Immediately following the Apalachee High School shooting on September 4, the shooter’s father was arrested and charged with two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children. Why him when he wasn’t present at the crimes his son committed? He allowed his son access to a gun, knowing he had a troubled history, had made threats the year before, and was angry at being picked on at school. His permissiveness was seen as a direct contributor to the death of four and the injuries of nine.

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The news of the shooter’s father being held responsible for his son’s actions accentuates the need for concerted prayer over America’s parents because this father’s actions are symptomatic of something I brought up in my article on teen violence: the decline in parenting skills and responsibilities during the last couple of decades due to the social and economic shifts affecting families.

American parents have been under enormous and increasing pressure. During the late 1980s and 1990s, an increasing number of parents both had to work. In addition, many women wanted careers in their quest for equality with men. I remember the working mother of my two young daughters’ best friends saying, “If I were a stay-at-home mom, I’d go crazy.”

The result of this shift was a generation of so-called latch-key kids: children who would come home from school mid-afternoon by letting themselves into the front door with a key to the door latch (hence the term latchkey kids) and be alone until their parents came home from work – often not till 6 or 7 p.m. They were supposed to do their homework, but no one supervised them or monitored what they watched and listened to or who they talked to. While there were positives, the adverse effects outweighed them. Law enforcement officials began to raise the alarm in the late 1990s that latchkey kids were prime recruiting targets for youth gangs and hate groups. The Riverside Sheriff’s Department in Southern California stated to a group of ministers that the Aryan Brotherhood, one of America’s biggest neo-Nazi hate groups, was in the process of moving its headquarters from the backwoods of Idaho to Riverside County for that very reason. They urged churches to create after-school programs where children could receive homework help, engage in activities, and be mentored by adults. Hate groups and youth gangs provide them with the sense of belonging they crave and an outlet for their frustration, boredom, and anger at being left alone so much, they said.

Most of these kids received minimum parenting. Exhausted after a hard day’s work and busy during the weekends, parents didn’t have the margin to provide the constant coaching needed to teach children intangible life skills such as respect for law, order, and authority, responsibility to use freedoms for good, and coping skills to handle adversity and negative emotions.

To add fuel to the fire, divorce rates climbed to 50% during the 1980s, resulting in many children being raised primarily by one parent or a relative and spending more time being babysat than being parented.

Children growing up in that environment were the older Gen X-ers (1965-1980) and Millennials (1981-1996). They have become adults and are raising families without having received adequate parenting skills, and they are parenting in a world that has become increasingly complex.

Parenting Is Becoming More Challenging

Parents now have to contend with online gaming and social media, which are available not only on computers at home but also on children’s ever-present cell phones. Exposure to violence, cyberbullying, and social isolation are increasing while attention span and mental health are decreasing.

It is also increasingly difficult to keep children safe. The world of social media is targeted by predators who approach children and teens online with false profiles and promises to lure them into trafficking or other nefarious activities. Unsuspecting parents who proudly post pictures of their children in front of their new school or a fun park don’t realize that predators have developed software to extract information from such posts and triangulate the children’s exact location.

The constant use of social media, communication apps, and entertainment also allows children to create their own digital environment without their parents knowing. They often trust information they receive online more than what their parents teach them and now have endless sources available to them. This is challenging even for highly skilled, Christ-devoted parents.

Several years ago, my presence as a police chaplain was requested at a suicide. Parents had found their eldest son deceased in his bedroom closet after he didn’t emerge for breakfast, and they went looking for him. Their shock was profound, as you can imagine. His dad was a former major league baseball player, and his mom was an all-American Lacrosse star. They had a stable, loving Christian marriage, were financially stable, and lived in an upscale suburban neighborhood. The night before, they had played music together, they had helped him with his homework, and he was excited about getting his driver’s license later that week. After a thorough investigation, the coroner found cutting marks on his body and a sketchbook full of drawings that showed he had been hiding a dark fascination with self-harm and death as an escape from his current life. His parents had no clue that he was in emotional turmoil. It was a wake-up call that kids are at risk, even in the most stable families.

Parenting challenges are also becoming evident in environments outside the home. School administrators in public and private schools have repeatedly voiced concern that parenting is left up to educators. When our daughters went to college, admission staff praised us for letting them have a gap year in which they gained some independence and life experience and pointed out that many of the kids that arrived from high school had no skills and no resilience. Many didn’t last more than a semester because they couldn’t handle communal living and independent study.

Similarly, a firefighter who served as a drill instructor for the Army Reserve lamented that the vast majority of late teens arriving in boot camp had not been parented and didn’t know how to make their beds, wash, fold, or iron clothes, keep their space clean, or manage a bank account. “We spend the first couple of weeks doing basic parenting,” he said.

How To Pray

Satan’s strategy is to kill and destroy. Since stable families are key to a healthy society, he will attack them because he aims to bring society to ruin and profit from the fear and chaos that ensues.

We recognize his hatred for truth, love, and justice because those values are inadequately being taught and modeled in the home, if they are being taught at all.

This is where God’s Church can be a powerful example and change agent. By following God’s design for marriage and parenting, which is laid out in the Scriptures, we can point the way to others. By banding together to run after-school programs desperately called for by law enforcement and school administrators, we can fill a void in their lives and minister to tired and confused parents. By praying, we can ask the Holy Spirit to use the challenges parents face to point them back to a relationship with God and a biblical parenting model.

I see three parallel lines for concerted prayer as intercessors:

1. Pray for the Church to be a light by modeling biblical parenting in the power of the Holy Spirit.
2. Pray for churches all over our nation to catch the vision for onsite mentoring and offsite after-school activities to introduce young people to Christ and receive positive input in their lives.
3. Pray for revival in America’s homes – that the growing challenges parents face will help them realize their need for supernatural help, lead them to faith in Christ, and put God at the center of their lives.

Abba, Father of all. You are the perfect parent. We appeal to You to rescue American parents from the value and skill erosion of the past few decades. Awaken the Church to its potential as a role model and empower her to be an example and meet today’s families’ needs by providing outreach programs after school. Reverse Satan’s destructive power and ignite a hunger among moms and dads to return to You by opening their eyes to the parenting wisdom in the Scriptures. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

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Remco Brommet is a pastor, spiritual-growth teacher, and prayer leader with over 40 years of experience in Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the U.S. He was born and raised in the Netherlands and pastored his first church in Amsterdam. He moved to the U.S. in 1986. He and his wife, Jennifer, live north of Atlanta. When not writing books, he blogs at www.deeperlifeblog.com and assists his wife as a content developer and prayer coordinator for True Identity Ministries. Jennifer and Remco are passionate about bringing people into a deeper relationship with Christ. Photo Credit: Denise Husted/Pixabay.