Preparing & Releasing Your Children for Marriage

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

HAROLD HARPER: Annie, it is so good to have you back in the studio. Welcome back to For Faith & Family.

ANNIE CHAPMAN: Oh, I’m thrilled to be here.

HARPER: Now, you’ve been through the process, though of releasing two children. Share the emotion of that. Just give us a glimpse of the mother’s experience of, there’s a lot of work that goes in those years, but the releasing part.

CHAPMAN: Well, it is funny you’d bring that up because my daughter, who has been married about four and a half years, she was in a Bible study with some girls who had been married a year, two years, five years, you know, just young girls, and they knew Heidi was doing a lot of the data entry for me for this book, so she would take all of the surveys and she would put them in categories, the answers, and it was cute too because she would editorialize on the comments. Out from it she would write, “the meanest woman in the entire world,” and periodically she’d call her mother-in-law and say, thank you so much for being such a good person. It’s like the worst case scenario she was reading and so one of the girls asked her in this Bible study, “Ask your mom why is it harder for mom’s to let go of sons than to let go of daughters.” And she went on to say that her mom didn’t have any trouble with her, but she is just having a horrible time letting go of her brother, and the conflicts and how her mom was butting in about this and that, and so Heidi came home and asked me, and I said, “Well, that’s an easy question.” See, a mother never lets go of her daughter. Now, my relationship with Heidi, it’s changed a little in that I don’t call her in the evenings and I don’t side with her if she’s criticizing her husband, you know, I don’t do that. But our relationship as far as going shopping and hanging out together, it really hasn’t changed that much. But my relationship with my son has changed totally because, as I told her, a mother never lets go of her daughter, but she has to let go of her son. And that’s the hard part of the letting go, because there’s another woman between you. Now, again, as I said in the book, the mom has to back away. She has to back off. Now, my son called me this morning; I was thrilled. I keep telling him, “You realize if I called you every time I thought about you, you’d never get anything done.” So, I tell him if you want to talk to me, I want you to call me. I’m always available to talk to you.

HARPER: My mom always said, she has a similar approach. She is very cautious of backing off, and she says when she wants to talk to me, she just tells the Father and if I’m right with the Lord I will hear and give her a call.

CHAPMAN: So the pressure is on you. You call every day just in case.

HARPER: Well, there are times that I really do sense that it’s time to call her, for whatever reason, and, sure enough, there’s something going on. So I love those days when I am that connected.

CHAPMAN: Yes, that’s good.

HARPER: Now you talk some in the book, quite a bit, about the biblical teaching on the tongue. How do you apply these Scriptures to the mother-in-law relationship?

CHAPMAN: Oh, you know, if we just had to say one thing that could probably be the most helpful to a mother-in-law, and maybe to the daughter-in-law as well, is to keep our words short and sweet. You know, one mother-in-law said, no matter what her kids tell her, we are going to Hawaii for vacation and she knows they don’t have their rent money or whatever, no matter what they say to her, she always says, “you might be right.” I thought, wow, that’s pretty smart. Or you can just keep them short, whatever they tell you, say, “really, sure,” and just keep it a short answer and a sweet answer because as we hear in Proverbs, with a multitude of words we are bound to offend. Even when a daughter-in-law asks an opinion, I think it should be pretty guarded, even when we are asked to give our opinion of something. I’ve not always done that, but it’s a really good idea.

HARPER: Well, at least you’re honest. That’s a tough call.

CHAPMAN: Yes, because you know, as a mother, as a father, that’s what you’ve done from the get go, is tell them what to do, and how quick to do it, and you can’t do that now. There is a story that we like to tell that I really think applies to grown children. When I was raised in West Virginia, in the spring, the old hens, you know we tried to get the eggs so we could sell them but once in a while, the old hens would hide a nest and they would hatch out little baby chicks, and so I remember as a kid, I was up in the hayloft and I found one of those nests where the momma had hidden the eggs, and the little chickens were just ready to hatch, and I sat just with absolute rapped attention and watched as the little beaks started pecking through that thin shell, and I watched them as they tried to get out of the shell, and I felt sorry for them because it looked like such a hard job. So, in my youthful ignorance, I reached over and I began helping the little chicks and I began breaking the shell away for them, and help take the egg shell off of the little babies, and to my horror, I sat and watched as every little chick that I helped began to die. What I didn’t realize was that the struggle to free themselves from the shell actually was giving them the stamina to live. So, in a real sense, my kindness killed them. And when I watch my children struggle and I watch them go through difficult times, as a mother, I keep wanting to peal the shell back and break it off and write that check and give that opinion and make that call, and yet, I realize now if I do that, I am making my children weak. As a good mother, I have to stand back and watch them free themselves from that eggshell.

HARPER: That’s a great analogy that applies, I mean, that applies where we are with our kids. So that is a beautiful, beautiful, that just gave me a picture of what I have been struggling with in my own home.

CHAPMAN: Well, I had one of those where Nathan and Stephanie, who are in country music, and, you know it’s like starve, starve, starve, McDonald’s, starve, starve, starve, and I was praying for them one day and I just said, “Lord, I’d just like to write them a check,” you know, and just give them a little cushion just so I don’t have to worry about them, and it was one of those handful of times when God speaks and He said, “Do you want them to trust you or do you want them to trust Me?” That mother heart was just being ripped out and ultimately, I want him to trust You, because I won’t be here. God will always be here.

HARPER: Talk to the mom today who is listening to the program—she has young kids, she has a young boy and perhaps a young daughter, we’ll cover both, because that’s your situation—and she is just struggling to be a mom, but she’s looking ahead. This program has caused her to look down the road. What advice would you give that young mom?

CHAPMAN: Well, we did this with the kids. Nathan would date me, and Steve would give him twenty bucks, and we would go out on a date. He would pull the chair out, all of these old fashion things that he would probably get slapped for nowadays, but I really tried to teach him how to treat a woman, how to be kind. We never let him be mean to his sister; we thought that was a bad example. We would tell them, we can’t make you love each other, but we can make you be nice to one another. So, I think in the home, your kids are in pre-marital counseling from the moment they are born, and they are learning how to act and react and sometimes overreact, but they are learning how to interact with men and women. Steve dated Heidi from probably five years old. We have a film of him taking her out on a date, and she’s in her little dress. We played that at her wedding reception and there wasn’t a dry eye, but they really did, and he tried to treat her with such respect and deference that she would look for that in a young man. And so, for the mom that’s there, what’s the best thing that she could do to teach her kids about being married is to make sure that your marriage is a wonderful, beautiful example that your kids would want to follow.

HARPER: Not to dismiss all that we’ve talked about, what’s the one thing that you would want to tell moms out there, or mother-in-laws to be, or mother-in-laws that just find themselves in this role or trying to maneuver and figure out what they need to do? Any advice as a final advice? What’s the one thing you want to leave us with today?

CHAPMAN: Well, I think it is really true that children will put up with just about anything. They will accept parents who are flawed, who are immature, who are imperfect in every way. Kids are very resilient; they can adjust to anything. They can put up with anything except hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, I believe, is a poison, to a child. So, as a parent, as you do your job, as you try to love them and, even as a mother-in-law, you are imperfect and you don’t back off when you should, or you say something you shouldn’t; kids can accept that. They can forgive it. They can deal with that, as long as they know you are not a hypocrite, that you are not saying one thing and living another. So, I think children, you know, in the Scripture it says that women will be saved through the bearing of children. I think she is saved from herself. I think that children are an incredible gift from God, because they are like this huge mirror that’s right in front of us, and our kids have kept us from doing stupid things and saying dumb things. If your kids know that you love the Lord, even though you are imperfect, I think they will accept that and take what you can give them.

This For Faith & Family Insight has been produced by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Join the conversation at iLiveValues.com.