When "Praying More" Doesn’t Heal Your Child’s Depression

When "Praying More" Doesn’t Heal Your Child’s Depression

What makes a parent’s faith feel suddenly fragile? This conversation between Nancy Sabato and author Lori Wildenberg centres on that moment when a child’s depression shatters the illusion of “doing everything right.” Lori shares the terrifying season when her college-aged daughter, long prone to big emotions, became eerily flat and unreachable.

She later found out her daughter had attempted to take her own life, and describes how “some people call it a heart attack of the brain” to capture how distorted thinking can become in deep depression. While focused on her daughter’s survival, Lori slowly realised she was carrying trauma too. The chat digs into the myth of the perfect Christian parenting formula: raise kids in church, pray hard, and everything should work out.

Lori tells a story of a valedictorian whose life derailed after following that formula, showing how fragile it is when life doesn’t match the script. Instead, she talks about building both resiliency and hope, explaining that hope is rooted in knowing “the Lord is with you and that he wants good things for you,” even when trouble comes.

Parents will hear honest reflections on harmful comparison, including Lori’s own regret about comparing her daughters’ bodies, which fed into an eating disorder and revealed how closely eating issues, depression and anxiety can be linked. There’s also a compassionate look at faith and mental illness: Lori describes how repeated, unanswered prayers led her daughter to give up on Bible reading for a time and how, for her, “someone with skin on” was more helpful than another verse.

If you’re carrying the weight of a child’s mental health struggle and wondering where God is in all of it, this conversation offers permission to keep it real, to seek help, and to remember that, as Lori says, sometimes just surviving is victory. What small step towards hope could today hold for you and your family?