Adam Ewy 🇺🇸

Adulthood is coming for your kids, like it or not. Parents often overestimate their remaining power to control an eighteen-year-old while underestimating their continuing power to influence her. By late adolescence, temperament is already quite stable, and the fundamental moral lens through which a young person interprets the world has usually been formed. Family culture, religious formation, habits, expectations about sex and marriage, attitudes toward work, and perhaps most importantly, the child’s conception of what kind of people her parents actually are have accumulated over eighteen years. College does not suddenly encounter an unformed human being. It encounters someone who has already been habituated toward certain loves, loyalties, and judgments. Do far too many young women (and men) go to college? Yes, but that's a separate argument. The quoted post strikes me as getting causality backward. A university certainly presents temptations, rival doctrines, bad incentives, and new peer groups. But describing the ordinary outcome as though parents are releasing an innocent into a machine that mechanically produces promiscuity, drunkenness, debt, and ideological conformity implicitly concedes that the preceding eighteen years accomplished remarkably little. College is an environment of testing and differentiation, not simply programming. In many cases it reveals formation more than it creates it. The parental task therefore has to change. Somewhere in the later teenage years, command-and-control parenting should increasingly yield to counsel, coaching, hospitality, financial prudence, honest conversation, and availability. You are no longer trying to manufacture the adult personality; you are helping an emerging adult exercise judgment, gain wisdom and grow in agency. The objective is that your daughter calls you because she wants your judgment—not because she fears your enforcement power. The great mistake is attempting at eighteen to exercise externally the authority that should, by then, have been cultivated internally. Parents who have done the earlier work should expect increasing liberty, because the goal of formation was never permanent parental government. It was self-government. Planned emancipation. A soul that can glorify God through the newfound agency of adulthood. And that is the specifically Christian point underneath this. Biblical child-rearing is teleological: the child is being raised toward maturity. Authority is therefore inherently self-liquidating. The father who needs the same mechanisms of control over his twenty-two-year-old that he needed over his twelve-year-old has, in an important sense, misunderstood what paternal authority was for. He has failed. That does not mean children cannot rebel dramatically against excellent formation; human fallenness remains real, and some children choose very badly. Nor does it mean worldview is permanently fixed at eighteen. But I would resist the increasingly common conservative tendency to respond to cultural decadence by extending childhood indefinitely. I get the sentiment of the post below. I do. However, the Christian answer to a dangerous world cannot be perpetual custody, and continued childhood. It has to be the formation of people capable of living faithfully in the world.