There were a few moments when I felt a tug — not a single moment, but multiple moments throughout the season for a few years after Lucy Grace. And I finally recognized it. What I didn’t have words for yet was that I was parenting without finishing the job myself — trying to control outcomes that were never mine to finish in the first place.
I was parenting from fear.
Maybe a somewhat ordinary fear — maybe a deeper one. A quiet, constant fear growing underneath everything — what if something happens to them too, and I have to survive this again.
I didn’t recognize it for what it was at the time. It just looked like vigilance. Like being a careful mother. But underneath the carefulness was a fear I was never going to say out loud, because it felt too honest, too selfish, too much like making their safety about my own survival.
I know now it wasn’t selfish. It was human. I had already learned, in the most unbearable way possible, that I could not actually keep my children safe from everything. And some part of me spent years trying to parent my way back into a control I had already lost once.
I wrote about those early years of walking with my remaining children through that grief — this post picks up years later, once fear had quietly become a parenting style I didn’t fully see.
Broken People Raising Broken People
Here’s something I’ve had to keep relearning as my kids have gotten older, especially into the teenage years: they are going to make their own decisions. And some of those decisions are not going to be the right ones — because they are human, and because I raised them, and I am human too.
That’s a hard sentence to sit with as a parent. We are broken people raising broken people, and no amount of vigilance changes that math.
I used to think my job was to prevent every wrong decision. To control the behaviors. But that’s not actually possible — and even where it is possible, it isn’t always right. Kids need room to make their own choices, including the ones that don’t go well, because that’s part of how they become people instead of extensions of us.
As parents, we can’t always control the behavior or the outcomes. What we can control is what happens after.
The Son in the Painting
A few years ago I read Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son — his reflection on Rembrandt’s painting of the same name — and it rearranged something in me.
Nouwen writes about his research of the Biblical truth represented in this story and brings the readers along to understand a new depth that Rembrandt reflected in his painting. Nouwen goes through each character represented in Rembrandt’s painting — Buy the book here — Rembrandt didn’t focus on the moment that the younger son (often referred to as the prodigal son) left. He didn’t focus on the moments the son was gone, although they Biblical story allows us to imagine a long list of bad choices. No, Rembrandt didn’t paint the mistakes he made along the way. Instead, he painted the moment he came back — ragged, empty-handed, undone — and the moment the father ran to him anyway.
The Bible tells us, there was no lecture first. No accounting of the wasted years. Just the father’s hands on his son’s shoulders, pulling him in before a single word had been said.
I thought a lot about the son, and how he must have rehearsed his apology the whole way home, bracing for the conversation he thought he deserved. And how none of that conversation actually happened — because the father wasn’t waiting to deliver a verdict. He was just waiting for his son to come home.
This is the Gospel. It didn’t erase the reality of consequences — the son still lived with what he’d lost. But it reframed what the homecoming was for. That image did something to my fear that no amount of vigilance ever could.
What They Actually Need to Know
I’ve stopped believing my job is to prevent every poor choice my kids will make or hard consequence they may face. I can’t. And honestly, some of those consequences are exactly how they’ll learn what I can’t teach them any other way.
But here’s what I do believe is my job — the actual job, the one that matters more than any single decision they make:
They need to know the consequences are real.
And they need to know, with absolute certainty, that they are loved.
And they need to know that no matter what they’ve done or where they’ve been, it is always, always safe to come home.
Not safe from consequences. Safe in identity. Safe in knowing who they are and whose they are, even in the middle of their worst decision — especially in the middle of their worst decision.
That’s the tension I live in now as a parent of teenagers. Letting the natural weight of their choices actually land, while making sure the door home never, ever feels locked.
He Who Began a Good Work
“Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 1:6
I didn’t start this parenting journey understanding this verse the way I do now. I used to read it as a promise about me — that God was finishing the work He started in my own healing.
But it’s also a promise about them.
I am not the one who has to finish the good work in my children. I never was. I can show up, love them, tell them the truth about consequences, and leave the door open — but the actual finishing of who they are becoming belongs to God, not to my ability to control every decision along the way.
That’s what helped free me from parenting through fear. And helped me let go of trying to control all actions and outcomes.
Because God is not finished with their story either. And He has you too.
You Are Not Meant to Do This Alone
If you’re in a season of parenting from fear right now — or trying to let go of control you never actually had — the Old to New Creations Journals were made for exactly this kind of wrestling. A place to bring the fear honestly, and watch God’s faithfulness show up anyway.
And if you’re in a hard season of your own — the free prayer list was made for exactly this. You don’t have to carry it alone. 🤍