Introduction
I’d like to begin by swinging us back around to the title of this blog series – Reading as Preparation for War. That title’s a little dramatic, don’t you think? We’re talking about reading, and many of your children are reading titles like Hello, Ninja, or Arlo and the Great Big Cover-Up. I mean, war? Seriously?
Consider the society we’re raising our children in. Watch the news and consider the riots, the looting, the tearing down of every statue and monument to our past. Consider the shouting down of every argument, every statement of Truth. Consider the cancel culture, the labeling of genuine masculinity as misogynistic, the portrayal of biblical femininity as victimization. For our children to mature into steadfast Christian adults, they will need to be well-trained in biblical doctrine. Not only that, but they’ll need to be aware of, and prepared to face, what’s out there – and that means that they’ll need plenty of opportunities to engage with age-appropriate amounts of muck while they’re under your tutelage. They should start out wrestling little gators, and when they can beat those up they’ll move on to the medium-sized gators, and then before long they’ll be wrestling and subduing the big ones. Think of this as boot camp. Use this time to train up your little warriors so that when it’s time for them to take their place on the battlefield, they’ll be ready.
At the moment, however,
. . . your little warriors are . . . well, little. Many of you are in the phase where your children are exercising their opinions by announcing that they’re only going to eat chicken nuggets, or noodles, or the blue box mac-n-cheese. This phase can be worrisome and maddening. For those of us with teenagers, it seems as though they eat everything and nothing in the house is safe. They’re not only eating everything, they’re also giving no thought whatsoever to nutrition or a balanced diet. Parenting can sometimes feel like an all-or-nothing endeavor.
When it comes to their reading habits, our children can exhibit the same degrees of control. Some kids will only read one genre (if it doesn’t have a wizard, I’m not reading it). Others want to read everything, especially if all the other kids are reading it. Like food, there’s a happy medium that we need to teach our children to strive for.
The question then becomes, “How do I encourage my eager reader to try new books and learn to seek out the good ones, without becoming a Hoover vacuum that consumes indiscriminately?”
Setting the Standard
The first step is to teach them to love the standard. That standard is Christ and His Word. Like we discussed in an earlier blog post, a great deal of the time we spend reading should be spent reading the eternal, infallible Word of God. The Word is the measuring stick against which we measure all of man’s ideas. The Word also reveals God to us and helps us to understand who He is and what He expects of us. This is our baseline for everything else. When we teach our children who God is, to love what He loves and to hate what He hates, that will splash out into other areas of their lives. For example, when we learn that God created marriage and intends for marriage to be between one faithful man and one faithful woman for their entire lives, then whenever we read a book or watch a movie that depicts men “marrying” men or a man and woman having an adulterous affair, we should recognize that as falling short of God’s standard and call it sin. We shouldn’t sympathize with it, and certainly shouldn’t be tempted to desire it for ourselves. As our children mature, they should be able to listen to a catchy song, recognize that its lyrics celebrate concepts that God hates, and choose to stop listening to it even though it sounds good and all their friends are dancing to it. This is one example of how we love the standard.
Second, it helps to sit down and read aloud with our children. This is a practice that I’ve continued with my own children well into high school . . . in fact, we’re still doing it. One benefit is snuggling up on the couch together and giving each other our full attention. Another is having the opportunity to introduce a book that they’d be disinclined to read on their own; a story from a different author or genre, perhaps. A third benefit is helping them understand what is being read. We’ve read books like The Odyssey and Beowulf together, and have found that classical literature can be wordy and difficult to sift through. So after every couple of lines or stanzas we’ll lower the book and put it into our own words, paraphrasing to make sure we all know what’s going on. The best benefit, however, is discussing ideas and worldviews, and highlighting passages or phrases that are especially rich and spiritually juicy. Or perhaps the author has gone out on a bendy little limb and we have to discuss whether or not what they’re saying is doctrinally sound; Paradise Lost is a really good example of a book like this. Would either of my children have picked up any of those books on their own? Certainly not. In spite of that, if they ever have an opportunity to read Homer, Virgil, or Dante in the future, they’ll be more inclined to pick it up and start reading knowing that they’ve got some experience under their belt. They will be better prepared to “translate” classical English into modern words, and sift out the good theology from the bad.
Be the Training Wheels
What does this look like with children in elementary and middle school? Sit down as a family and read a classic title like Anne of Green Gables, or Tom Sawyer. Every so often, stop and ask questions like “Why do you think Anne responded like she did?” Or “What motivated Tom to help Huck in that way?” Teach them to consider how the characters exhibit godly character or ungodly behavior, even when the characters themselves aren’t explicitly Christian. It’s amazing how often an author who isn’t a Christian holds up something explicitly Christian as an ideal: ideals such as fidelity, loyalty, perseverance, and hospitality in The Odyssey, for example. The best part is, they don’t even know they’re doing it!
This same exercise can be done while watching the news or discussing current events. Ask the children questions about what’s happening, and what God has to say about these things. News stories about theft or murder become discussions about pride, anger, envy, and covetousness. News stories about the pandemic become discussions about the fallen creation and the effect sin has had on the world – and the hope we have in Christ! What a blessing it is to have the Scriptures as our foundation; to be able to point to what is happening in a story or in the real world and be able to ask the question “What does God have to say about this?” And then we can train our children to ask the questions, “What is this author trying to tell me? What is his worldview? Is the author saying something good and right and true according to God and His Word? Or is he trying to tell me that something is good when God tells me that it is bad and wicked and evil?”
As parents, this kind of training is critical for our children; we need to teach them to think critically about what they’re reading (or seeing, or listening to), to identify and hold onto the good, and reject the bad. We’ll dig into this more deeply in a later post when we talk about the Chew and Spit Method. For those of us with voracious readers – those of us who have found that we’re unable to keep up with our children’s reading habits and are worried that we can’t possibly pre-read every book to make sure there’s nothing objectionable in it – we need to train our children to be discerning and wise, to develop their literary taste buds to desire godly good and to be able to identify and reject what’s worthless.
In conclusion, I encourage you to read aloud to your children. The benefits of doing so are innumerable! It takes effort, time, and consistency over many years, but the longer you spend reading and learning and discussing together, the more your children will grow to be thoughtful consumers – picky eaters, if you will. They will expand their reading limits and try out new genres and authors, they’ll learn to identify those authors that are “good” and desire more good stories, and they’ll learn to identify and reject those authors and books that are rubbish, turning their noses up at ideas and stories that glorify ungodly thinking, behaviors, and desires. Cultivating a sophisticated literary palette prepares our children well to engage the culture they’re growing up in and take every thought captive to Christ. Like Elisabeth Elliot said, “the taking of captives is no gentle business.” This is why we’re raising warriors.
More to Entice Your Tastebuds
If you’re interested in more resources on these topics, might I recommend . . . ?
- Stories Are Soul Food podcast by N.D. Wilson
- Lit! How Christians Should Read Books by Tony Reinke
- Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature by Peter J. Leithart
- Reading With Purpose: Applying the Christian Worldview to American Literature by Nancy Wilson
All three books are available in our church library.
