I also wonder how it is parents don’t see this coming at a young age, and why they are unable (or unwilling) to do something to arrest it while it’s still formative. Maybe there was nothing anyone could have done in Clancy’s family. Maybe it just happens. Who knows.

I just know I worry about things like that with my kids sometimes - I’m so close to them, and they are to me..I can’t imagine one of them growing up someday and having values and ideas so vastly different than my own that they would choose to separate themselves so completely from the family (at least for a time).

To answer your question — or fail to answer it, actually — it’s hard to say what causes it. There’s often not as clear an explanation as there is in the Himmelreich family, like the Collins family I’ve posted on before producing two wayward children (but then there may have been things about that family that I didn’t know) that seemed perfectly normal until high school.

On a micro-issue, I think that one important thing is to live the values you preach. If you want your kids to understand the importance of family, do everything you can to produce a family life that your kids would want to replicate. If you want them to grow up Christian, introduce them into Christian communities that they will want to be a part of. It’s all absurdly easier said than done, of course, but it does seem that a disproportionate number of rebellious kids from involved parents take the attitude “You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to understand it, you just have to do it” that is ripe for contradiction in high school, college, and beyond. Granted my parents had a lot of rules and such I disagreed with and/or didn’t understand, but as the saying goes your parents get smarter as you grow up and you start finding out that they often really did know what they were talking about.