How can parents respond when their children ask difficult questions? And how can they answer in an age-appropriate way? These questions acquire additional force and urgency as an increasingly godless culture increasingly targets kids. Many parents may find these questions perplexing, but there are answers, and a new resource is available to help them answer the tough questions.
“I am constantly caught off guard when my kids ask me questions in the car and on the way home from school,” said Mrs. Christian Walker, 5th Grade teacher at Highlands Latin School and co-author of a new book, “What Do I Say When ...?: A Parent’s Guide to Navigating Cultural Chaos for Children and Teens.” “I needed this as a parent myself,” she admitted.
“At a recent election that we were having, there were signs to vote ‘yes’ for an abortion amendment and ‘no’ for an abortion amendment,” Mrs. Walker recalled on “Washington Watch” earlier this week. “Our daughter saw some yard signs … and she was asking about, why do some people have a ‘yes’ for this and a ‘no’ for that? And so, we had to have a conversation about what abortion was. … She was eight years old at the time. And so, we weren’t quite ready to have that conversation.”
“We see ourselves living in a really chaotic and tumultuous point in time,” explained Andrew Walker, professor of Ethics and Public Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who co-wrote the book with his wife. And, when it comes to helping children and teens navigate that chaos, “The front line with that is the parents,” he said.
God designed families in part so that children would learn about the world from their parents, specifically “the fear of the Lord” (Proverbs 1:7). Ancient Israelites were commanded to diligently teach God’s words to their children (Deuteronomy 6:6-8), and the book of Proverbs presents this as the normative mode of learning wisdom (Proverbs 1-7). Paul reaffirms this command in the New Testament, urging fathers to “bring [their children] up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).
Universal public education does not absolve parents of their responsibility to teach their children, nor do cultural expectations about two-income families or fatherly aloofness. If anything, the anti-Christian propaganda children are exposed to from an early age makes religious instruction in the home even more necessary. “If parents and grandparents are not able to teach their children,” warned guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice, “the world will certainly do it.”
If the label “teaching” seems too overwhelming or burdensome, just think of instructing your children as low-stakes evangelism. Young children love you, trust you, and rely on you. They aren’t going anywhere, and they won’t reject you for telling them what the Bible says. And they need to be saved just as much as anyone who might read your tract. So why not tell them about what God requires of them and how he offers to save them in Jesus Christ?
Oftentimes, parents do feel like insufficient teachers for their children. “Parents and grandparents … oftentimes do not feel equipped, but, in reality, they must be equipped with sound biblical answers,” Hice insisted. However, one major hindrance is that “we don’t have a lot of resources right now making that accessible and easy for parents … to help equip their kids,” Walker acknowledged.
The new resource from Andrew and Christian Walker aims to fill that void. “We believe, with a biblical worldview, it produces the only, truest, fullest account of human flourishing and human dignity,” Andrew said. So, he and his wife decided to “fuse our talents together” to help parents “equip the next generation with biblical truth.” The book was published last week and is available from Crossway and Amazon. “A resource like this is desperately needed,” exclaimed Hice. “So many churches are not addressing these issues, and so people are not getting a biblical worldview perspective.”
One topic on which breathtaking change has left many parents bewildered is technology and its proper limits, and the Walkers seek to provide wise counsel in their book. Like many questions the Bible doesn’t address explicitly, technological guardrails fall into the category of wisdom, Andrew explained — more specifically the category of parental authority.
“Parents, you have been placed in your child’s life as an authority, which means you have wisdom and you have discretion over them,” he said. “It seems unwise to hand over an incredibly powerful device that can take a child anywhere the child wants to go without any guard limits, without any types of protections in place. … That is, more or less, a nuclear weapon getting ready to go off.”
“The first thing you can do with technology is to simply be intentional about it. Have a plan,” Walker advised. “A lot of times parents aren’t even aware of the limits and the kind of tools at their disposal.” The book can serve to inform them.
The book also addresses other pressing cultural questions including abortion and gender identity. “The attack on the human person is where the enemy has most fervently set his sights,” Walker explained. Responding to Satanic lies about man’s identity as image-bearers of God “necessarily is going to bring us to issues of abortion” and “the purpose of our embodiment as males and females,” with gender identity included in that discussion.
The challenge is determining the best way to address those issues. “We wanted to be clear about what we believe the Bible teaches on these issues, but we wanted to do this again in an age-appropriate, accessible way,” he said. “What we really strove to do in this volume is to make it as accessible as possible” because “you can have the right ideas, but, if you’re not communicating the right ideas in the right ways to the right people, all we’re doing is just leaving the battlefield.”
That means that the book favors straightforward language over academic jargon. Instead of wielding “terms like theological anthropology,” it deals with questions like, “What does it mean to be a human?” or “Where is the enemy attacking the image of God?”
To make the book as useful as possible to as many families as possible, the Walkers divided each topic up into four sections. “The first part of each chapter is specifically for parents to understand what the Bible says about each topic,” Christian described. “After that, each cultural controversial topic is broken down into three floors. The first floor is the most simple and basic [for] around age four to eight, the second floor is around age eight to 12, and the third floor is around age 12 to 16 or 18.”
As an example, Christian described their approach to addressing the topic of transgenderism with young children. “Focus on starting with understanding that God made us with our bodies, male and female, in Genesis 1. And that’s really good,” she said. “Instead of looking at these topics in a negative light … what does God’s plan look like in a good way? In God’s good and natural plan, it looks like having a male and female body that was made differently, on purpose, in a good way.”
Parents can even begin laying the foundation with 4- and 5-year-olds, she added, by making the message very simple: “You are a boy, and you are a girl, and that is good. And boys and girls are different, and that is good.”
For children ages eight to 12, the book begins to provide more in-depth explanation of these difficult issues, and it also includes “some prompts that parents can ask their kids,” Christian explained. “We want parents to start having an open dialogue with their kids about those kinds of feelings that their children might be experiencing … and be able to stand up with the truth.” For children who may experience feelings of gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction, parents can help their kids understand “that those are just feelings. We are not going to change the biology that God has given us. But parents can work through those feelings with their kids, or help their children have conversations with their friends to know what the truth is against the lies of culture.”
The Walkers chose to address the hottest, most controversial topics because addressing those topics would make the book most helpful to Christian parents. “They’re the ones that my mom-friends and I are talking about,” said Christian. “They’re the ones that Andrew has the most questions about when he’s out speaking.”
She expressed hope that parents would be able to use this book not only as a “defensive tool” — a resource for finding a quick answer to a difficult question — but also an “offensive tool” — one where parents intentionally expose their children to biblical teaching on these cultural controversies, catechizing them in biblical wisdom instead of worldly folly.
The goal toward which we strive (Philippians 3:12-14) is eternal life, not only for ourselves, but for our children. In pursuit of that goal, we must equip our children to hold fast to biblical truth at the culture’s point of attack, not just at the uncontroversial points. To do this well, we also must equip ourselves.
“These words that I command you today shall be on your heart,” Moses instructed the Israelites. “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deuteronomy 6:6-8).
Thus, Moses exhorts parents to persevere in teaching their children what God’s Word says — at all times, in all places. Doing so not only requires God’s Word to be in their (the parents’) hearts but also in their homes, before their eyes. Constant parental instruction to fear the Lord is “for our good always” and “will be righteousness for us” (Deuteronomy 6:24-25). It takes a lifetime of commitment, but it yields an eternity of reward.
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
