Children of preachers have a unique life. When a man heeds the call to ministry, and a wife willingly joins her husband in ministry, children are plopped into all of it with no say in the matter. They get birthed, a couple of days later they are in the church nursery, and before they are even really old enough to grasp the situation, someone is snootily looking down on them proclaiming, “I never expected a pastor’s child to have a diaper like THAT!”
Things often go downhill pretty fast from there. When they learn to toddle around, they find that another child can bite someone or whack someone with a toy, and grace and mercy are the prescription, lest some precious member be offended and leave. When they do the same, though, the pastor will be expected to nearly flog them publicly.
As they grow, other kids can run in church, and they will be “redirected.” If a pastor’s kids do the same (and I speak from experience on this one), they will be dragged to the office, and some oaf or oafette will angrily proclaim, “Preacher’s kids ought to know better than to run in church!”
The pre-teen and teen years are often the worst. “Normal” kids will be allowed a life to play and go and do without much scrutiny, but a pastor’s kids will have every outfit, outing, interaction, word, post, crush, joke and facial expression put under a microscope.
But all of that can be dealt with easily enough. What is utterly soul-crushing is when those flesh-and-blood kids look to their mom and dad expecting mom and dad kind of support, and instead find those parents being pastor and pastor’s wife first, and dad and mom a distant second. They will often see a scowl of disapproval and hear something they never expected to hear, something like, “Even if they are wrong, we need to go along with what they say for the benefit of my ministry.”