Parents Can Guide the Path, but Free Will Chooses the Direction

I was reflecting on something that weighs heavily on the heart of many parents. No parent is ever truly at peace watching their child suffer. That simply doesn’t exist. When a child suffers, the parent suffers with them. But at the same time, I have been thinking that parents are still human beings, and sometimes they can end up being hurt twice: first by the suffering of their child, and then by a feeling of guilt that slowly starts consuming them from the inside and deteriorating their own peace.

Thinking about this, I have come to a reflection that helped me a lot. Parents have three responsibilities in the life of a child: to teach the right path, to warn about the consequences of wrong choices, and to lead by example through their own lives. When these three things are done sincerely, parents can know that they fulfilled their role. After that comes something no parent controls: the free will of each person.

The guidance from parents to a child is very similar to the way God guided His first children in creation. In the Book of Genesis, God gave a clear instruction to Adam and Eve not to eat from the fruit. The instruction was given and the warning was also made, but the final decision came from their free will. They chose to ignore the instruction and do the opposite, and by doing so they not only stopped following the guidance they had received, but also began to experience the consequences of their own choices.

In our lives it is not very different. Many times, people are influenced by environments, by external pressures, by ideas, by agendas, or even by “friends.” And sometimes it makes you wonder what kind of friend leads someone down the wrong path. I suppose that is a question most parents understand very well.

Because of that, I have been thinking that if parents have taught, warned, and led by example, they can still suffer with their child and continue loving and wishing the best for them, but they do not need to carry alone a guilt that does not belong to them. Many times life itself ends up teaching what parents had already tried to teach through those three responsibilities.

Perhaps that is why, in many moments in life, when we realize we have already done everything within our reach as parents, there is something we sometimes forget in the middle of the pain: to trust that God can reach places in the hearts of our children that we simply cannot reach ourselves.