When kids ask you a question give them an answer. If they understand enough to ask tough questions than chances are that they are old enough to hear tough answers.
I love technology. The leaps we have made in the past 30 years are astounding. I remember as a ten-year-old being my families first remote control. As my family was sitting on the couch the kids would take turns either turning the sound up or changing the channel. We didn’t have remote controllers for our TV’s but we also didn’t have the internet. As a result, there were many things we just didn’t know. In some ways looking back, ignorance really was bliss. As an adult, I can remember back to being a child and my mom just making up answers to questions I asked that she either didn’t know the answer to or felt the answer was beyond what I should know at the time. Today we don’t have that luxury. Technology has changed everything.
If we tell our kids half-truths they will find out once they discover the half-truths we have used to deflect or delay from tough conversations our kids will begin to wonder which half of everything we say is untrue. When you answer a question with age-appropriate directness you remove the power of curiosity. Kids have always been curious about the only things that have changed is the internet allows our kids to not only satisfy any curiosity but it feeds their curiosity.
Every parent needs to invest in filtering and using parent safety procedures most technology provides. The first line of defense is not those things it’s honest answers to tough questions. Kids have no lack of resources to satisfy their curiosity without you. It is our job as parents to know our kids enough to know what their questions are and be prepared so that when they ask we are ready to give them the answer that is based on a biblical worldview. This is huge because every answer kid gets from the questions they ask help to form their worldview. What our kids need more than their curiosity satiated they need to understand how to see the world through the lens of the gospel. Our worldview informs every question we ask and every answer we give. You might be saying right now I don’t have a worldview, I would say you do and If you don’t think you do you are in trouble because the lens in which we view the world both defines and informs our loves.
