Grandparent parents?

I have recently been very confused with the way county human service agencies seem to handle it when parents are not qualified to raise their young children. Can anyone explain this? Parents raise their children, but, for lack of a better term, mess them up. Whether it be through lack of discipline or lack of nurturing, or what have you, the parents raise children who, as adults, are irresponsible, immoral, and sometimes even in trouble with the law. For whatever reason these adult children have such poor parenting skills that they go out and have children of their own, usually out of wedlock, and start raising the children with even less guidance than they have. So what does the county do? Give the children to the grandparents. Does it ever occur to the county that if the parents were incompetent at raising their own children that they may very well be just as incapable of raising their grandchildren? Add to this the fact that most of these grandchildren have a number of years of negative training already under their belts. Why would the county do this when they know they are just going to perpetuate dysfunctional people who will continue to produce dysfunctional families and children? Because it shows the validity of their existence. Am I saying social workers are bad or unnecessary? Absolutely not! For those of you who do not know, my full time employment would not exist if it was not for social workers placing youth with our shelter/group home. This may be for behavioral issues or for safety sake. But over and over I have seen social workers put youth in placement but neglect offering other services that might be helpful such as counseling, therapeutic as opposed to psychiatric, or skills worker who works on social skills, or even basic mentoring.

I work in a field that would definitely be associated with human services, even though I am not a social worker, but this is not the majority opinion of most people in the field. Our society is unwilling to call sin what it is. It is not a bad choice, a small mistake or a speed bump. Scripture refers to our sins as the rags used to wipe sores from leprosy. How's that for a picturesque thought? When we realize that sin is SIN and that we are responsible for our behaviors, we come a long way.

We also need to remember that while parents are not responsible for the individual actions taken and choices made by their children, we can not ignore that Scripture clearly holds anyone in a position of authority responsible for how they lead those under them. Pastors are clearly held accountable for their leadership of the sheep God has entrusted to them (Hebrews 13). By way of principle this would also apply to parents, teacher, youth workers, etc. Too many times I see parents not taking responsibility for themselves, but conversely making their children not only take responsibility for the children's actions, but also holding the youth responsible for the parent's life. This week I had two different young men sit in the office with me and tell me that they believed they were directly responsible for the divorce of their parents. These divorces occurred when these young men were still small children, but their mothers had drummed into them that the problems were their fault. Another youth told me that he held himself responsible for his father's alcoholism even though he had barely seen his father in years!

Without true direction from God's manual on life how do we expect to raise children to be anything other than lost and separated from the love and will of God? Can unsaved youth become moral "good" kids? Of course. There is only one problem here. God doesn't require that our youth are moral or good. He requires that they be holy and sinless. This is the only method of entry into his presence. We must be perfectly holy and sinless either in and of ourselves or by proxy through Christ's full atonement.

We are always perpetuating a system. Is our parenting perpetuating God's system or the worlds? Let's get back to His Word and perpetuate His system.