The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele

Growing Up in the Pastoral Spotlight: Insights into the lives and wellbeing of Ministry Kids - with Valerie Ling

• Valerie Ling • Season 6 • Episode 34

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What impact does growing up in a pastoral family have on ministry kids? 

Valerie Ling from the Sydney Centre for Effective Living joins us to unpack the ‘Ministry Kids Wellbeing Survey,’ revealing what Australian ministry children, say about their upbringing. 

They tell of heightened responsibilities and an acute awareness of adult realities plus concerns about  feeling different from their peers.

We explore the broader impacts of pastoral life on children, and explore displacement, constant mobility, difficulties in forming lasting friendships and achieving a sense of belonging.

Comparisons are made with the experiences of diplomats and defence ministry kids, emphasizing the common struggles and the critical role parents play in providing stability.

Plus we talk the importance of empathy and creating safe spaces for doubts.

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Speaker 1:

What are the kids of pastors telling us about their current experiences growing up in ministry families? Valerie Ling is our guest. Valerie Ling, friend of the pastor's heart, and it's good to have her back. Dominic Steele is my name. It is released today, the Ministry Kids Wellbeing Survey, a survey of 107 Australian children from ministry families. Average age of the survey participant 12 years old, sharing their findings of life in a pastor's family. Most ministry kids are positive, but most kids feel different to their peers. Key issues that have come up are engagement at church, lifestyle and social perception. But issues to talk about also include personal faith, moving house and the unique opportunities that come from being in a ministry family. And what are the recommendations coming out of the survey for us as parents? Valerie Ling leads the large team of psychologists engaged in Sydney's Centre for Effective Living and Centre for Effective Serving, but she's married to a pastor and so has real skin in this game. And, valerie, for you, doing this survey of kids, it's not just academic and your pastor's heart is full of all of this.

Speaker 2:

Initially started because we've seen kids come through the practice and we've heard what the pastor's kids have said. But my children, who are now young adults, were really interested in this and particularly our youngest, is really invested in the results and, dominic, she's processing a good 10, 12 years of her experiences through the voice of these kids. It's a little bit anxiety provoking for myself.

Speaker 1:

Are you feeling critiqued?

Speaker 2:

I think there are a lot of things we just didn't know. You know she'll see something come out of the results and say wait a minute. That's what I thought and felt, yeah. So you know, we're going through the process, we're in it as well.

Speaker 1:

So you interviewed 100 children.

Speaker 2:

Well, they completed surveys.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

About 139 actually logged on, but we had 107 clean, complete questionnaires Right.

Speaker 1:

And overall experience, church engagement, lifestyles, social perception, those kind of things. Well, let's talk about church first, because you were telling me in a conversation a few weeks ago that pastor's kids have too many adult realities. What did you mean by that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So first of all, it's a mixed survey. I would like to say this is probably one of the first ones that I know that have polled children in real time. A lot of the research for ministry kids reflect back as adults. And the second is there's a lot more that we know about kids on the fields across cultural ministry than we know about clergy. So this is unique in that we put them all into the one survey to see what would come out and the things that they have in common. One of these things would be that they spend a lot more time with adults and they have more exposure to the realities of an adult world. So things like being responsible, managing money, knowing that you can't always get what you want. You're doing different things from your peers, but both missions and clergy kids say they have a lot of responsibilities as well looking after siblings, manning the house, home duties and a lot of ministry duties as well.

Speaker 1:

Mm-hmm. What about awareness of adult reality?

Speaker 2:

So I think the older ones consider themselves to be different from their peers in understanding suffering, hardship, politics, geography. These would not just be the kids that are on the field, but I think they're also coming from clergy kids, just knowing the reality of what does happen when you have riots, knowing because your parents talk about it, you hear it in the sermons, you're surrounded by an awareness and that's not something you can have in common with your other friends in school who probably are not as concerned or not as aware of those realities. So I suspect I have a hypothesis that anxiety, particularly as we see in the later years of adult ministry kids, there's a tinge of that of going the world really isn't that safe and we know either firsthand or we just have heard lots more about it.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I'm thinking there's some great advantages in that, in that you get to open the door, talk to more people, you learn to be more socially able, all those kind of things and yet there are potentially disadvantages in that you're not shielded from things in the way that others might be.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and also it's a bit of Russian roulette, dominic. So I think it really depends on your relationship that your parents have with the church. If it's a healthy relationship, vice versa, like if you're in a ministry context that is healthy and loving and generous and gracious, adults probably might spend time talking to you as a child and as a human being and answering your questions. But what we get from the survey is that there's an awful lot of not knowing if it's okay to say that I'm afraid or that I don't understand. So one of the core things that came out for both groups of kids is the need to have that parent connection. You know their first team, their first belonging, their first sense of adults. Giving us the answers to our questions is really from parents.

Speaker 1:

Ministry kids go to more funerals.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, anecdotally, because we I don't know whether a lot of people know this we're known more for our clergy work, but for the last decade we debrief families off the field and our practice sees the kids as well and a little bit of traumatic experience from funerals does tend to come up from the kids Sometimes because they don't really understand they have to deal with death. A lot more Like weddings and funerals, I think, came out in the survey.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I remember there was one year when I went to 16 weddings. I don't know how many our children went to, but far more than their cousins.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the reality of that, but the seriousness of it too. Like when I read through the comments from the kids, life sounds really serious because if you attend that many public gatherings and you know there's weddings you can be happy and then there's funerals, you need to sit really, really, really, really still. They deal with that a lot more than their peers and again means that they feel that difference from their friends. They deal with that a lot more than their peers and again means that they feel that difference from their friends. You know how many 12-year-olds go to school and say, oh, went to another funeral.

Speaker 1:

Food was good. Not many, yeah, but you do get to raid the church fridge.

Speaker 2:

Now this was beautiful as we saw the answers coming through, because we had quite a few open-ended meaning that we just said to them tell us. We saw how much it meant to them to have the generosity of the ministry family that they were in. Many mentioned discounts that they got for school, all the food that gets given to them, the kindnesses and, like you said, the privileges, the first dibs on things as well, and I think that helps or at least it sounds like from the kids that it helps them to know that, though it is a counted cost, there are many privileges as well that come and many front row witnessing of God's kindness to them and their family.

Speaker 1:

Now you and I were talking about this book by Barnabas Piper, yeah, and I made the comment that I mean I'd read it. A few months ago, just before we interviewed James Galea, and I made the comment that he was quite negative about some of the experiences of growing up as a pastor's kid and that perhaps he was overly negative. But you said to me actually pretty much the experiences that he was describing in this book came through in your survey results.

Speaker 2:

Cover to cover. This is the book to read. So there's a couple of things I want to say to this. First of all, I'm getting a chance to interview Barnabas. I'm looking forward to that and he's quite apologetic in the book and I understand he says I'm not a statistician. You know, I'm not a researcher. I have lived experience and I've talked to a lot of ministry kids and this is our collective experience. This is in the US. This other book that I wanted to also mention you can raise it these are for third culture kids right.

Speaker 1:

This is an excellent book. I'll hold it up to the camera here. Thongs or Flip-Flops, australian Kids Overseas and what Comes Next. Now, that's speaking more broadly than ministry, I take it.

Speaker 2:

That's specifically third culture, kids mainly in ministry, so on the field. But if you put those two books together, would it?

Speaker 1:

also include like I mean, my cousins grew up as the children of diplomats.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes.

Speaker 1:

Diplomats defence ministry.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, there's a lot of similarity in that community kids who are basically roped into the family business, if you like, and then move around. But if you blend those two books in there are a lot of similarities. Our survey was predominantly young kids and I love that. I just love the fact that we got to hear you know, you can kind of see, the modal distribution is 10 to 14, right, but our survey did show that the older the children got, the more the impact of ministry weighed on them. These books and this research predominantly document retrospective accounts. The research suggests that, particularly in the missions community, as kids grow to their 18 to 25, this is when we start to see first episodes of mental health episodes come to bear. That's when you really see the impact.

Speaker 1:

So in your survey, because your average age is 12, you haven't really hit to see whether or not there's a difference between mental health predominance issues amongst clergy kids to the wider community kid community yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we had a smaller sample of cross-cultural kids, about 40. There were no statistical differences in any of the things that we looked at really On mental health type stuff.

Speaker 2:

Or anything Right. Even in time, with parents, parents understanding there really wasn't any difference. So what I'm suspecting, my hypothesis, is we are having the chance in this survey to hear some of the things that do matter, yeah, and could matter even more if not addressed. Does that make sense? Because in young adolescent mental health anyway, you wouldn't expect to see a lot of depression and anxiety scores in the under 12s. But you certainly do see it, you know, once you go 16, 18 to 25. And these books, they are written really from a group of people who are now processing all the stuff that went on, like my kids, and therefore experiencing, you know, the grief, the loss, the anxiety. So is it negative? I think it's just realistic because no matter where you look in the research whether it's defence, kids looking back, adult kids looking back, missions, kids looking back they say very similar things and the core issue is a sense of being displaced, of being on watch and not having an opportunity to really process the things that have happened.

Speaker 1:

Well, let's work through those three in turn, then, because, displaced, one of the issues was moving house, and although the third culture kids moved house a lot more than the kids growing up in rectories, pastorates, here there's still more house moving going on than in the general community.

Speaker 2:

Definitely, and you know, is there more? I mean on average, I think we found that the cross-cultural kids moved. You know they remembered six houses. Ministry kids remembered four. That's still probably more than the average kid, right? So mobility certainly was a common feature. Like I was saying to you earlier, if I didn't colour code the kids according to whether they were in local, ministry or in cross-cultural, you couldn't really tell the differences as they were speaking about moving.

Speaker 1:

But moving was a significant issue for all of them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's right. Being displaced, being displaced.

Speaker 1:

Tell us, dig into that, for us the anxiety that we could move again right.

Speaker 2:

So kids don't know what's happening. Are we going to move today, next week, next year? The anticipation of the move to us sounded like in their comments that it was harder for them to invest fully in friendships, to invest fully in the experiences that they were having, because there was an anticipation this could all dissolve. So the feeling of I'm not. I'm in this community but I'm not sure if I'm part of it. Can I be a part of it? Feeling like where is home, where do I belong? And I think that's why parents are so important in this space.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, mobility came up for both groups which was even interesting for us to observe that, you know, the kids were talking about moving and transition and not feeling like they could really invest, wondering when the next move was going to come.

Speaker 2:

Let's talk about being watched, because that was one of the things that Barnabas Piper raised as well that I'm always on display, yeah yeah, and this is probably where you might find some differences with the culture kids, in that when you look different in an environment so if you're, you know, in Africa or you're in Asia that feeling of being watched amps up again there's a sense of you're really different and in some cultures you might get pinched at. I remember us living in Singapore and though my children don't really look that different to the average Singaporean, everybody wanted to take photos of them. I felt under threat with that.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I mean because you and Josh are both Singaporean.

Speaker 2:

Well, I have a bit more of a mixed heritage, so I think when I'm in Singapore I do look different, and when the kids were younger they looked a little different. But yes, it's just people wanting to take photos of them.

Speaker 1:

But if you think about when they're in the field, they're going to be different, and then when they come home they're kind of doing deputation and so again being watched. Yeah home they're kind of doing deputation and so again being watched, yeah, what about for the?

Speaker 2:

pastor's kid though. Um, there's a sense of being watched as well. Yeah, I mean barnabas talks about from the car park to the toilets, to the supermarket, to school. Everybody knows you're the minister's kid, and so there are expectations of adults particularly looking in on behaviour, expecting perhaps that you know the minister's kid would behave a certain way, wouldn't swear, wouldn't have doubts. There's a sense that ministry kids would have all the answers. I remember my kids telling me mum, you don't know, but every time there was something to do with scripture in school, everybody looked at us for the answer. And what if we didn't know the answer? What could we say? We didn't know.

Speaker 1:

And so that's where the anxiety comes in.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, feeling like you're never allowed to take off the role of the job. Now I want to say, though the kids know that that I think the things that we were really touched was their faith in Christ. How genuine if you think about this, you know most of them, 10 to 14, how genuinely they love the Lord, how genuinely they know that what they're doing is important and how much they want to make it work. But that's the pressure, right. It's almost like a message of I've got to make this work. If I don't, mum and dad could lose their job. People might think poorly of mum and dad. Maybe they won't believe what they say anymore. So there is that pressure.

Speaker 1:

What about relationship with parents? One of the lines from a survey respondent my dad sometimes feels, like he's not here because he's on the phone with people from work that his brain's off thinking about a conversation or a sermon.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that was common.

Speaker 2:

So I can't remember the stat, but I think it was something like overwhelmingly about 60% of kids felt they had enough time with their parents and their parents understood them.

Speaker 2:

But if they could improve things, it would be for parents to be less busy, to be more at home and to be doing fun, chill things. Yeah, so that that was a common theme. And I think the other important thing is quite a lot of them mentioned the need for parents to empathize, help them to say the hard things without feeling judged, or I think Barnabas talks about sort of theologically being clamped down. You know, like it's a closed system. If you say that you feel angry with your friend, you suddenly have a Bible verse that you've now got to live through, as opposed to being able to say I'm feeling angry with my friend and a parent sitting down and saying, oh, what happened? I get angry too. You know, like working through I think that's probably a very strong theme that's come out from the survey is more time with parents in a chilled, relaxed, fun, light environment and the ability for us to share our doubts, our strong feelings and some of the things that are hard for us emotionally.

Speaker 1:

Negative things that have impacted them, from the ministry of their parents.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I've got a list here. This one was really interesting I think in light of the current culture that we live in, that the negative attitudes that society has about ministry and Christians, some of the kids feel like they wear it too. So I think one of the children actually wrote my friends, tease me and said that my dad's a pitiful. So that sort of negative press that the church, christians and recently Christian leaders have had, the kids have to take that with them. That's hard. Oh, the church is on all the time, right? So if you think about particularly in Australia and I'm sure in other parts of the world as well, you know the weekends are no longer for staying home and relaxing. There's a lot on Sport parties. I think that's something that the kids mentioned. That displacement also occurs because there are strong expectations that they're at youth, they're at church and many of the things that happen with friends happen in collision with those times. So it's like church is always on.

Speaker 1:

There isn't a sense that they get to have a weekend off.

Speaker 2:

Where are my people is the other thing Like friendship came out a lot in both camps, both kids.

Speaker 1:

That was really moving for me to listen to the loneliness. Loneliness Because I mean, my perception is that because you're there, you're going to have friends and other adults are going to be investing in you as well. But you're actually saying the pastor's kid feels alone.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the friend-to-friend connection. You know, just feeling like, well, I think we should have asked maybe someone else can do this research what contributes to the loneliness? My hypothesis is particularly for this age group, 10 to 14, it's quite dependent on parents and family, isn't it? So if you're at home by yourself and you're not allowed really to go and interact with your school friends, you get a little bit cut off maybe from friends.

Speaker 2:

But I think more what was coming out was we really would appreciate to be able to connect and hang out with people who are like us, that ministry kid to ministry kid connection. They're very appreciative of camps and conferences that came up quite a bit. They love that. But there's this sense of how do we continue that even in the everyday? How can we hang out with people who are like us? And I suppose even for the pastor's heart to understand the missions community that you're supporting, the kids who are overseas feel greatly disconnected from Australian culture or even just contemporary culture. I would say both camps because of strict this came out too stricter rules by parents in terms of social media use and things like that. You can be a bit disconnected from your friends if you're not allowed to be on those platforms as well.

Speaker 1:

So you're talking about the mission kid who's where parents are strict.

Speaker 2:

No, I think across the board, across the board, there was a sense that kids say we have stricter rules than our friends.

Speaker 1:

Right, right, okay, that good bad, or yeah.

Speaker 2:

I think we've got to understand it. What do they mean? It possibly adds to a sense that it's harder to connect with our friends, it's harder to find people who are our people, because if you have lots on on the weekends and you're not allowed to skip church and things like that I'm not saying that that's good or bad Plus, you have stricter rules about going to parties or participating in social media, then it becomes that extra harder to connect, isn't it? And what's the language you can use? I remember our kids. We had very strict rules with them for social media.

Speaker 2:

In fact, there was a parent in school who thanked us Thanks, because we reference you. Like we tell them do you want her as your mum? Okay, but we had to find a way and I don't know that we did this very well for the children to not feel even more weird to their friends when they didn't know Like. I remember my 16-year-old son saying I hope he doesn't mind me saying this, but he had only ever been allowed to be on Pinterest and he was like try telling your 16-year-old friends, who are mostly guys, that you're only on Pinterest. He's like nobody's on Pinterest, mum. It's like hmm, think about that one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, nobody's on Pinterest, mum. It's like, hmm, let me think about that one. Yeah, I remember going to a parent orientation at the school and the person who was welcoming us. This is when our son was in year six saying they don't need a smartphone, and I think that is great.

Speaker 1:

He's saying you won't be able to get away with it when they're in year 12, but you can get away with it in year 7. And feeling so encouraged by that. And then he said to us when you take them to a party, I want the norm to be that everyone goes in. You know that you go in to drop them off and you go in to pick them up. Yeah, and he said they will fight you on that in the car every time you know. But could we have that as the norm please?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And I was so impressed with him in attempting to set culture like that, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. One other interesting thing that I thought is worth mentioning is that in our small little survey and we really can't make too much of it because it was only little and it was quite localised to our networks, like our practices networks, but girls would probably we found a correlation between girls feeling the impact of their parents' ministry on them.

Speaker 1:

More than boys yeah.

Speaker 2:

People girls feeling the impact of their parents' ministry on them More than boys, yeah, and I think it's to be aware that we think it might be if we don't talk about ministry things at home or, you know, if they're not really aware of what's happening at church. But the reality is ministry is all around our kids, right, and this is my particular, I think, appeal to churches. If you have a vibe going on about the ministry worker the kids are going to know right.

Speaker 2:

They're watching it, because where do ministry kids sit? They sit at the back. They don't really want to be at the front or even in the middle. They can see every body language that happens and girls are particularly attuned to that sort of thing. They pick it up. They can hear things that are being said about their parents. They can pick up attitudes and so the kindness there was actually a couple of kids. When you ask them what would make ministry kids happy, a couple of them actually said be kinder to our parents. You know, be nice to our parents.

Speaker 2:

There is that awareness Particularly. I think we also found the same effect for older kids. So the older that they get, the more they're picking up on the difficulties of being in ministry. One kid even put they said I wish I could do more for my. This particular case was the dad. I wish I could do more for my. This particular case was the dad. I wish I could do more for my dad. We need to be aware that this sort of conflict, because the clergy wellbeing survey that we did and we talked about last year picked up that there were levels of hostility that were just really extreme in churches.

Speaker 2:

The kids will pick this up, pick up those tensions.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, anything else. The kids said under the section of what do you want us to know about?

Speaker 2:

being a ministry kid. Actually, they were so wise. We've learned a lot, even as a practice, from them Less busy parents, please, less meetings and I thought this was interesting. They're basically not saying can our parents do less? I think they're asking for flexibility. They're actually saying can there be a little bit more flex so that things aren't locked in quite as much?

Speaker 1:

How do you do that?

Speaker 2:

Well, if you think about when can ministry kids go on holidays? Generally it's locked in right. You can't really go during Easter, Like you can have a good time maybe in January, but it's all after Christmas and things like that. So a little bit of variety I'm not saying that and obviously the kids haven't said this, but that is something that puts them at a different place to their friends is when they can take holidays and how long and how much money can be devoted to that. So I think being able to maybe tap into there might be some things that they might want to do that's different one year that the whole family can do that maybe other families have had a chance to do. They definitely said people to hang out with, so could they have more spaces to hang out with other ministry kids? I've already spoken about empathy from parents, a place to doubt, a place for them to have mixed feelings.

Speaker 1:

A place to doubt. Keep going on that.

Speaker 2:

Because the ministry kids told us that they're always expected to have the right answer, right, and if you say well, I don't believe in that, that will look poorly on your ministry parent. So a place that they can actually say I don't agree or I don't understand, or why does it have to be this way. It's probably going to be harder for them to do that in church. It'd probably be in the space of with parents or even being really intentional about getting uncles and aunts who can surround the ministry kids with a place and space for them to talk about the hard things they said they need to be loved and accepted by their church community. I said this be kind to our parents. No, I am not perfect. This one kid said it would be really nice not to have 55 million questions to answer.

Speaker 1:

On a survey from you. Well, maybe that was related to me, yeah.

Speaker 2:

The next thing privacy.

Speaker 1:

Privacy. Yeah, tell us about that.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think quite a few of the kids mentioned that there's always people coming in and out of their house, and so they would love to be able to have sometimes some space where they don't always have to be interacting with strangers and, obviously, keeping them out of sermons that came out a couple of times as well. Can their stuff not be known by everybody, like is it really public property? What happens in their world? And finally this is a really good one A few of them actually mentioned resources. Could they have access to counselling? I can't remember whether they said free, but free would probably be good. Could they actually have access to counselling and more information about how to manage being a ministry kid? And then for the missions kids, it was the ability to get more access to contemporary culture, like just to understand Australian culture or even, I think, just contemporary culture. So resources came up a couple of times as well. That's what they said. What?

Speaker 1:

surprised you most.

Speaker 2:

Their honesty. Some of the comments I wouldn't share because I think they could be identifiable. If you were a parent, you'd probably know the way your kids say things, the honesty of them actually really forthrightly saying, sold on Jesus, know that what we're doing is really meaningful, love being a part of my family and, at the same time, the commonality of the themes that I've just talked to you about. The same time, the commonality of the themes that I've just talked to you about going. But this you know, the busyness, um, the moving, the loneliness, uh, I think the honesty of the kids and it was like why have we never asked them before? Why wait? And I think this is what barnabas and these books, um, are really advocating for is that preventative if we, we know that and it's so common across the US, in Australia, where the kids are saying the same things, that it provides us with an opportunity to actually listen and validate and make a change for them.

Speaker 1:

What worried you most.

Speaker 2:

I think what worried me most was again the commonality of how organized church may be depriving some kids of their parents. And that worry actually comes because from the clergy wellbeing survey that we did, a third of ministers at that point in time were thinking of resigning. One of the primary reasons was the impact on family. Now we've got the ministers saying that, we've got the kids saying that right, you've got actually a kind of a corroborative statement there of going. We need our parents. And I think one of the children actually said the church consumes my dad. That worries me because as a psychologist, that's like the foundations and the precursor for later adverse mental health experiences, right. So I would really hope that we can think a lot about that. Whether organized church and the way that we're doing it, the pressures, the conflict you know, for that 15% to 25% of kids that are struggling since you know a lot of them were okay but some of them weren't that that's going to have some long-term adverse experience outcomes.

Speaker 1:

What encouraged you most?

Speaker 2:

Their faith in Jesus. I mean, we know in the practice that you know when. I will never forget because we have a practice that we have to. We want to see all the kids as long as they're in school. And this young person that had come in positive and you know, wanting, wanting us to know that they, they was in it with their parents. And then we said we want to know how you're doing you. And the tears that just rolled down. What encouraged me was their faithfulness, that even at such a young age, their devotion to Jesus and to suffer along with their parents was so tangible. I thought that was just amazing.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for coming in, you're very welcome.

Speaker 1:

Valerie Ling has been my guest and she, of course, is with the Sydney Centre for Effective Living and the Centre for Effective Serving. The three books we've talked about. Lauren Wells is Raising Up a Generation of Healthy Third Culture kids, practical guides to preventative care, Thongs or flip-flops is this one? Australian kids overseas and what comes next? And this one from Barnabas Piper, called the Pastor's Kid. My name is Dominic Steele, You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.

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