids

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I sponsor a retreat and speak at churches on a subject I call “off-script kids,” a subject many, if not most, churches say little if anything about. There are books on the subject that parents read, and they devour articles when they appear on-line, but when they want to discuss these with others, they don’t know whom they can trust to do so. The silence of the church isolates these parents and intensifies their pain and confusion. It’s important that the church begins to speak more about this.

When a child is born, the parents inevitably write a script for the child in their heads. They don’t publish it, they may not talk about it, but it’s there. They imagine a future for their children, a collection of their hopes and dreams for them, and they begin to parent according to this script. Christian parents will write this script in such a way that has their children beginning to follow Jesus when young and continuing to follow him into adulthood. They write good scripts, holy scripts, and then they do their best to move the children to fulfill their role in that script, a role they believe is the best for their child.

No child, of course, perfectly fulfills that script. They all ad-lib to some extent. In many cases, children alter the script in mild and acceptable ways. Their parents see them as pursuing law, but they become artists. The parents picture them sitting in the pew next to them, but the children pursue a different church from a different tradition. Or parents imagine their kids having a family and living down the street, but they stay single and move to Alaska. These rewrites leave the heart of the script largely intact, and parents find ways to accept them without too much difficulty.

For many parents, however, the rewrite is severe. Some children reach adulthood and cut themselves off entirely from their parents. Others are afflicted with mental health issues or fall into the grip of substance abuse. Some embrace a different moral standard or express a different sexual orientation. Or they reject Christianity and pursue some other religious path, or none at all. These are what I call off-script kids.

The intensity with which this is felt depends on the values of the parents. Author Melanie Springer Mock^⁠¹ is a Quaker, and a professor in the Mennonite George Fox University. Her tradition, her personal moral and religious commitments, and the environment in which she lives are pacifist and value higher education. So when one of her sons declined the opportunity to attend college and instead joined the US Navy it was a shocking and traumatizing turn of events. That was not the script she had written and her world was turned upside down and her heart and mind flooded with confusing emotions.

My friend, Curt Moore, is a disaster specialist within my domination. He’s dealt with families in a variety of natural disasters. He’s quick to point out that it doesn’t matter if your house has been flooded with 2” or 24” of water, it’s still a disaster. The same is true for parents of off-script kids. The extent of the disaster varies, but the impact is similar. Parents of off-script kids find themselves locked in a prison with no discernible means of escape and with no one offering to help them.

As well these parents feel emotions they struggle to name and to address. Parents of off-script kids will feel uncertainty, comparison, failure, hurt, heart-break, anger, and isolation.^⁠² Particularly intense for Christian parents are feelings of guilt and shame. A toxic Christian parenting culture has placed the blame for the choices of adult children on their parents, who then feel like pariahs in their own churches, fearing above all fears someone asking them, “So, tell me about your children.”

This is all so real, and all so wrong. Space here only allows for me to name the issue, not to solve it.

You who are parents of off-script kids, though you feel alone, need to know that you are not. I encourage you to open your eyes and ears for others. There are those sitting near you in church who struggle similarly. Seek them out. Ask to hear their story. Chances are you will find much overlap.

As well I encourage you to find solace in the psalms. The psalms remind us that there is no emotion that has not been felt before, and felt by the saints of God. To feel things, to struggle with those feelings before God, and to learn from them, is a deeply biblical thing.

The psalms, the grace of community, and a proper understanding of God and of his expectations, can move us from the 2:00 AM anguish found in Psalm 77:

“You hold my eyelids open;
I am so troubled that I cannot speak.”

to the lighthearted dancing of Psalm 30:

“Weeping may last for the night,
but joy comes in the morning.”

It’s a journey that is possible, and one we need to take with others.

1. Melanie Springer Mock, Finding Our Way Forward: When the Children We Love Become Adults (United States: Herald Press, 2023).

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2. A helpful resource for thinking about emotions is Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (United States: Random House, 2021), p. ix, x.