Genesis 2:24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
The closest relationship between two humans must certainly be that between husband and wife as imaged by the ‘one flesh’ reality. Mature Christian parents should be training their sons and daughters up for it and not to ‘take ransom’ of their children’s emotion as some parents tend to behave. Parents should be training up their son to leave them and set up his own family under God and if the child is a daughter, to train her to be given away to be cleaved to her husband.
Immature parents tend to behave otherwise. They insist on emphasizing on the relationship of parent/child over that of the husband/wife. Especially when the age old conflicts arise between the mother–in-law (MIL) and daughter-in-law (DIL), who does the poor husband side with? The issue is not less helped when the husband is the elder son or the only son.
One scriptural way in looking at this is not to confuse honour for our parent with love for our spouse. Some parents insist that their married child love them and honour their spouse. But this is not the biblical mandate. Having state this, it does not give passport for the married children to ignore everything their parent says from now and listen only to the spouse. But what it does is to change the direction of the child’s orientation. Before marriage, the child orientation is to the parents. After marriage, his/her orientation must be to the spouse. Married couple first priority must be to each other followed by other duties such as filial, sibling or parental duty, etc. Children added to the married couples later can often blur that distinction. Nevertheless, this principle must be ever held up before both husband and wife.
Does this mean that we can’t stay over with our parents after marriage? What if we have yet to save enough for that new house? What if our parents are medically unfit and require constant care and therefore would like to move in with us? What if no one looks after our children while we work? And the permutation can go on and on.
The issue at stake is not so much with sharing the same roof. The real issue is whose headship is reigning. Before marriage, we are under our father’s headship and therefore submission is appropriately rendered. But if the newly wed is to move in with the guy’s parents, this creates 2 issues, 1) the husband is not exercising his headship as he is not the head of the household, 2) which headship should the wife submit to now, her father-in-law or her husband?
The situation is different if the married couple were to invite their parent to stay with them for all the valid reasons. In this case, the husband is the head of the family and the parents understand that they are under the son’s headship. What is the difference then, you may ask, are they not all living together in either of the above cases?
The difference is in the word ‘maturity’. The husband needs to grow up to maturity. Part of that involves exercising his headship in his new family. That means instituting new and godly culture and habits in his family under God. All members within the household should submit to the culture and elderly parents who live with them ought to recognize and respect it. When that happens, there will be a lot less problems with important issues like MIL/ DIL relationship, grandchildren discipline and so on.
