When Your Adult Child Strays: Trading Heartache for Hope

No matter what comes between you and your adult child, you can still foster a strong relationship.

In his 2019 bestseller, Doing Life with Your Adult Children, author, speaker, and podcaster Jim Burns gave hopeful encouragement on how to navigate the tough yet rewarding transition to parenting adult children. Now in When Your Adult Child Strays, Jim takes it one step further, giving practical advice on key areas of conflict and ways to foster a strong relationship with your adult child.

Parents are often stunned when their children reach adulthood and disregard the values, practices, and faith commitments they were raised with. Whether these differences are over church, politics, sexuality and gender, addiction, or another issue, parents struggle to know what went wrong.

But there's good news: In the midst of uncertainty, you can trade heartache for hope. As a trusted expert on family, parenting, and marriage, Jim will help you:

• Rebuild trust with an adult child who has rejected your traditions
• Lower your emotional reactivity in heated conversations
• Learn how to validate your adult child's feelings without trying to be right
• Move from advice giver to mentor
• Understand the differences between Nomads, Prodigals, and Exiles
• Avoid being defined by your adult child's choices

Maintaining a healthy relationship with your adult child is hard. But with God's help, hope and healing are within reach.

Jim Burns is the founder of HomeWord. He speaks to thousands of people around the world each year and has more than three million resources in print in over twenty languages. His popular podcast, HomeWord with Jim Burns, continues to grow. Jim writes and speaks on how to enable strong marriages, confident parents, empowered kids, and healthy leaders. His books include Doing Life with Your Adult Children: Keep Your Mouth Shut and the Welcome Mat Out; Finding Joy in the Empty Nest; Have Serious Fun; Creating an Intimate Marriage; and When Your Adult Child Strays. Jim and his wife, Cathy, live in Southern California and have three daughters, three sons-in-law, and four grandchildren.