What Does It Mean to Honour My Parents as an Adult?

Question 11146.

Honouring your parents does not end the day you move out, get married, or start making decisions they disagree with. The command stays with you for life, though the shape it takes changes considerably once you are grown.

I get asked this often by adult believers navigating ageing parents, strained relationships, or simply the ordinary friction of two adults who happen to be parent and child trying to relate to one another as equals in most respects, yet not quite.

A command with no age limit attached

The fifth commandment simply says, “Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12), with no clause limiting it to childhood. Paul repeats the command to the Ephesian church, an audience of grown adults, and calls it the first commandment with a promise attached (Ephesians 6:1 to 3). Honouring your parents as an adult is not a leftover instruction from a stage of life you have outgrown. It remains a standing command, though obedience and honour are not quite the same thing, and that distinction matters enormously here.

The Hebrew word for honour, kabad, carries the sense of weight, treating someone as significant, giving their voice real consideration in your life. That is a different demand from childhood obedience, and recognising the difference is where most of the confusion around this command actually lies.

Honour is not the same as obedience

Children are told to obey their parents (Ephesians 6:1), a command that fits a season when parents carry direct authority and responsibility for a minor child’s life. Honouring your parents as an adult does not mean obeying every wish or living your life according to their preferences once you are responsible for your own household and decisions. Once grown, particularly once married, a person’s primary earthly loyalty shifts, as Genesis itself teaches when it says a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife (Genesis 2:24). Honour continues. Obedience, in the childhood sense, does not.

I have watched adult believers tie themselves in knots trying to obey parents on decisions that were rightly theirs to make, and I have watched others use their adult independence as an excuse to disregard honour altogether. Both miss what the command is actually asking.

What honour looks like in practice

Practically, honouring your parents as an adult can look like genuinely seeking their counsel even when you are free to disregard it, speaking well of them to others rather than only airing complaints, staying in regular contact rather than letting distance become neglect, and treating their opinions with real respect even in disagreement. It does not mean pretending they are always right, or hiding disagreement to keep an artificial peace. Honest, respectful disagreement can itself be a form of honour, provided it is expressed with genuine care rather than contempt.

Caring for parents in old age

Jesus rebukes a religious practice that let people avoid caring for ageing parents by declaring their resources dedicated to God instead, calling it a way of making void the word of God for the sake of tradition (Mark 7:9 to 13). Paul goes further, telling Timothy that anyone who does not provide for his own household, and especially for members of his own family, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever (1 Timothy 5:8). Honouring your parents as an adult includes a practical willingness to care for them as they age, whether that means direct support, help arranging care, or simply showing up consistently, rather than treating their need as someone else’s responsibility.

When the relationship has been genuinely harmful

I want to say something carefully here, because I know this command lands differently for someone whose parent was genuinely abusive or neglectful. Honouring your parents as an adult does not require pretending harm did not happen, staying in an unsafe relationship, or restoring unrestricted access to someone who remains dangerous. Honour can, in the hardest cases, look like praying for a parent from a distance, forgiving them before God even while maintaining firm boundaries, and refusing bitterness without requiring closeness that is not safe to offer. This is a case where wisdom and pastoral care matter enormously, and I would encourage anyone in this situation to work through it with a trusted pastor or counsellor rather than alone.

Honour flows from the gospel, not simply duty

The deepest reason to keep honouring your parents as an adult is not simply that it is commanded, though it is, but that Christ Himself modelled perfect honour toward His own earthly family even while His truest allegiance belonged to His Father in heaven, and even from the cross made provision for His mother’s care, a pattern worth reading alongside what the Bible says about parenting and how parents pass on doctrine to their own children (John 19:26 to 27). Honouring parents flows most naturally from a heart that has itself received the Father’s grace, and finds it easier, in time, to extend grace outward to imperfect parents in turn.

Honouring your parents when you become a parent yourself

Becoming a parent often changes how honouring your parents as an adult actually feels, sometimes softening old frustrations as you understand for the first time how hard the work of raising a child truly is, and sometimes sharpening old wounds as you resolve not to repeat mistakes you can now see more clearly. Either response is worth bringing honestly to God rather than suppressing. If you find yourself learning, through your own children, to appreciate what your parents managed even imperfectly, that gratitude is itself a form of honour worth expressing to them directly while you still can.

It is also worth remembering that your own children are watching how you treat your parents, learning, often more from example than instruction, what honouring parents actually looks like in practice. Few things teach a child the fifth commandment more effectively than watching it lived out consistently in front of them, and few things undermine it faster than hearing it taught while watching it ignored.

I am conscious that some reading this carry real grief over a parent already gone, wishing they had honoured them better while there was still time. If that describes you, let me say plainly that grace covers genuine regret as much as it covers anything else. You cannot go back and change how you honoured your parents in years now closed to you, but you can let that regret shape how you treat the people still in front of you, your own children, your wider family, the older believers in your church who could use exactly the kind of attentive honour you wish you had given more freely before.

I would add one further encouragement for those whose parents are not believers. Honouring your parents as an adult does not depend on them sharing your faith, and it is not a reward for their spiritual agreement with you. Peter instructs believers married to unbelieving spouses to win them without a word by their conduct, and the same quiet, consistent respect applies well to parents who do not yet know Christ (1 Peter 3:1 to 2). Sustained, genuine honour, offered patiently over years without demanding agreement in return, has opened more hearts to the gospel within a family than any number of arguments ever could, and it remains one of the most powerful, quietly evangelistic things an adult child can offer a parent still outside the faith.

I will finish with a wider thought about what this command teaches us beyond the family itself. Learning to honour flawed, ordinary people simply because of the place they occupy in your life, rather than because they have earned it through flawless conduct, trains a heart for something larger than family relationships alone. It shapes how we honour elders in the church, how we honour those in authority generally, and ultimately how we learn to honour God Himself, who deserves far more honour than any earthly parent yet is so often given far less. Honouring your parents as an adult, practised faithfully across an ordinary lifetime, turns out to be a small, repeated training ground for one of the deepest postures the Christian life asks of us.

However complicated your own family history, take heart that God Himself is the perfect Father no earthly parent could ever fully be, and that honouring imperfect parents well is possible only because you have first received far greater grace and patience from Him than you could ever be asked to extend to anyone else.

So, now what?

Think of one concrete way you could honour your parents this week, a call rather than a text, an honest conversation rather than an avoided one, or practical help offered before it is asked for. Honouring your parents as an adult will look different in every family, shaped by history, distance and health, but the underlying call remains the same across every season of life: treat them as people of real weight in your life, cared for and respected, even where obedience is no longer what the relationship asks of you.

“Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”

Exodus 20:12 (ESV)