Hi, and welcome to the Five Word Prayers Daily, a five-day-a-week daily devotional where we share the word, prayers, in our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

So here's a big one on the show today, parental control.

If you parents of little ones are listening, I'll tell you this.

First, an encouragement. It gets easier in many ways logistically. You get so much of your life back. Isn't that awesome? And then I've also got to shoot you straight about this too. It gets more complicated as your kids get older in the area of control. As these kids become young adults, there are things that change, and part of what we do as

parents is change with them. So I want to talk about letting go of parental control, what that

looks like, in what key areas it's really important, and how in the world to do it. Let's go.

Our five-word prayer today, I'm opening with that, is Give Me Wisdom for Now.

And by that, I'm praying a prayer for myself and my fellow parents in the trenches of parenting

older teens and adult kids because we need some now wisdom to maneuver these new strange roads.

There's a lot of parenting advice, lots of books for new

parents and raising toddlers and young kids, but not near as many adult kid parenting books

and resources. And I've had a few people tell me that either that they think the reason for that

is that either the parents or the older teens are too tired by the time they get there to write a book or they're over that feeling of feeling like they need to be the

expert. I think there may be an element of truth in that, but I also feel it's so needed for the

more seasoned parents to share what we've learned to help others along. I mean, isn't this the

point of life to share our journey that we might help and encourage

others? Certainly, that's what I really want to do. So I don't come at this as an expert. And yes,

I'm tired after parenting almost 21 years, but I'm here to talk about what has been one of the

hardest things for me as a mom, and that is letting go of control. Boy, have I had to do it.

Because at some point,

we will realize we don't have the control we thought. I often look at pictures of my younger

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