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Helping Our Kids Grow Through Challenges

May 18, 2026

Parenting through grief, loss, or major disruption rarely looks the way we expect it to. We show up wanting to help and often find that what we brought wasn’t what was needed. The tools that got us through our own hard things don’t automatically work for our kids. What helps us heal isn’t always what helps them. And figuring that out, in real time, with real kids, is some of the hardest and most important work there is.

Robert Beeson and Elizabeth Cole sit down with Jonathan Pitts and his oldest daughter Alena Pitts Franklin, who share their story with openness and grace. Jonathan is a pastor, author, and co-founder of For Girls Like You Ministries, who became a solo parent to four daughters in 2018 after his wife Wynter passed away suddenly. Alena was 14 at the time. She is best known for her role in the film War Room and is the author of the devotional God Is: 60 Days of Learning Who God Is to Understand Who We Are.

The questions this conversation addresses are the ones most solo parents carry quietly. How do you stay present with a child’s pain when you’re still carrying your own? What do you do when your instinct is to fix things, and fixing isn’t what they need? How do you reach a child who has gone quiet or pulled away? And how do you trust that God is still at work in your child’s story when you can’t see it or control it? Underneath all of it sits one question: what does it actually mean to help my child grow through this?

Key Insights from This Episode

  • Presence, not answers, is what children in hard seasons actually need from their parents.
  • You don’t have to be emotionally healed to parent your kids through their healing.
  • God is not absent from your children’s story just because you can’t control their outcome.

Presence, Not Answers, Is What Children in Hard Seasons Actually Need from Their Parents

When a child is hurting, the pull to do something is strong. We want to say the right thing, ask the right question, move them toward okay. But the fix-it instinct, as well-intentioned as it is, often lands differently than we expect. Jonathan found this out firsthand raising four daughters after losing Wynter. Each one processed the same loss in a completely different way. One turned inward and carried her grief as anger. Another channeled hers into social presence and activity. The twins were different from each other entirely. No single approach worked across all four, and no amount of strategy closed that gap.

What eventually became clear was not a better method. It was a different posture altogether. The moments that actually reached Alena weren’t the ones where her father came in with a framework or a piece of scripture. They were the moments he came back after getting it wrong, sat beside her, and let himself feel what she was feeling. When a parent gives themselves permission to be human, a child feels permission to be human too. That kind of presence communicates something words rarely can: you don’t have to be okay for me to stay in the room.

Every child in your home is a different emotional world, and hard seasons surface differently in each of them. Some go inward. Some stay busy. Some talk. Some go completely silent. And some get angry, which can be the hardest response for a parent to sit with because anger looks like a problem to solve rather than a feeling to receive. Applying the same approach to all of them doesn’t just fall flat. It can quietly communicate that you’re not actually seeing them. For more introverted kids, presence often means physically going to where they are, sitting in their space without requiring anything, and letting the quiet be enough. For kids who seem more naturally present and social, it might mean creating what Jonathan calls marking moments. Small, intentional pauses that give grief a name and a place before it goes underground. Saying someone’s name at the dinner table. Keeping a memory alive in ordinary conversation. Making it clear that the people and losses that matter most don’t have to be avoided.

Children absorb far more than we assume. Even when nothing is said, they feel the weight of what their parents are carrying. And when a child senses that their parent needs them to be okay, they’ll often perform okay even when they’re not. What most kids need is not explanation. It’s acknowledgment. The quiet certainty that their pain doesn’t need to be managed before it can be received.

You Don’t Have to Be Emotionally Healed to Parent Your Kids Through Their Healing

One of the more disarming things in this conversation is how honestly Jonathan talks about his own emotional limitations during those years. He came from a performance-oriented background that wasn’t fluent in emotional language. He found himself sitting at the dinner table with an emotion wheel, asking his daughters where they were on it, feeling personally uncomfortable with most of the answers. He was learning what it meant to be fully human in the same season they were.

That’s not a parenting failure. That’s actually one of the most important things a parent can model. Kids don’t need their parents to be fully healed to feel safe. They need them to be honest and present and willing to grow. When a parent says “I don’t have the words for this right now, but I’m here,” that communicates more than a polished response ever could. Shared humanity isn’t a weakness in parenting. It builds the kind of trust that holds through the hardest seasons.

This matters especially for solo parents who carry the weight of feeling like they need to hold it together for their kids. The pressure to be the stable one, the strong one, the one who has already processed enough of their own grief to be useful to someone else’s, is real. But stability doesn’t require resolution. It requires honesty and consistency. Showing up, imperfectly and repeatedly, is what kids actually remember. Not whether their parent had it together. Whether their parent kept coming back.

God Is Not Absent from Your Children’s Story Just Because You Can’t Control Their Outcome

One of the fears that sits under a lot of solo parenting is the fear that you are the only one watching out for your kids. That if you miss something, no one else will catch it. That the gaps in what you can give them are just gaps. This conversation pushes back on that directly.

Alena had carried anger as her primary expression of grief for years. So when, in the middle of that process, she told her father she was struggling to believe God was real, and that if he was real, she was having a hard time believing he was good, it landed in an already charged space. For a pastor and solo parent, hearing that from his daughter was the thing he could not control, and losing control was what scared him most. His initial reaction came from fear, and it showed. But then he came back. He stood outside her door. And eventually, he came in and sat with her. Those were the moments, she says, she remembers most clearly.

Her journey back to faith wasn’t a single turning point. It was hundreds of small moments of daring to ask God the hard questions honestly and giving him room to answer. She describes believing more deeply now than ever, not because someone convinced her, but because she experienced it herself.

What shifted for Jonathan over time was the recognition that God was working through people and circumstances he hadn’t arranged and couldn’t have predicted. Teachers who showed up at the right moment. Friends who said what he didn’t know to say. Resources that came through in ways he never engineered. The weight of solo parenting can become the belief that everything depends on you. The truth is that your faithfulness matters enormously, and it is not the whole story.

Keep Showing Up

The most consistent theme in this conversation is not a method or a framework. It’s a posture. You don’t have to have the right words. You don’t have to process your grief perfectly or read your child exactly right every time. What matters is that you keep coming back. You try again after the conversation that went sideways. You sit in the room even when you don’t know what to do there. You let your child see you growing in the same season they’re growing.

Children are more forgiving of their parents than most parents realize. What they remember, more often than the moments we got wrong, are the moments we showed back up. Not with answers. Just with ourselves.

That’s available to every solo parent, in every hard season, starting today. You don’t have to have it figured out. You just have to keep coming back to the table.

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