…My faith informs me that God’s promises are true, that parenting is a divine appointment and that He never gives us more than we can handle. God doesn’t make mistakes. Whatever was happening with my son I knew would be used to the good.

So in my mind, I heaped the mountains of fear and anxiety crowding my heart aching for my son’s suffering into a wheel barrow and walked it to the foot of the Cross. I thanked God for my son in all of his suffering, I prayed for revelation about what was wrong and what could be done to restore his health. I declared God’s grace over his entire situation.

And then my son’s heart opened to hear God’s promises from me. And it was revealed to me that the root of my son’s condition was an alignment issue.

Yes. Alignment. What a powerful, healing concept.

For digital natives, children born after 1990 who cannot imagine the world without WWW connectivity, authority is a relational experience. In previous generations, authority was ascribed to structure, such as a title like parent, teacher or president.

It is true that under the right circumstances and the wrong thinking, we are any of us capable of anything. In the network, this couldn’t be truer. As one teenager put it, “Everything is situational.”

God bless MSNBC news anchor, Melissa Harris-Perry, for speaking her mind declaring children as belonging, not parents and families, but to the collective who should also educate them. I do respect her point of view, and I am grateful that she put her belief out there so that what she really meant cannot be mistaken.

This statement and her attempts to recast it can serve as a rally point for truth and healing the American parenting culture which suffers from surrendering our inherent God-given authority to be the parent.

Blind spots are the stuff about our children’s lives that we cannot experience or know unless we are open to receiving data about our children, from sources other than our own children that in most cases does not conform to our expectations.

There always have been blind spots in parenting.

However, the advent of the Internet and the mobile phone transformed the dynamics for communications with societal implications that leveled hierarchies at work and home; the model for formal authority that was once tied to social structure (position) carries less significance than it did for previous generations. Titles like “president”, “teacher” or “parent” carry less inherent authority. In a flat world, where hierarchies are traded for networks, authority is more related than ascribed.

…In this networked environment, there are three realms of security:

Physical (our person and belongings, home and car)
Cyber (smart phones/social media and other applications)
Hearts and minds (beliefs, values, emotions)

Fear sometimes keeps us hyper-focused on the physical and cyber realms of security because it makes us feel like we are in control. And yet the most important part of cyber parenting is engaging hearts and minds of children so they can be self-governing in the network culture. Below are some of the problems with fear-based parenting:

In this “it is all about me” world of texting and social media, children can know way too much for their own good. More importantly, they are easily conditioned to keep the parent out of the equation when they are searching for answers and they risk becoming lost in the faulty-thinking of peer communities that frankly do not respect the individual.

As an American mother raised in the 1960′s and 1970′s I have observed that the role of the father in our culture has been minimized as Mom took on central prominence. Remember the Virgina Slims cigarette commercials, and the campaigns that women can have it all and do it all?

If you can do it all, who needs a partner?

As a youth substance abuse prevention activist, over the past ten years, I have come to appreciate that the confusion and fear over the nature of drug and alcohol addiction – especially with minors – has created a code of silence among adults, and driven youth drug and alcohol abuse to levels so extreme it creates a new norm for addiction. In June 2011, the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse declared youth substance abuse the number one public health problem in America.

Return to Table of Contents: 2013 Winter Edition of Family Business Quarterly

Bill Ryland, and his wife Camilla, have spent over 30 years providing a family life for foster youth. Today their own children are grown, and they operate the Koinonia Home for Teens in Loomis, California.

A Level 12 dual diagnosis residential treatment program, Koinonia accommodates 12 girls and 18 boys in separate single family homes. The foster youth in addition to coming from …