by Jonathan Davis
One of the joys of parenting is sharing your own childhood joys with your own kids. Watching them experience the things that brought delight to you do the same for them is endearing. Maybe a classic movie or a board game. What’s incredible awkward is when those things you enjoyed as a kid cause you to blush in front of your kids because the content isn’t quite what you remember. For me that was “The Goonies” from the talented Steven Spielberg.
We had drummed up family movie night and this special movie and all the fun of eating dinner in the living room instead of the dining room. The junk food, the popcorn, the candy… it was intended to be memorable, but memorable in a different way. Honestly does anyone else remember there being that much swearing in The Goonies!? We stopped the movie and watched something else and caused great consternation, but that experience taught me something as a parent. As I thought about my young kids and what they had heard I realized that it’s the same things that they overhear at the grocery store, that they would probably hear in school, and maybe even hear blurted from their parents own lips in a particularly frustrating moment.
That’s the thing about the world we live in. We can attempt to protect our kids from the ugly things in the world, and we should, but we also have a responsibility to teach them how to handle the world around them, being in and not of it (John 17). So we shifted our focus to try and teach more about awareness and how to engage our curiosity when we witness or feel different things.
Here are some of the ways that has looked for us. We engage with the content and ask questions. The movie isn’t a threat, the book ins’t a threat, and the culture isn’t a threat. Christ already won our biggest battle, so we can engage and ask questions of the world around us. Those questions look different at different ages. For our youngest children we might pause what we’re doing and ask:
- How is this person feeling right now?
- Why do you think they just did what they did?
- What does that person want most in this scene?
- Why do you think they said that?
- They look (insert emotion here, angry, sad, happy, excited) When have you felt like that?
- What do you think they should do next?
- What does the Bible teach us about this thing that we’re watching/reading?
For our older kids, we can ask deeper more probing and discernment focused questions:
- What do you think the producer of this film is trying to communicate?
- What cultural statement are they trying to make?
- Based on what you’ve seen/read, what do they believe about who God is?
- How would you respond to this situation if you were there?
Using tools like these we’ve engaged in conversations and discussed things like gender dysphoria, homosexuality, war, relationships, coarse language, and a myriad of other topics. The opportunities are before us wherever we go, and we can enter into them with boldness because in Christ, we don’t have to be afraid. Our kids are looking to us for direction, and our best answer is to point them to Christ, and there are many ways we can do that. When we do that together with our kids, something supernatural happens. Spiritual maturity and growth happens in two generations at the same time.
None of us have arrived at perfection yet, but in eternity we will all find it. For now we carry each other along and push each other toward our Savior, and who knows, perhaps you will get to experience the joy of being pointed to your Savior by your own offspring.