Teaching Discernment Through Books

“So give your servant a receptive heart to judge your people and to discern between good and evil. For who is able to judge this great people of yours?”

-1 Kings 3:9

“Let a wise person listen and increase learning, and let a discerning person obtain guidance–”

-Proverbs 1:5

In Christian circles I hear a lot about setting boundaries and rules for our children around what they’re exposed to. We want to make sure that our children aren’t watching movies with sexual content or reading books filled with bad language. And I think we have all become increasingly aware of the gender messaging that has crept into so much of what our kids are exposed to. And it’s absolutely right for us as parents to protect our kids from these things; as Abbie Halberstadt says in M Is For Mama, “We are the gatekeepers of our homes.” But I think in our focus on setting rules around these things we have often forgotten to teach our kids discernment.

Why do we focus more on rules than discernment? Honestly, I think it’s easier to simply set rules around what we allow our kids to watch and read rather than teach them how to build this skill. Rules are black and white; discernment is not. Actually that’s the whole point of discernment: we don’t know if something lines up with God’s Word, we don’t know if this thing is right or wrong, and we (by the power of the Holy Spirit that lives inside us if we are believers) have to decide for ourselves. It may feel easier to set rules and move on, but it’s doing our kids a disservice. The world we are raising our kids in is vastly different from the one we grew up in. Think back to the “rules” your parents had for you as kids around what you watched or read (if you grew up in a home that had rules like this). How many of those actually cover all the things our kids are being exposed to today? I had a close friend in high school who wasn’t allowed to watch anything with any sort of sexual content. This is a great rule and one you should absolutely be putting in place for your children; but what about homosexuality? What about the Hallmark Christmas movies that have a super short scene with two men kissing? What about the shows that portray women dressed in practically nothing for most of the episodes? There are so many nuances to this, and if we try to set a rule around EVERY. SINGLE. THING. our kids watch, read, or listen to, this is quickly going to become a full-time job. This is where discernment comes in.

What exactly is discernment? Dictionary.com says discernment is “the faculty of discerning; discrimination; acuteness of judgment and understanding.” Discernment is how we prepare our kids for the moral dilemmas they will face as adults, some of which we probably can’t even imagine. I doubt our parents knew we would face all the things we are in our society today. I want my kids to know how to evaluate content and decide if it lines up with God’s Word, not just follow a long list of rules around what they do and don’t watch or read. Again, the rules themselves aren’t bad, they’re just not enough.

So how do we teach discernment? I believe discernment is best taught by practicing it together, and books are the best place to do this. Reading aloud is going to be the easiest place to incorporate this, although I think you could also read a book while your older kid or teen is simultaneously reading it. The idea is really simple: you read books with your children and when you come to questionable content you stop and discuss it. Now I’m not saying to read books that are clearly meant for adults or that are just plain inappropriate; our kids SHOULD be protected from explicit content. I’m talking about practicing discernment around issues like when the main character rebels against their parents, when violence is portrayed, when characters are showing attitudes and mindsets that don’t point back to God and His Word. Often my kids will point these things out before I have the opportunity; earlier this year we read Little House on the Prairie and my kids asked why Ma was so afraid of the Indians. Now, my kids really have not been exposed to people who are racist; thankfully no one in either my or my husband’s families show strong racist attitudes, and, because we homeschool, my kids don’t hear racist comments at school. And I know there are many out there who would say it’s wrong to read the Little House books because of these attitudes that are sometimes portrayed in them. But instead we turned this into a learning opportunity and talked about how these attitudes were common back then and that Laura Ingalls Wilder always made it a point to keep her stories true to her own experiences. We also put ourselves in the shoes of BOTH Ma AND the Indians: What would it feel like to have strangers invade your territory, your homelands? How would you have felt? Scared? Curious? How would you feel if you were Ma, alone in literally the middle of nowhere with three small children and no protection, if these men in strange clothes who also smelled strange and who you couldn’t even communicate with, showed up at your house? These kinds of conversations help our children build empathy, not prejudice, but they can’t happen if they aren’t initiated by the books themselves.

In addition to teaching our kids these skills, we need to practice discernment in our own lives. It’s absolutely okay for our kids to see us wrestling with these questions. Can we give a defense to our children of why we watch certain shows but don’t let them? What do we do when the book we are reading suddenly has a homosexual character halfway through? I experienced this recently and had to make the decision if I was going to continue reading or stop. If I was simply operating off a rule that says NEVER READ ANYTHING WITH HOMOSEXUALITY, then I would have stopped immediately, but instead I used discernment to consider if this was worth abandoning the book over. In the end I finished the book (and honestly loved it).

Here’s the thing: we can get so hung up on one small instance of homosexuality (I literally think it took up no more than a page in total, wasn’t about the main character or a central part of the story, and wasn’t even explicit, it was pretty much an “oh by the way this girl likes other girlsl” kind of thing), but do we bat an eye if there’s an “intensely romantic” scene between a man and woman in the latest Colleen Hoover novel? Do we care if a character gets drunk? What if somebody in the story doesn’t believe in God? What about the shows you watch? Are you actually telling me there’s NEVER any instances of sin in them? You guys, if we don’t read any books or watch anything that contains anything negative or sinful, then I’m not sure we are ever going to read ANYTHING. Even Narnia, even Lord of the Rings, have violence; the characters are often selfish; these stories contain magic. We have to be able to look past the individual instance of sin and look at the overall story.

In conclusion, I want to leave you with a thought I saw on Instagram a while back from a fellow homeschool mama. She was talking about how homeschoolers (and I imagine this can be extended to all Christian parents) are criticized for “putting their kids in a bubble” and “sheltering” them. Her response was that she doesn’t put her kids in a bubble but rather in a greenhouse. Think about the difference: in a bubble your kids are floating along free from all cares, but once they encounter anything harsh or wrong that bubble is going to pop and they’re going to crash to the ground. But what’s the point of the greenhouse: to provide plants with the proper soil, water, and light to help them grow until such a time as they are ready to be transplanted into the world. I don’t know about you, but I want the greenhouse for my kids; I want to send kids into the world at eighteen who know how to evaluate all the content that’s being thrown at them everyday (not just through books and television, but also social media and the news and every other of the 20,000 sources of information we encounter everyday) and be able to hold it up to the light of God’s Word; I want them to see past black and white rules and instead see that God’s Word is nuanced, that it’s not easy to interpret, that we need the Holy Spirit to guide and direct us. I want my kids to be ready to face the difficult questions of their age with confidence, not confidence in a set of values I force-fed them their whole life, but confidence in the Holy Spirit that lives inside them, confidence in their ability to practice discernment, confidence in the firm foundation of God’s Word they have built over their childhood. Set your boundaries and help your kids be grounded in what God’s Word says, but please don’t forget to teach them discernment.