Our children should feel that they can peacefully say anything: questions, doubts, criticism, points of view. They should feel that we are genuine interested in what they do and think. We should not deprive them of privacy, but all our words and conduct should encourage an open relationship. One cannot overestimate the value of such relationships.

Our children should feel that they can peacefully say anything: questions, doubts, criticism, points of view. They should feel that we are genuinely interested in what they do and think. We should not deprive them of privacy, but all our words and conduct should encourage an open relationship. One cannot overestimate the value of such relationships.

One could imagine a parent saying, after prayer and reflection: “Dance, listen, go; but keep love for Christ alive in your heart.” Often the desire to do what their contemporaries are doing is a phase that children must get out of their system, similar to a childhood illness like chickenpox.

Something which a teenager does cannot be judged in the same way as something a committed adult Christian does—everything depends on the direction someone is taking within his heart.

Example speaks louder than words. We have seen children coming regularly to our monastery while they were growing up. We know that many kept Christian ideals of purity because they were inspired, simply by the people they saw, to resist the permissive tendency surrounding them in most other environments they frequented.