Parenting by Design

Chapter 1
Our Son Was a Drug Addict?
One summer night in 2003, Michelle and I woke up suddenly to the ringing of the doorbell. I glanced at the clock. Two-thirty in the morning. My anxiety rose as I raced through the possibilities. Were some kids playing a prank? Had one of our sons been in a car wreck? Was a neighbor in trouble?
I stumbled down the stairs, hoping it was just a minor annoyance. But when I opened the door, a friend of mine and his sixteen-year-old son were waiting on the front porch. Nothing could have prepared me for the story they proceeded to tell. Stunned, I listened as they described catching my youngest son, Bob, and another kid attempting to steal the stereo system out of the friend’s car. All I could think was “How could this be?” Bob had recently been elected to the high school honor council. He was a good student whose grades usually landed him on the honor roll. The only trouble he had ever gotten into was minor and we had no reason to think it had gone this far. The kid they described didn’t sound like our son.
But there was more. They told of Bob’s drug use and other criminal activity. And just like that, Pandora’s box had been opened.
I shut the door and walked back up the stairs. I had to tell Michelle. Her reaction was a mixture of astonishment and fear and then skepticism. Surely this was a monumental case of mistaken identity.
I called Bob on his cell phone. When he answered, I recounted what I had been told moments ago. He seemed as shocked as we were and vehemently denied the accusations.
“Okay, Bob,” I said. “I’m on my way to pick you up.”
When I pulled up to the friend’s home where Bob was spending the night, he was outside waiting. He got into the car and tried to convince me that he was a falsely accused victim. But inconsistencies in his story quickly surfaced. And as his house of cards tumbled down, I could no longer escape the truth. Our worst fears had been confirmed. Bob had been leading a secret life that we were just uncovering. As he revealed more of his story, we knew we had a huge problem on our hands.
By the next morning Michelle and I began to question ourselves. How could this have happened? We had never abused or neglected our kids. (Bob has a brother, Ben, who is almost two years older). We loved them and had been very involved in their lives. Our boys lacked for nothing. We enrolled them in the best schools, made sure they had the latest toys and games, bought them cars when they turned 16, and took them on incredible vacations. We did everything we could think of to make them happy. We considered ourselves a “successful” family; at least in the way the world defines “success.” Clearly this disaster did not fit the script we had carefully crafted for our lives. We were dumbfounded.
Michelle and I knew we had to do something drastic and we had to do it quickly, but we had no idea what to do. Obviously the problem had escalated far beyond our control. We were sure Bob needed to get out of Fort Worth and into a recovery program where they could work with him 24/7, but finding the right place was a challenge. After a lot of soul-searching and some research by Michelle’s sister Cynthia, we found a treatment program in Colorado where Bob would spend the next ten months—his entire junior year of high school. We dropped him off at the facility on July 17, 2003. It was one of the worst days of our lives.
Michelle and I were believers at the time, having trusted Christ long before, but we had drifted away from Him. Our affluence, with the attendant increase in our lifestyle, had made us proud, materialistic, and self-centered. We were focused on the things our culture told us were important—money, power, beauty, and fame. And to be honest, we had been rather successful in acquiring those things. This is humbling to admit, but that sense of self-sufficiency was part of why this event really shook us to the core—this wasn’t supposed to happen to us.
When we accepted the fact that a big change was needed in Bob’s life, we debated whether a thirty-day or ninety-day program would be enough to “fix” him or if he needed a longer program. The words of an admission director at a Christian facility resonated in our hearts. She said, “Many kids can change their outward behavior in three months, but it takes a lot longer to change the heart.” While we were not spiritually focused at the time, we could see the wisdom of an approach based on heart-level change. Deep down we knew Christ was the answer to our son’s issues, and it didn’t take us long to enroll him in this long-term, faith-based program. We were on our way to Colorado in a matter of days.
Bob’s treatment program included family weekends in the fall and spring. These weekends gave the therapists who worked with the kids an opportunity to work with the parents to improve their parenting skills and prepare them for the child’s return home. The therapists knew their work could be in vain if the child was sent back to the same dysfunctional home. But God was also working on our relationship with Him. Through this series of short parenting classes Michelle and I—a couple of independent, worldly parents brought to their knees by this disaster—got reacquainted with God. In His perfect timing He comforted us with a compassion that we just knew was coming from Him.
Michelle and I did not send our son to Colorado with an expectation that we would encounter God’s love. But He was there and it was the perfect time to draw us back to Him. The changes in our lives weren’t instantaneous, but over the next months we found ourselves turning to God over and over and finding true love and comfort. While I wouldn’t wish what happened to us on anyone, I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. It led us back to our Creator and to a ministry that has given us the opportunity to encourage other parents.
Our experience at our son’s treatment facility in Colorado caused us to think about parenting in a new way. We realized that our parenting methods—rather standard for a typical American family—were far more influenced by the world than by God. We began to understand that the way God parents us should be our guide for parenting our children, and that God uses our parenting experiences to teach us more about Him. Looking back, we realized God doesn’t waste an experience. He used our son’s troubles to teach our whole family about His redemptive power and love.
During the ten months Bob was in the treatment program, his therapist, Lee Long, encouraged us to adopt a new attitude toward family communication and to try some new parenting practices. We learned a lot about asking open-ended questions, practicing reflective listening, letting experiences and consequences teach our kids, and empathizing with struggles. We had assumed that parents who loved their kids as much as we did would instinctively know how to be good parents, but that wasn’t the case. The truth is we had not done a great job of teaching either of our sons how to be responsible decision-makers, and we had fallen into common traps. When we started implementing the principles we were learning, the relational dynamic around our house began to change. In some respects things got worse before they got better as our boys tried to push us back into our old, predictable parenting styles. But authentic communication slowly began to develop between our boys and us.