Excerpt from an email received from a mother in our stake:
Dear Amazing (Mother's name),
I hope you’ll forgive me if I mention one more thing that’s been troubling me, and President, I hope you know that I pray for you night and day, I’d jump off a cliff if you asked me to, but I need to tell you this. When (son's name) confessed to his leaders that he had a pornography problem, you counseled him to apologize to us, his parents, which he did. It has bothered me ever since, not because I didn’t want to hear that (heaven knows there isn’t much that shocks me these days), but because it really was none of my business. (Son's name) didn’t need to feel that shame in front of us, it was between him and his Heavenly Father and his leaders, not us. He was an adult, for one thing, but even a teenaged person shouldn’t be required to do that. No apology was necessary. I think it made a difficult process more difficult and unnecessarily so. I agree that an underage child should be able to turn to their parents for help, to formulate a plan to overcome those issues IF THEY CHOSE, but not all parent/child relationships are healthy enough to be helpful. I wish that weren’t the case, but it really is. No harm was done at our house, but harm can really be done elsewhere if those forced admissions aren’t handled with complete and unconditional love and acceptance.
Dear Amazing (Mother's name),
Thank you for sharing all of this with me. And thank you for the wonderful example you and (husband) give all of us in the way you live the gospel and teach your family. It’s wonderful to see!
As for the confession to parents, I’m not offended. I’m grateful to know your feelings and especially thankful that it did not hurt (son's name). My feeling is that whenever a young person is living at home, no matter the age, and is hiding something from his/her parents that is contrary to how he/she is taught in the home, that the spirit of repentance requires that person to seek forgiveness for the dishonesty and deceit. It’s not so much a sexual addiction confession, in my opinion, as it is a matter of integrity. Even if (son's name) was an adult and was living on his own, but had deceived his parents by accessing porn while in high school, I would have still counseled him to seek your forgiveness for deceiving you while in the home. (I typically say something like, “You don’t have to go into very much detail, just say something like, ‘You made it known that we had a rule and expectation that I was not to look at pornography in our home, but without you knowing, I did. Will you forgive me?’ “)
I hope that helps a little in understanding why I counseled him to do so. I’m sure other priesthood leaders do not agree with me and feel as you do. I don’t know if there is an absolute right or wrong to the matter. I do try to take into consideration the young person’s relationship with his parents and the parents’ understanding of the gospel before giving this counsel, but I feel pretty strongly about this.
Maybe this strong feeling comes from an experience I had a long time ago. When I was a teenager, I deceived my mother about something that I never told her about that most would think to be inconsequential. 15 or so years later my parents were staying in our home the night before leaving on their first mission. As I knelt in my personal prayers, asking the Lord to bless my parents, I suddenly had the memory of my teenage deception vividly come back to me. I knew that I needed to seek her forgiveness before they left. So I sought out my mother and asked her forgiveness for my inconsequential deception many years before. It was a sweet experience and she, of course, forgave me. But I learned that even the small infractions of the Lord’s law of honesty must be addressed before God and man.
Sorry to take so long in responding on that question.
Thanks again for the wonderful work you two do in blessing so many around you and in our stake.
Crismon Lewis
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