You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan and Becky Allender continue their conversation about parenting adult children,

particularly when the relationship is so broken that it seems beyond repair,

or when past experiences of harm have fostered deep division, how can we name that which seems unnameable and move together toward a new style of relating to each other?

Well, we're entering into another discussion about the complex world of parenting adult children.

And as we address some of the more heartbreaking issues, we want to set a kind of context, and that is to say, I don't care how well you've parented, I don't care

how well you have loved your children, or they have loved you, or how broken the relationship

is, there is always the potential for more. If there's one message that you hear from the beginning

to the end, nothing is so hopeless

that there is not the potential for change. I don't care how trite that sounds at the beginning

of our time. But if you don't enter in to a adult relationship with another adult, let alone

your own children, with the potential of redemption,

the potential that all things will one day be renewed and nothing will be lost, including

your failures.

Let me just say there is nothing worse for developing a relationship with any human being,

but particularly your children, with regret and worry.

So you've got to pull those two weeds out before we begin to work on this garden.

And that is, if you're regretting your failures versus grieving them and turning them over to God,

asking not only your children, but also the

living God for forgiveness, then you're bound in either regret or self-righteousness.

And in some ways, regret is always a form of depleted self-righteousness.

And so in that sense, regret is with regard to the past,

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