Answer

What Should I Do If My Child Leaves the Church?

Few things unsettle a faithful parent more than a child stepping away from the covenant path. The instinct is to become their missionary, and the fear underneath is usually that you failed somewhere.

Stay their parent. That is the whole of it, and it is harder than it sounds, because the relationship is now the only channel anything else could ever travel down. Protecting it is not a compromise of your faith. It is the most faithful thing available to you.

Eternal Truths

Agency is not a flaw in the plan; it is the plan. In 2 Nephi 2:27, Lehi teaches that his children are “free to choose.” That freedom is real in the people you raised. Lehi was a prophet with children who went both ways, and scripture does not present that as evidence he had failed.

God asks parents to teach and to love, not to secure an outcome. The Family: A Proclamation to the World charges parents to rear their children in love and righteousness. It does not charge them with guaranteeing the result. In Luke 15, the father watches the road. He does not go and drag his son home.

Nothing about your child’s current position is final. Prophets have taught that the promises made to faithful parents reach further than most people assume, and a sealing is not annulled by someone’s choices at twenty-three.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Most parents’ first question is what they did wrong, and usually nothing they did explains it. The harder pattern to see is when fear starts shaping the relationship. Fear turns every conversation into an intervention and every visit into an assessment. Children feel it instantly, and it is the most reliable way to make the distance permanent.

Questions to Think About

• Am I talking to my child, or at the decision they made?
• What would our relationship look like if I stopped trying to change the outcome?
• Whose verdict am I actually afraid of — God’s, or other people’s?

What You Can Do

Do one ordinary thing this week that has nothing to do with the Church. Turn up, remember something they told you, be genuinely interested in a life you would not have chosen for them. The relationship is what keeps a door open, and nothing else does. The essay behind this answer works through the scriptures and research at more length.

Jesus Christ has not finished with your child, and He has not finished with you either.