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The parents of rebellious children desperately want their kids to straighten out their lives and fear the outcome if they don't. They also often find their marriage in crisis, because of guilt, blame or conflicting ways of approaching their wayward child.

Marriage and family counselor H. Norman Wright, the author of more than 60 books, knows first hand the corrosive effect a prodigal child can have on the parents' marriage. For four years, Wright and his wife, Joyce, watched and prayed for their daughter, Sheryl, as she stumbled through progressively more destructive stages of rebellion.

"You worry," he says, "not only about the prodigal's potentially dangerous lifestyle, but also about the real danger to your marriage."

Combining what he learned from his own experience with extensive research he's done, Wright wrote Loving a Prodigal (Chariot Victor Publishing) as a "survival guide for parents of rebellious children." He talked with Marriage Partnership at length about the marital difficulties experienced by parents of a prodigal.

First of all, how do you define a prodigal child?

A prodigal is someone who goes against the family's value system. A prodigal says, "I'd rather go this way, and I choose to reject all this over here." In a sense, it's going counter-culture to the way the person has been raised. Prodigals have an intensity in their rebellion that is missing in the actions of other highly disobedient kids.

How can the behavior of a prodigal child damage his or her parent's marriage?

It's not a given that their marriage will be damaged. But the effects can be devastating if the parents aren't in agreement on how to deal with this child. Maybe a wife makes decisions with her head. She thinks their child has done a wrong and therefore needs to experience the consequences. But the husband makes decisions with his heart. He thinks, "We've got to cut this child some slack. Maybe with love and empathy and concern we can bring him back." So you've got that clash, and the child knows it. Kids are experts at pitting their parents against each other. And so the child's behavior becomes a divisive force within the marriage and polarizes the husband and wife.

It's hard enough for parents of cooperative kids to agree on discipline. How can parents of a prodigal child keep divisiveness out of their marriage?

If couples have built a solid relationship to begin with—one of good communication and solid commitment—you then have a source of strength to draw from. But if you've got a tenuous, shaky marriage, any kind of crisis could throw you because you feel isolated. You feel like a married single. You have the sense that you're suffering through this ordeal alone.

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