Children, Faith, and Answering Hard Questions

Talking to children about big concepts like faith can be intimidating. How do we know what’s age-appropriate? How do we know how honest to be? How do we know how much they can absorb? Especially when the questions children ask today are beyond what we may want to answer. 

“Why do people bring guns to school?” 
“Why do people hate each other?” 
“Who gets to go to heaven?” 
“Do shooters get to go to heaven?” 
“Does God really love everyone?”

Over the years rearing our children, we’ve been asked some doozies. But this one…this question made me stop mid-bite.

A little background is needed. Our four children were born in Athens, Georgia, where we were active members of Emmanuel Episcopal Church. We attended worship on Sundays, participated in Wednesday night fellowship, and the children attended the church’s preschool. All our friends belonged to Emmanuel, too, so I guess you could say the children were not exposed to religious diversity.

In 2002 we moved to Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and lived in an extremely religiously diverse neighborhood. Many neighbors were Roman Catholic or Orthodox Jews, and there were also families whose parents were of different faiths. This led to regular conversations with the children, one of the first began with the question, “Do Jewish people go to heaven?” (spoiler alert—yes) While our neighborhood and the children’s public school were religiously diverse, there was zero racial diversity. 

A couple of years later, we moved to Lynchburg, Virginia. The children attended the neighborhood public school, which was both religiously and racially diverse. We’d lived there a couple of months when Sarah Katherine, our oldest and at that time in third grade, asked a question during dinner that I will never forget. 

“Mommy, would you rather I marry someone of a different race or a different faith?”

I’ll be honest. I tried to respond to her question with a simple answer: “I want you to marry someone you love very much and who loves you very much.” I think if she’d been 13 instead of 8, I would have seen her eyes roll. She instead took a deep breath and firmly said, “I know that. But would you rather me love and have someone love me of a different faith or a different race?” 

I told her, and the younger siblings who were also listening, that I could only speak from my own experience. I reminded them of times in the recent past when one of them had a severe medical crisis, then said, “I think what really helped me during those times was knowing that not only was I praying, but Daddy was, too. Because of our shared faith, we share common values like treating everyone, no matter what, nicely. When we have to make decisions about our money or what we allow y’all to do, we both think about what God would want us to do.” I paused; the babies who were barely 4 and 5 were getting fidgety. I was about to continue with even more explanation when Sarah Katherine said, “That’s what I thought—same faith. May I be excused?”

There are probably many ways that question could have been answered. Not everyone would have responded the way I did. One thing I can be sure of, however, is that our children want to know what we think. They want to know what we believe as the trusted adults in their lives. 

Twenty-two years later, our children remember that conversation. As they each move into their own relationships and decide what’s important in finding a life partner, the foundation of faith remains solid.

Remember those What to Expect books?  They had one for being pregnant, the first year, the toddler years, and maybe some others. I do know there was not one called What Questions to Expect. Because the truth is, no one knows. We don’t know when we bring our children home from the hospital what they will face in the world. We don’t know how they will experience the world or what the world will thrust upon them. But we can prepare ourselves to respond. As we communicate and build relationships with our children, we gain a sense of what they can handle and how the engagements need to happen. Sometimes a child just wants a quick answer and sometimes a lengthy conversation. My husband and I decided early in our parenting years that our guiding rule for these questions, regardless of the age of the child or which child asked the question, was to answer honestly.

[Editor’s Note: While a What Questions to Expect book has not yet been published, Chalice Press does have two books called When Kids Ask Hard Questions, to which several Grow Christians’ authors contributed. —Allison]