16:20 - Mistake 8. Huerta suggests that a healthy child is one who honors both parents and sees both parents as “broken” (suggesting both are troubled or "at fault").

But in Christian marriages that end in divorce, often one parent is involved in repeated marriage-destroying sins. And the other parent is bending over backward to improve the marriage. It's like being in a sailboat where one parent is trimming the sails and scanning the horizon while the other one is drilling holes in the hull.

Danny Huerta gives an anecdote of a child who is “doing well” in his view…and the evidence of that is that the young man would speak in an honorable and loving way about both parents. That's a very strange thing to say. I don't think a normal person would consider that a measure of how well a young adult is doing, do you?

Children are truth-tellers. Once they get to a certain age, they know when the emperor is wearing no clothes. They've observed and experienced both parents. In many cases, one of the parents is not a good human being, he or she is a person who is undermining the love and acceptance in the home, and creating chaos. Measuring a child's well-being based on how well a child covers up for a cheating, addicted, or abusive parent tells us only that they live in fear of revealing the truth. Why must children keep the code of silence? Why aren't they allowed to say what they see and feel? It's okay to acknowledge in the family if one parent is treating the kids badly. Why must children be enlisted to cover up and conceal the marriage-destroying sins of one of their parents?

I would suggest that a better way of measuring a child's well-being is their level of fear, confusion, anger, grief, or anxiety.

Demanding that a young person only speak positively of both parents is a form of gaslighting. It's saying their experience isn't valid. It's telling them to lie. And it's training them to use a spiritual abuse method called mutualizing, where everyone is required to view all marriage problems as equally the fault of both parents. It's similar to the “50/50" or "two-to-tango” ideology that underpins Focus on the Family and makes so much of their their advice unsafe.

Huerta describes a young man's home as a marriage where the parents “couldn't get along,” suggesting that they are just immature and poor communicators.  But there are no details, no examples given. Maybe there’s a good reason they couldn’t get along. Maybe Dad spends money on prostitutes or child rape porn. Maybe he belittles Mom, no matter how much she sacrifices her dignity to appease him. Or perhaps Mom is manipulative and self-centered to the extreme. Or maybe she drinks, is unreliable, and buys hundreds of dollars of booze each month. We don’t know how serious it is, so we don’t know if it’s appropriate for the child to speak of both parents honorably and lovingly. The Bible doesn't mince words about sexual immorality and swindling and greed and abuse. Maybe it's a sign of "doing well" for the child to tell the truth or say nothing at all.

Let’s be honest: maybe both parents are seriously messed up. I get that. I also know that it’s normal for children to love both parents—warts and all.

But it seems that Focus on the Family's advice to the young man has a negative result: It protects the bad parent and undercuts the good parent who might need some spiritual, financial, or emotional support right now. The adult child cannot show anger or outrage, or speak of the injustices happening in his family. He must speak in an honorable and loving way in order to suit Focus on the Family's ideology. If you read enough articles at Focus you find that the pressure to forgive and smooth things over is always put on the victimized wife (almost always the woman), while the abuser/betrayer's actions are excused or explained away, and years of damaging sin are minimized and covered up—as long as he (and in Focus on the Family anecdotes, it's almost always a man) goes to counseling a couple of times.

Kids aren’t fools. You’ve been teaching them right from wrong from Day One. And half of divorces in the U.S. are for very serious reasons. This video suggests that the child who breaks the code of silence is sinning or not adjusting well. But frankly, if the kids are older, they often know some of the issues the marriage. They've been living in tension and trauma for a long time.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying the child should bad-mouth a parent publicly or seek revenge. I'm not suggesting the child refuses to see the other parent (provided they feel safe). But I am saying children of divorce need a safe place to express and work through their anger, fear, outrage, injuries, and frustration. These are godly emotions as we know from King David's psalms of lament in the Bible.

17:50 – Mistake 9. The Devil made me do it. Focus on the Family portrays divorce as some “darkness” that comes over the home, completely ignoring the marriage-destroying sins of abuse, betrayal, or addictions committed by one or both spouses. They blame it on Satan wanting divorce. But in reality, Satan loves abusive marriages. He loves bondage to evil.

Satan encourages abuse, lies, and violence. Satan wants Christians to stay in a marriage that destroys them and their children. Satan wants Christians to be rendered ineffective for serving the church and spreading the good news.

19:10 – Again, the guests bring up the “cycle” of divorce that’s supposedly devastating, but they never mention any cycle of abuse or infidelity. We know there is a heritable aspect of some personality disorders.

21:30 - Mistake 10. These three men advocate something called co-parenting and setting aside your disagreements for the kids’ sake. This is really good advice if you and the other parent have good character, and the children are cared for and accepted. But where there is a destructive ex-spouse with poor character, who makes false accusations, threats, lies, refuses to care for the family, squanders money, or places weapons on the counter to intimidate you, you cannot be naïve. You need to take precautions. Instead of “co-parenting,” you may end up using another technique called “parallel parenting,” where you don’t engage much with the other parent about anything other than the legal minimum required.

You see, the landmark Jaffee study shows that if the father has at least 3 of the 7 anti-social traits (see link), he is destructive to the children, and divorce provides some protection by removing the children at least part of the time from the home, thus reducing their likelihood of developing conduct disorders themselves.

22:20 - Mistake 11. Focus on the Family pretends the godly spouse can “bring health” back into the marriage single-handedly. The reality: The abuser needs to stop abusing. The cheater needs to stop cheating. Each spouse is responsible for their own attitudes and behaviors; the godly wife cannot control the misbehaving husband no matter what she does. The godly husband cannot control his alcoholic wife just by setting a good example. This is another false ideology that underpins Focus on the Family: placing the burden on fixing the marriage on the wife (usually) and letting the destructive husband off the hook.

22:30 - Mistake 12. Believing that therapy can solve serious marriage problems, where one spouse has a pattern of cheating, abusing or addictions. They say, “It will be much more helpful to your kids if you decide to go get the help.”  Yes, if the problem is just communication, problem-solving techniques, or conflict resolution, that might be true. But if one spouse just loves to sin whenever the other isn’t looking, there’s not much hope. Focus on the Family talks about the “complexities of marriage.” But abuse and betrayal are destroyers of marriage, not mere “complexities” that one has to endure. A complexity is an illness or a job layoff or a natural disaster, or something outside the relationship. Marriage therapy is not the right path for individual characterological issues. The abuser needs to go to individual therapy and work on themselves.

These Focus on the Family spokesmen are supposed to be experts but don't seem to understand that abusers love to abuse. Abusers love their life exactly as it is. In their minds, being kind to people just takes too much time. Reasoning with others and listening to their views annoys them. Finding a mutual agreement is too much work. They're impatient. They have the "my way or the highway" mindset. Abusers want to dominate. They want compliance NOW, and being mean or brutal is a great way of achieving that—FAST! Abuse works for them.

Finally, there are some final ironies in this video:

19:45 – 20:39 — John Trent tells an anecdote where a mother divorces and the child is angry at first but admits later, "Mom, you were right." The implication in the story is that there was physical abuse, and that the adult child now sees that divorce was the best choice in the hostile dangerous situation. John Trent's story suggests divorce might be best in some cases, but Huerta and Sanford ignore his anecdote. That message doesn't fly at Focus on the Family. (But thank you, Dr. Trent, for trying.)

23:20 - Huerta talks about Dr. John Trent’s book, Breaking the Cycle of Divorce, and suggests viewers buy it. It was written more than a decade ago, and rather than “breaking the cycle of divorce,” it failed to do so. Trent’s own lovely daughter got divorced a few years ago. She talks about it publicly on several Focus on the Family videos. Like many of us, she was a girl from a good Christian family who fell in love with someone who concealed their traits and became destructive. It can happen to anyone. In her Focus on the Family interview, she had to be very careful what she said because Focus pressures couples to stay married even when there is serial infidelity or pedophilia. But when I interviewed her, she was eager to tell the full story on YouTube HERE.

Focus on the Family is UNSAFE where there is abuse/betrayal. 

Note: Where there is marriage-destroying sin, kids aren't "caught in the middle" of divorce. They are caught in the cyclone of someone's rampant sin, usually one parent's cheating, porn, violence, mental abuse, or addictions. 

• • Most of the time, the kids side with the protective parent:  That makes sense:  Part 1

• • But sometimes the kids side with the abusive controlling parent. Find out why in this video series.
    • Part 1  Why the Child Doesn’t See Through the Abuser
    • Part 2  More Reasons Why the Child Sides with the Abuser
    • Part 3  Rebuilding the Relationship