As a mom with young children, I feel the weight of this world. Our children are growing up with tragedy, conflict, cultural issues, and loud voices. There are wars raging in the Middle East and in Ukraine. We’ve lost a strong cultural voice that so many of our young people looked up to, Charlie Kirk.
With everything happening in our world right now, as parents who have young kids, it’s tempting to want to protect them, to shield them from the heaviness, to say, “they are too young to carry this,” … but the reality is, they are already seeing and hearing about the evils of our day, and they are asking questions.
God has called us, as parents, not to hide these things from our children, but to walk through them and teach them together, with His truth as our guide. Deuteronomy chapter 6 tells us, “You shall teach these words diligently to your children and to talk to them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise.” That verse means that we don’t get to pick and choose the easy moments; we are called to teach them through the challenging moments, too. That is true if you’re talking to your 8-year-old or 18-year-old.
We can’t hide the world from our children.
When we look back at the last 30, 40, or even 50 years, so many of us in America have been blessed beyond measure to raise our children in comfort. However, comfort has never been the reality for the majority of the world. Our brothers and sisters in Christ around the globe right now are suffering persecution and hardship in ways that we can hardly imagine.
When my son was baptized this past summer, I looked at himโof course, with joy and tearsโbut I told him something that may sound hard: “Austin, now that you have chosen to stand with Jesus Christ, you stepped into those waters and chose to be baptized, you will now have Satan as an enemy. The enemy will come after you, and you will have to defend your faith and stand on truth. When you stand with Jesus, the world will hate you, because they hated Jesus first.”
That might sound harsh to tell a little boy who just chose to be baptized, but it is the truth. I wanted him to know what it meant to stand with Jesus. Jesus Himself told us in John 15 that the world will hate His followers, and if we don’t prepare our children for that reality, when trials comeโand they will comeโour children will be blindsided by it.
We don’t want our children to live in fear. Of course not! I talk about these issues with my kids, but then I tell them the Scriptures that we can hold close and the promises of God. We want them to live with courage, knowing who their Savior is.
If you are parents of older children, consider the fact that they are wrestling with all the information they are taking in. They watched a martyrdom take place on TikTok or X, then the very next video they flipped through, they watched godless people mock his murder. They are trying to decipher and process information in an upside-down world where evil’s on full display.
We might say, “their minds were not created for this,” but our children were created to be tough. Children, since the beginning of time, have dealt with and faced evil. We are simply facing a new kind of evil onlineโand we need God’s wisdom to train our kids to face what they will see and hear.
It is important to remember that while we’ve been blessed with safety and stability here at home, that’s not the reality for countless families and children around the world and across history. War and conflict have been the backdrop of childhood for generations in so many places. Children in Europe grew up through two World Wars that reshaped entire nations. In Scotland and across the UK, families endured bombings, rationing, and loss during the Blitz. Across Asia, countless children have faced war, famine, and persecution for their faith. In Africa, millions of children still grow up in regions torn apart by civil war and violence.
While we are deeply thankful that has not been our experience on our home front in America, we do our kids no favors when we shelter them so much that they have no understanding of life’s harsh realities. The key is to introduce these truths in ways their minds and hearts can understand.
How do we do that? How do we bring our children into conversations about what’s happening in the world without overwhelming them?
Consider the response to 9/11. An entire generation remembers where they were on that day. For many of us, it was the first time we realized just how broken and dangerous this world could be. And yet, it was also a moment when people turned to God, and when stories of courage and sacrifice came to the surface.
My children weren’t born during that time, but we have taught them the history of 9/11. They have watched documentariesโand even some that were quite graphic. Not because the information was forced upon them, but because our conversations made my children want to know more. I’ll never forget walking into the room when my daughter was 11 years old, watching a documentary on 9/11 in her free time!
How do God’s people respond during moments like that? And even now, when tragedies or big cultural moments happen? Recognize that these are important opportunities to point our children to Scripture, the hope we have in Christ, and the courage that God gives us. We don’t need to create fear. Instead, we can say, “Let’s see what God’s Word says about this and let’s talk about what it means to live as His children in a broken world.”
Sometimes our kids are hearing and processing things before we even realize it. I remember working at my kitchen table when my son came home and began criticizing then-President Biden. He said something that was pretty degrading, and I had to stop him. “Where did you hear that?” Although I did not agree with very much regarding President Biden, if anything at all, I knew my son had never heard those criticizing words in my home!
That’s when it hit me: our kids are listening.
