On Answering Our Kids' Tough Questions

This morning, as I was driving my daughters (Anna, 3 and Mary, 1) to school, Anna and I had a chance to talk. We don’t always have such a chance in the mornings, since it wasn’t till recently that I conceded that Mary wasn’t going to get a cat-nap on the drive (she often wakes up at 5:30 am and life is easier if she does—but she’s been over her morning nap this week).

Anna and I spend a good bit of time talking while driving since we spend at least an hour each day total in the car together. Usually these conversations are pretty simple ones, but today Anna had her Wheaties, it seems.

She asked two questions which would cause any parents to pause:

1.       What is God?

2.       Tell me about Santa. (Technically this isn’t a question but you get the point)

Now I am in no way a parenting expert. And there’s a context to these questions that is different for every family and kid. We are pretty open with our girls (not that Mary knows the difference) about life. During the past 14 months, my father and grandfather died, and my brother Dan committed suicide. We don’t share all details of these, but we decided early on that as far as possible, we didn’t want to tell our girls anything we had to un-teach them. Unfolding lessons, yes. Having to say, “Well, that’s not actually true, that’s just what we told you.” No.

I thought I’d share how I approached these questions. Not as the example of how you should, but just as one way, and to share why I said what I said.

WHAT IS GOD?

First off, I thought this question was a doozy. I thought it was insightfully put. Not “Who is God?” But “WHAT is God?” And let’s be honest, both of those questions still confound adults. So first off, it seemed to me Anna also didn’t need a simple answer.

But before I started, there were some questions I had to ask her, including at least the first question anyone put on the spot (whether put on the spot by a child OR an adult): What do you mean?

Anna’s reply: “How is God in the whole world?”

This still doesn’t narrow things down too much. Yeah, really not at all.

But here’s the thing—why would we give our kids answers that God doesn’t even try to give US? How do the people of God come to know God and how God is at work in the world? Not by theological treatise. Fortunately. But by recounting, yes, how God has been known to be at work in the world. And where do we find this? In scripture.

If someone asks you about God, and you start spouting off theological principles, stop yourself. Even Jesus doesn’t do this. Instead, Jesus offers parables. Because as it turns out, it’s remarkably difficult to convey in direct language much about the nature of God. We encounter God through the narrative of the people of God. And that narrative begins at our beginning.

That’s why I found myself recounting for Anna the story of creation and of Adam and Eve. Because that is where our human understanding of God begins. And it’s hard to go wrong when just referring to scripture. Ok, maybe that’s not true. But it’s a safer place than any to start, I think.

Now the concept of a God who existed before anything is hard to imagine. The best I could come to explaining this to Anna (who clearly balked at this notion) was to talk about how I was alive before she was born—even before I was pregnant with her. (Context again, we used natural childbirth methods for both girls, and Anna was present for her sister’s birth and so she’s got a clearer grasp of all this than most three year olds).

Anna seemed to understand this comparison, but really, how do any of us “grasp” the world that existed before our presence—even our comprehension of the world around us and our ability to retain memories. It’s the difference between being told by someone of their experience on a zipline and actually DOING it ourselves. It’s not merely a difference in degrees of “getting” the experience.

I talked about God creating all this awesome stuff and us getting be part of it, but not listening to God. A 3 year old definitely understands what it means to be told not to do something but to want to do it (and in fact TO DO it). But this God that created us, always loved us, and even when Adam and Eve faced the consequences of their actions, God still loved them.

Long story short—when we get questions about God, or our faith from our kids, we don’t have to try to grasp onto whatever threads of theology we’ve picked up. We don’t have to try to explain the nature of God in abstract. God’s people have never primarily done so. Let’s cut ourselves a break. And draw our children into the Biblical narrative that has formed God’s people for so many years.

Now the Santa thing…

TELL ME MORE ABOUT SANTA

I suspect there is far more variety of the Santa thing than the above question. Maybe it’s because it’s hard to be “wrong” about it, and we feel more comfortable taking creative license. When we first had Anna, it was very important to me that my husband and I discuss how we were going to handle Santa in our household. My husband was far less concerned about it, confident it would work its way out. The truth was/is probably somewhere in between.

I know some families where the magic of Santa is an entire undertaking. And impressively so.

For me, this issue has three elements:

1.       Not wanting to teach something we have to later “un-teach”

2.       Not wanting (admittedly selfishly so) Anna to miss out on a whole experience other kids have (and one which I’m fairly sure my mom would find a way around anyway, or at least would be very sad about)

3.       I am a pastor. I am one heck of a busy person around Christmas. I ain’t got no time for some of this stuff people do…

My answer to Anna was, “Well, Santa isn’t a regular person. Santa is magical.”

She followed up with a question about Santa and chimneys, to which I referred her to my original statement.

She then seemed concerned to know if Santa sleeps all the time aside from at Christmas. I managed to change the point here (God I can handle on one cup of coffee, Santa, not so much…)

At any rate (and because when I mentioned these questions to Anna’s teachers they were curious about this), Santa is a rather minor figure around our house. Brings a gift or two (we had a good crop of options from our last church where families did lots of different things). We read “The Night Before Christmas,” leave cookies out, and if we happen to get a photo with Santa, so be it. But we also talk about St. Nicholas, and yeah, we do actually try to make Christmas about the birth of Jesus. I just don’t feel the need to sack Santa in order to do so.

As it turns out, your kids will follow your lead on a lot of stuff. Especially at the age ours are now.

That brings me to my last, and really, my major point.

What you tell your kids now is going to be the foundation for what you teach them later. That doesn’t mean you won’t get to update or even correct things. I, for one, lack the memory to try to recall inaccurate stuff I’ve said, so I try to avoid doing that with everyone—so this is both a practical and ethical thing for me personally.

Related, you don’t have to have all the answers. OR, maybe you shouldn’t try to make stuff easy for your kids that still isn’t easy for you to understand.

I hope this is reassuring for you. It is for me.

But again, all of this is context. It’s rooted in how I was taught, how I grew up. For a variety of reasons, yes, perhaps because my father was a pastor and my mother was also quite knowledgeable about the faith, my memory of my own formation in the faith doesn’t recall simplistic answers and in fact revealed to me the complexity of a deep and abiding faith. Also, some crazy stuff happened when I was growing up. It’s hard to give your kids easy answers when crazy stuff happens.

In the end, we all bring up our kids differently. I don’t think you should answer your kids the same way I do mine—in a different context these answers might not work or produce even what I would consider the desired result.

I do think, however, that we should train up our kids ON PURPOSE and striving for a particular goal. I want my girls to be followers of Jesus Christ. I want them to value that relationship and to treasure it for its complex, rich, grace and love-filled awesomeness. I want them to be deeply suspicious of people who try to give simple answers. And I want them to know how to read scripture on their own and in community. So I need to model all these things.

It’s hard to parent on purpose. Some days we cannot. But we probably can more than we think.

So next time your kid asks a hard question, one that makes you both chuckle and shirk at the same time, give yourself a minute or two. Stall, if you have to. Ask them what they mean by their question. And try to give them the answer you actually want them to ponder. Not the one that shuts them up the fastest. And maybe, just maybe, a five minute conversation in the car with your kid will be able to begin to gird them for the journey ahead and to be able to grow in their own faith journeys in ways that decades from now will have set them on the right path.

In the meantime, we all need a lot of prayer (for ourselves and for each other) for this incredibly challenging task of raising up children, and helping them to come to know God. We also need each other--no parent or set of parents (or grandparents, or whoever is primary caregivers for a child) can do this on their own. Thank God for the community of faith.