I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand. (John 10:28)

I've seen it from both sides - from the side of the family with a difficult child and from the side of the mother who complained that one "rotten apple" in her son's third grade class was disrupting the learning environment for the whole group. Both sets of parents would no doubt prefer to live in a simple, unambiguous world in which everything rolled smoothly along like clockwork. The fact is, however, that even the best parents in the world cannot necessarily prevent their children from having emotional problems, and parents who are lucky enough to have relatively well-adjusted children cannot, and probably should not, totally insulate their children against disruptive influe…