Parental coping with their child’s abandonment of Jewish Orthodox religious observance in Israel

Abstract

ABSTRACT The current study’s focus was on the parental emotions, thoughts and coping methods of parents with their child’s abandoning the Jewish Orthodox belief system, using the salutogenic approach to study their sense of coherence and promote relevant professional instruction. Semi-structured interviews were held with 40 parents. Content analysis of the interview transcripts revealed three themes: 1) The parent’s comprehension of the reasons for the child’s abandoning religious observance as the surrounding influence of friends, the issue of military service and self-emotional difficulty. 2) The parent’s perception of the radical changes as manageable through hiding the changes and searching for comfort from the environment and through flexing demands from the child and tightening religious demands from the siblings. 3) The parents’ emotional processing of the child’s abandoning the belief system as arousing difficulty, deep sadness and fantasy, and hope for the child’s return to it. Results demonstrate that the parental sense of coherence was based on a dual attitude and the need for greater acknowledgement of parent-informed interventions that specifically address the issues of combining the child’s and parents’ need to reduce the family difficulty.