Podcast: How to Talk with Your Kids about Sexuality, Screen Time, and Hostility at School (Andrew and Christian Walker)

August 12, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Answering Our Kids’ Questions

In this episode, Andrew and Christian Walker reflect on the importance of proactively talking with our kids about important topics even when it feels difficult or awkward.

What Do I Say When . . . ?

What Do I Say When . . . ?

Andrew T. Walker, Christian Walker

In a world filled with cultural confusion, this book provides busy Christian parents with quick and trustworthy answers to questions their children may ask about life’s toughest topics, including abortion, sexuality, technology, political engagement, and more.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:29 - Who Is Discipling Your Kids?

Matt Tully
Andrew and Christian, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Andrew Walker
Yeah, Matt, great to be with you.

Matt Tully
This new book that you two have written is intended to help parents talk with their kids about some of the most controversial, most sensitive issues in our culture today—things like abortion and homosexuality and gender and technology. We’re going to get into a few of those areas as we progress in our conversation, but I want to start with how you two open the book. You open with a pretty strong exhortation at one point to parents. You write, “If you think two hours per week in church and the well-intentioned efforts of your youth pastor excuse you from having to talk about these topics, some of them very awkward, then I regret to inform you that your outlook needs to change.” Andrew, I wonder if we can start with you. Is that an outlook that you encounter a lot when you talk with parents?

Andrew Walker
In my experience, what I observe is a lot of very well-intentioned parents. One of the reasons that this book became the book that it did is because everywhere I speak, people are always asking me, “How do we translate this into helping our kids understand this?” So there’s a hunger for that, which is absolutely fantastic. I don’t know if this book is necessarily going to have to convince people that they need to care. I think they do care. I think that they are looking for the resources on how to do it. And so when this book comes along, what we are trying to do is to say there are these issues out here. If you are not actively running towards these issues, the culture will do this for you.

Christian Walker
We grew up in a time where I think our parents and parents of people our age sent us to our church to receive a lot of discipleship from our youth pastors and from our pastors on Wednesday nights and Sunday nights and Disciple Nows and weekend activities. Things have changed rapidly in the culture, and so I don’t think that is going to cut it anymore. I don’t really think it cut it then, but it’s definitely not going to cut it now. And so we, as parents, have to be the ones that are having very intentional, ahead-of-the-game discussions with our kids. And I think that for some parents, they are a little bit too late to the conversation. And so this book that we wrote is wanting to give a resource to parents to help them stay ahead of the game with those intentional conversations, because there aren’t a lot of resources out there for parents, with all of these crazy things that are happening in our culture, to be able to talk to their kids and not only talk to their kids intentionally but talk to their kids right now, ahead of the age that they’re going to encounter these things so that their kids are ready for it.

Andrew Walker
I’ll add that I think people do notice that there is a need for these conversations. I think that there can be underestimating how those conversations are going to need to look and how much time need to be given to those conversations. So when you read from the introduction, the idea of two hours at your church and in your youth group, I think problematically, while parents can affirm that there’s an urgent need for this, they may think that’s enough. Our response to that is that’s actually not enough. When you consider, and I can’t break down the statistics and the numbers right now, but if you just break down what the average child is bombarded with in terms of social networks, social media, school environments—regardless of what schooling environment you’re in; some are, obviously, more challenging than others—this is not something that you can take a lackadaisical kind of approach to. It's going to require a greater degree of fervency and intention in having these types of conversations.

Matt Tully
Christian, I appreciate your comment a minute ago about how perhaps the mentality that I think all of us have probably seen in some context—maybe we’ve experienced it, maybe we didn’t—but the mentality of, The church is going to take care of this discipling of my kids. The church is going to teach them good morality and the worldview stuff. I’m not maybe as intentional and involved as a parent. I think that’s probably always been problematic. That’s not consistent with a biblical vision of parents’ roles. And yet I wonder if there are certain things about our culture today—the speed at which our culture is changing and secularizing—that makes it more clear to us, perhaps more than ever before, the deficiencies of that approach.

Christian Walker
I think that what I see when I talk to my mom friends, especially as a mom, is this is happening so fast. There just aren’t enough resources out there for us as moms to read and then figure out how to take that information and give it to our kids in an age-appropriate way. We just don’t have enough time in the day for us to be able to do that and to stay ahead of the culture. And so one of the reasons that we wanted to write this book was to help give a quick guide for parents—not just be able to see some foundational tools, but quick foundational tools to a variety of cultural things that are going on so that they would at least have some quick-reference guides to some cultural things happening around them. They may not have all the answers, but they would have a few basic, foundational, Christian discipleship answers to several of the cultural things happening so that they could help start that foundation for their kids.

Andrew Walker
That’s why I think having the recommended resources at the end of each chapter is very important. I kind of swim in the deeper waters of all the various resources and voices that are out there, and so we did try to very intentionally say if you want to go deeper on this issue, these are the individuals that we think are trustworthy and that can be a helpful guide for further conversations and further study with you and your child.

08:41 - Ten Issues under Assault in Our Culture

Matt Tully
And that comes out in the book as you encourage parents, again, towards this proactive posture in all these things, that we can, as parents, engage with our kids and help them to understand a biblical worldview on these important issues. So let’s talk about those issues. In the book you cover ten distinct topics that you think parents should be talking about with their kids in an intentional, age-appropriate way. And we’ll get to that age-appropriate thing in a little bit. Andrew, I wonder if you could briefly highlight what those ten topics are that you cover, and speak to how you came up with that list. I’m sure there were lots of other things that you could have tried to address in here, but you had to whittle it down to just ten.

Andrew Walker
We ended up doing chapters on human dignity, abortion, sexuality, gender, homosexuality, identity, transgenderism, technology, political engagement, and then hostility and persecution. I chose to focus on these issues because these are the issues that I think are most under assault in our culture today. I think it’s ethics that is actually at the crosshairs of Christian witness in the culture today. We’re not debating Christology and Trinitarianism in our culture; we’re debating the question, What does it mean to be a human being? And so I think you’ll notice all of these topics kind of circumnavigate around issues of anthropology. We don’t use the terminology in the book of theological anthropology, but this is a book that is helping us to figure out what it means to be a human. When you’re thinking about the gender issue in particular, there’s no greater example today of the realization of what Lewis calls “the abolition of man” than the attempt to actively suppress and, in some cases, mutilate the body in service to ideology. And that’s just one particular issue with the gender issue. Thinking about sexuality, why do our bodies matter? What does the design of our bodies tell us about how God intends for us to live? We graduated college in 2008. It seems like it could be a different century from 2008 to 2024. I think parents in our generation right now are the ones who have been caught the most flat footed in terms of seeing the massive cultural change, whereas our kids are growing up in a time where the constant change is perpetual and regular at this point. The parents have to play catch up almost more than the kids do at this point. And all of those issues, whether it’s issues of abortion in the culture today, the overturning of Dobbs. We thought the abortion issue might go away. It’s not going away. It is actually more politically volatile now than it was in 2021. So if we think we can just, as parents, put our heads in the sand and run away from these issues, we can’t, because the culture is not going to allow us. And again, as I said in my previous answer, if it is in Scripture, it is there for our good. And so our job is to help parents as much as possible try to understand this is good. This is not something to be afraid of.

Matt Tully
You noted that maybe a common thread for all of these issues is anthropology—the question of what makes us humans, what makes us who we are as people, who we are made to be, if we even are made at all. Why do you think there’s that focus on anthropology today and not something like, for example, theology proper—Does God exist? What is he like? Why is the conversation so focused on issues of ethics and anthropology? Do you have a theory as to why that’s where we’re at today and not somewhere else?

Andrew Walker
I don’t think I have one singular explanation, but I think I’ve seen some historians carve up epochs of time. The Middle Ages was a time of belief. The Enlightenment was the time of reason and rationality. Today, and I’m borrowing from Carl Truman in this, Carl talks a lot about how this is the age of feeling. Notice how we moved from massive and expansive belief to thinking, and then to feeling. We’ve moved from transcendence to eminence; we moved from objectivity to subjectivity and relativism. And I think that the reason we have the ethical and anthropological crisis that we do is that we no longer live in a society that I think is broadly construed to be a Christian society. Obviously, there are still lots of symbolic cultural Christianity, but the towering epicenters of our society are no longer Christian. And I think that where we have seen that be most viscerally demonstrated is around these issues of ethics. It’s where it’s cashing out most practically. It began, arguably, 500–700 years ago. But this is where we are right now, and it’s kind of the final frontier. Ask yourself, What’s next after this? If we’ve abandoned belief in God, if we no longer trust our minds (as far as our sense perception and our rationality), and now we’re questioning how we live our lives and whether we’re males or females, we don’t really have anywhere else to go. You and I were having a side conversation earlier that it’s a really interesting time right now to be a Christian in this day and age because, honestly, the lines are getting so clearly drawn, as far as the repercussions and consequences of jettisoning Christian belief, that it’s causing some non-Christians to kind of get mugged by reality. And these non-Christians maybe can’t bring themselves to be Christians necessarily, but they’re realizing, Oh man, we’ve gone too far. And that’s demonstrated the most viscerally in the area of ethics and then what we talk about in the book.

Matt Tully
And as you said, ethics is often viewed as, and some thinkers will say, it is that final frontier. Metaphysics has kind of already been lost—the actual belief in a transcendent God who is the King of the universe and can tell us who we are and who he is—that was gone a generation ago, and now the ethics is starting to catch up. There’s a lag, but we’re now starting to feel the implications of that.

Andrew Walker
I totally agree with that.

15:40 - Human Dignity

Matt Tully
So let’s dig into some of these issues in particular. So you start out the book with the issue of human dignity. That’s something that maybe at first, when you hear that phrase, it doesn’t seem like it’s maybe in the same category as some of the other very controversial, hot-button topics that you guys listed there. Christian, I wonder if you could speak to that. Why start a book like this with this topic of human dignity?

Christian Walker
It starts with human dignity. God created humans in his image, in the image of God. He created us male and female. That’s where all of creation starts in Genesis 1. And if we don’t start there—understanding that humans were made differently than all of the other creation; that we are created in his image; that’s how we, as human beings, are different; that he’s given us dignity, we haven’t earned it, we can’t add to it or subtract from it, it’s just given to us by him—then we can’t really talk about any of the other issues. We can’t really do anything else with sexuality or transgenderism or anything else. It all starts with the dignity that he’s given to us. And so that’s why we started the book with human dignity.

Matt Tully
That seems like it’s such a helpful reminder for parents, because I think we can sometimes, especially if we’ve been Christians for a long time and perhaps grew up in the church, when it comes to our kids, we can kind of just assume,”Yeah, of course. We all know we were made by God, and then there’s so many things that need to flow from that.” But it’s helpful to be reminded that when we talk with our kids, we actually shouldn’t assume that, even with them. We should build, essentially, this ethical house on the foundation of this idea that we were created by God and, therefore, have a purpose, have an end, and have dignity.

Andrew Walker
I think that if you don’t lay the foundation correctly from the start, everything else is unclear. And something we write about in the book that I’m really serious about is we tell parents that a lot of these issues in here are controversial, but they’re not actually complex. So there is some study that needs to be done with a book like ours. We try to make it as simple as possible. But all we’re trying to do is to explain these simple truths in full ways. The good news is that God does not want us to have to live in a complex world. I think the way that Satan operates is to introduce complexity where there’s actual simplicity.

Matt Tully
Ambiguity where there’s actually clarity.

Andrew Walker
Yeah. Take something like the gender issue. Four and five-year-olds have a pretty clear understanding of what a boy and a girl is. How does the gender issue occur? It occurs when adults and activists and ideologues want to get cute in tampering with God’s design. They introduce complexity into it. They bring controversy with it. What we’re here to do is to say there’s controversy, but this is not so much complexity. And this makes sense with how we ought to assume God’s world would be. If God’s world is what Genesis 1 and 2 depicts it as, it is orderly, designed, there’s pattern, it’s self-attesting (it makes sense of itself). It is its own evidence. And so, again, parents should not be fearful; they just need to actually be encouraged. There’s a pastoral angle to this book. Be comforted to know that we actually have better answers. One of my friends likes to say, “We’re not the weird ones.” We’re actually the ones in defense of creation. We’re the ones in defense of reality. It is those who want to destroy unborn life and tell us that our bodies have no inherent design or purpose to them that are the weird ones. They should have the burden on them to prove their case, not us. Our case makes sense with our everyday experiences.

19:52 - Gender and Sexuality

Matt Tully
Probably some of the most sensitive issues today in our culture are those issues related to gender and sexuality. And we’ve already hit on those a little bit in this conversation. Christian, I wonder if there could be some parents listening right now who honestly just feel kind of exhausted by these issues, and they maybe feel like Christians seem to want to talk about them all the time. They’re thinking to themselves, “Is this really what we should be focused on when we talk with our kids and disciple our kids? Aren’t we missing other things when we focus so much of our attention on these issues of gender and sexuality?” How would you respond to somebody who’s maybe wondering that?

Christian Walker
If you’re not discipling your kids in the understanding of what God’s natural design and good design for gender and sexuality are, then the culture is going to disciple them with what culture’s un-natural design for gender and sexuality is going to be. And they’re talking about it in every movie, in every song, on every commercial that they see. And all of those little tidbits of life are adding to what kids think is normal. So when your kids are just playing a video game and two guys hold hands, that is creating a normalized view of gender and sexuality. When they’re just watching a normal TV show that you’ve said is okay, but a commercial comes on and two dads are at home with their daughter, that’s creating a normalized view of gender and sexuality. And that is actually discipling them in the world’s view of gender and sexuality. And so, yes, you have to be spending as much time discipling them in God’s view of gender and sexuality as the world is discipling them in the wrong view of gender and sexuality. I don’t know if this is true for other people, but I grew up in youth group where sexuality was talked about only in a very negative way. “Sex is bad. No, don’t do it. It makes you dirty and shameful.” And that created in me a really terrible understanding of God’s view of sex within marriage. And so we need to turn that around and we need to start talking about God’s view of gender and sexuality in a very positive light within the confines of God’s natural and good plan of gender and sex and marriage. Your body is good because God gave it to you. And sexuality is good, and it’s good in God’s natural and good plan. That’s in marriage between a male and a female—a one-flesh union—and they make babies that God gives them, and they take care of those babies in the family. And if we start talking about that as early as we possibly can and just setting up those good, godly expectations of marriage, then when our kids see those awkward commercials, then they know, “Oh, that’s not right. That’s not right for two daddies to be there with a boy.” And they know the truth of God’s good and natural plan for marriage, and they can see when it’s false. And they can identify the falsehoods that Satan is putting in our culture. And that’s what we need to be doing to disciple our children.

Andrew Walker
One of the things she just said that we hope this book does is we provide some discussion questions for parents to have these conversations with. If parents are doing what we hope they do, this book is providing them with a launching pad to introduce these conversations in a thousand different ways in everyday life that go beyond what our book does.

Matt Tully
This isn’t just a curriculum that says, “If you follow these ten steps, you’re done. You did your job.”

Andrew Walker
The incredible thing in our culture right now is that our culture provides us no small amount of opportunities to bring clarity to these issues. Literally, just last week we had an occasion to talk with our five-year-old about something. And it wasn’t from the book necessarily, but it was just like, “Charlotte, what do you know about X, Y, or Z?” And she was able to have a conversation with us about things that we had talked to her previously about how God had made her. And this is supposed to be an opportunity for parents to lean into these conversations.

Christian Walker
And I will add, too, in the book we are being age appropriate about it. Obviously, I’m not going to tell my five-year-old the ins and outs of the birds and the bees. I’m going to tell her that God made mommies and daddies to get married and have babies and take care of their family. That is an age-appropriate way to start discipling her in what sexuality looks like. “God made your body, and it’s good.” That’s an age-appropriate way to start talking to her about sexuality. “God made boys and girls different.” That’s an age-appropriate way to start talking about gender. You’re going to take this a step at a time. When we say, “Disciple your kids about gender and sexuality”—

Matt Tully
That might look different depending on your kids.

Christian Walker
Yeah. Take it bit by bit.

Matt Tully
Because I think that could be another concern that some Christians might have, Christians who would be fully in agreement that these are some big issues out there that are dangerous, that can lead people astray, but their concern is, “I don’t know if I want to introduce my kids to the issue of transgenderism.”

Christian Walker
We don’t think you should.

Andrew Walker
You don’t have to at age five.

Christian Walker
But a five-year-old should know that boys and girls are different, and God made you different, and that is good. And that is the basis of starting that so that when you get to age eight or nine or ten, and they start asking, “Can you become a girl if you’re a boy?” No, you can’t.

Matt Tully
Or they hear a friend at school talk about that.

Christian Walker
Right. “Do you have a friend that might?” And that is part of these questions. “Have you ever had a friend that’s felt like a boy when they’re a girl? Have you ever had a friend try to feel different? Have you ever experienced that? Have you ever felt different?” Starting that conversation with them—“Let’s talk about that.” And so taking that very slowly, age by age, it’s not going to all happen at once. But if you’ve already started and your young child knows that God made you a boy, and that is a good thing, then when you get to seven and eight and nine, you can start having those conversations about, “Well, you can’t change that. You may start to feel different, but we need to talk about that. Those are feelings. You can’t change your body. God made you a boy. So let’s work with your feelings and let’s see what’s going on there. But you can’t change the biology that God made.” So we’re taking this step by step, slowly.

26:49 - Technology

Matt Tully
Let’s turn to this issue of technology, another one of the topics that you address in your book. In recent months, there have been a lot of discussions about the negative impacts of technology, especially on young people, but honestly, on all of us in different ways. One example is Jonathan Haidt’s recent book, The Anxious Generation, which I know has been making the rounds and people have been reading that. He, a non-Christian, is calling attention to the really damaging effects of smartphones and social media on young kids today. Andrew, you’re very engaged in some of these online conversations that are happening. How would you summarize the broader secular understanding of the impact of technology on kids today?

Andrew Walker
Jonathan Haidt’s work is monumentally significant in demonstrating basic things that I think we all knew was going to come true and it has come true, that phones, for young persons, is oftentimes leading to dramatic decreases in mental health. It’s sapping their ability to focus for extended periods of time. I think this is just an example of how our technology has moved faster than our morality has. There’s an organization in Silicon Valley who, rightfully so, exists to basically ask technology companies to be more virtuous in how they design their apps. Anyone who follows the technology conversation closely knows that these things are not just neutral canvases that you’re acting upon. The way that they’re designed is to manipulate the human psychology. So I would say here is for parents, this requires an active strategy for your child with technology. We are not anti-technology in our home. Our children have access to tablets. Hopefully that’s okay to say out loud. But we are very intentional in putting in limits of when they can be used, both in terms of what time of the day and how long they can be used. And again, we’re not trying to pat ourselves on the back. We’re still figuring this out as well as parents. But in my experience, anecdotally in talking with people, I don’t even think that they’re utilizing some of the restrictions that, thankfully, phones do offer. Actually, let me go on record and say that if you spend the time to pay attention to the screen time controls on an iPhone or an iPad, Apple has actually done some great stuff in restricting access to apps and restricting the amount of time that children can have with them. I think that we want to easily slip into this mode of cruise control and say, “Here, take your iPad, take your phone, go have fun.” If you take the time to figure this out, you can get ahead of this.

Matt Tully
I think that illustrates the broader, growing awareness in our culture today among non-Christians as well of some of the dangers associated with this unfettered access to technology that the young generation, Gen Z in particular, has had as they’ve grown up. And so I think one very practical question, Christian, that a parent might have is, “I’ve either tried to kind of start to limit my teen or preteens access to this stuff, and the response I get is, ‘You can’t take this away from me because all my friends are on Snapchat. All my friends are on Instagram. If you don’t let me have access, I’m not going to be able to connect with my friends and my community.’” How should parents think about that kind of objection that kids might have?

Christian Walker
We’ve had conversations with our thirteen-year-old daughter about the fact that, number one, this is an area where you have to trust our authority. There are going to be times when you don’t agree with us, and there are going to be times when you actually probably hate us and you really hate the decisions that we make, but you have to just trust that we’re doing what we think is best for you, and you’re just going to have to obey. And maybe one day when you’re an adult, you’ll understand why we did what we did, and maybe you’ll agree with us then. And maybe you still won’t agree and maybe you’ll just really hate what we did, but you’re just going to have to trust us right now. The other thing is we would really rather you have face-to-face relationships, and so whatever we can do to encourage your friendships, we can go get your friend and you can have them over here. We can go with your friend and take them somewhere or whatever we can do to encourage that. We are always willing and trying to do that. We would much rather you have a face-to-face relationship with your friends than over the phone.

Andrew Walker
I think sometimes with parenting and all of these issues, but technology especially, we tend to want to operate where the switch is either off or on. I liken this more often to a dimmer switch, where you’re gradually on-ramping your child to the next phase of technology or the next conversation. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. So kind of a gradual, incremental kind of maturing with technology. So she’s thirteen. She has protocols in place commensurate with being a thirteen-year-old, When she’s sixteen, those controls will look a little bit different when she’s a sixteen-year-old. But what Christian just said, I want to affirm. One of the things I think parents can say to their children is, “You may not like the decision we’re making, but I need you to do one thing. I need you to believe that everything that we’re doing is for your good.” And how much of that is true in terms of our relationship to the Lord? We can sometimes think that maybe Scripture is hemming us in or restricting our liberty.

Matt Tully
Just for the sake of making us miserable.

Andrew Walker
No. Actually, Scripture’s there as a guardrail, as an authority—a delegated authority given by God. Parents are also delegated authorities given for children by God. And so we’re called to trust and obey God in his word. Children are called to trust and obey their parents, in accordance with their parents following and obeying Scripture as well.

33:33 - Hostility and Persecution

Matt Tully
And I’m struck by some of the other issues we’ve discussed already this morning—the value of being proactive and having these conversations, starting to have them early with our kids and setting good precedence with our kids when it comes to their technology use. That’s just going to make it all the easier to take that progressive approach to allowing them to use more and more rather than having to go back and pull them back in some way when we haven’t done that already. Let’s talk about one more major topic that you address in the book, and that’s hostility and persecution. What are you trying to help parents communicate to their kids about that, Andrew?

Andrew Walker
Sure. I mentioned this once already: I graduated college in 2008. This seems, in 2024, to be an entirely different American landscape. That means that American culture is, at least at the very elite cosmopolitan sectors of American culture, often very anti-christian. That means that we’re going to have to train our children how to navigate and bob and weave through certain situations where they may have to accept, “Gosh, I’m a Christian. I may not be welcome at this institution. I might be called certain names for having these certain beliefs.” My parents never ever had to have that conversation with me. They assumed that the ambient culture around me would more or less prop up my Christian convictions. That is no more. I also want to say this: with the language of “hostility and persecution,” some critics could easily say, “Well, there’s the evangelical martyr complex.” I fully acknowledge that there are Christians in Africa who are violently martyred and persecuted in far more violent ways than what’s happening in the American context. What we’re talking about in an American context is that our views are treated as repugnant. And so how do you operate and live in a culture where you might be a nice person, but you’re a nice person with really repugnant views? And by the way, I think sometimes American Christians are caught off guard by the idea that you would suffer for your faith. That is the historical norm is to suffer, to some degree. To not suffer is the exception. So I think that we are trying to introduce basic categories of the fact that when you are called a bad name because of your beliefs in Jesus, that’s not fun. You don’t have to relish being insulted and mocked, but Scripture does say, “Blessed are you when you are reviled for my name’s sake.” That means that in some weird, divine transaction there’s a blessing and an encouragement and a comfort that Jesus gives you when you have stood firm for his truth and his word. And I don’t genuinely think young Christians today and young adult Christians are adequately being trained in how to walk into that culture.

36:39 - Floors of Complexity

Matt Tully
We’re not always intentionally preparing people to be that social outcast or to be perceived in that way. We all naturally kind of want to be friends, especially kids. They want to have friends and be accepted. So preparing them intentionally for the possibility of that makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk a little bit more about the book itself. Can you remember the moment that you both realized that a resource like this might be useful, and then that maybe it was you two who were the ones to actually write it?

Andrew Walker
I would always get asked at these events where I’m speaking, “How do you talk about this with kids?” And our response would be, “Well, to do it in age appropriate ways,” to which I would then think to myself, “But I don’t know what that is”—because I’m not a young educational development expert. I just know the ideas. But I was like, “I do know someone who knows how to translate ideas into age-appropriate ways.” That’s my wife, who has a background in early childhood education. So that’s what really kind of spawned the idea.

Christian Walker
And so I said, “I can help you write it, because you can write the part for parents, and then I can take that and actually break it down for kids’ age-appropriate level.” So we actually kind of, right then and there, made up a quick little idea, and then that Thanksgiving week, we busted out the first chapter just to see what it would look like. And it was awesome.

Andrew Walker
We took it to our agent from there, and the rest is history.

Matt Tully
Christian, the book is structured in a unique way that I think makes it very helpful and practical for parents to actually use with their kids. We’ve talked a lot about doing things in an age-appropriate way. How is that reflected in the way that the book is actually structured?

Christian Walker
I really wanted it to be a quick-reference guidebook because I’m really busy myself, and I knew that I needed a book that I didn’t have to read 300 pages myself, digest that, and then try to figure out how to get it to my own kids in different ages. And so I wanted a book that was set up so that I could quickly find a chapter, find an age, and then tell my kids what they needed to know. So each chapter is set up where the first part of the chapter is explaining what the Bible says about that cultural topic for parents. It lays out a very good, solid theological foundation for parents. And then after that, there are three “floors,” mimicking a house, because we are starting with the family, with the home, which is where discipleship should start. So we have three floors, and we’re calling them floors because you can move through the floors, as you will, depending on age or developmental maturity. And so in those floors, you have biblical foundations that you need to teach your children what the Bible says about this specific topic for that age or stage of development. And then you have conversation starters. Based on those biblical foundations, how can I start a conversation about those with my child? And then when they’re ready, you move to the next floor.

Matt Tully
So the floors are almost levels of complexity or specificity, perhaps, in how you’re explaining things?

Christian Walker
Yes. And so the first floor is about an age range of four to eight, and then the second floor is about eight to twelve, and then the third floor is about twelve to sixteen or eighteen. But based on your kid, they might be ready for the next floor before that age group, so we didn’t put strict ages on them. But I really love the way that this format turned out because it can be a defensive tool. Your kids just asked you a question, and you need a quick answer.

Matt Tully
Because they heard something at school.

Christian Walker
That’s right. You can turn to that chapter, you can read the parent part really fast, find your child’s floor, read through the biblical foundations, read through the conversation starters, and then have a conversation with your child. Or we really hope that you might use it as an offensive tool for your family and almost work through the chapters as a family devotion. So each chapter has a memory verse, which is a unifying verse for everyone through the chapter. In our family, we hope to use this as a family devotion and sit down and learn these things together. So we would keep all the kids together and go through the first floor together. And when our youngest is done, she can move on. We’ll go through the second floor together, send our middle one away, go through the third floor with our oldest, and kind of work through them together as an offensive way to study about that cultural topic, and memorize that memory verse together as a family.

Matt Tully
And that’s one of the things I love about this resource is it’s written for parents, but it’s not just a theoretical, background information resource for parents that they read and then they are left to then go figure out how to actually do this with their kids still. It really is meant to be used. It’s a tool that parents are almost bringing along with them as they have conversations with their kids about these intense issues. So maybe as a final question for you both, at one point in the book, you say something that really stood out to me. You write, “One thing that we pray you remember is that God has given your precious children to you to protect and disciple, but he has not given you the power of salvation.” Christian, I wonder if you could close this out. Why do you think it’s so important to say that, to emphasize that our role is as disciples and equippers, but reminding us that we can’t actually save our kids?

Christian Walker
I think that sometimes we, as parents, put all this pressure on ourselves to do everything right. Send our kids to the right schools, make sure we have the perfect family devotions, make sure that we take them to church every time the doors are open, and make sure we read all the right books with them. We just keep all of this pressure on ourselves to do all the right things. And we could do all the right things, but we can’t save our kids. Although we have the responsibility to disciple our children, and we should take that responsibility incredibly seriously and we should do as much as we can as parents to disciple our children, we really need to remember that ultimately the Lord is in control of our kids. He will call them to salvation. And we need to rest in him and rest in his faithfulness to our children and rest in his faithfulness to our parenting and not be so frantic about trying to get it all done. I can feel that way. Use this resource, use the Bible, parent your kids, disciple your kids, talk to your kids, but remember that you can also just rest in the Lord because he’s the one who has the power to save them.

Matt Tully
Amen. Andrew and Christian, thank you so much for spending some time with us today to help all of us, as parents and even those who aren’t parents but who care about young people in their life, to think a little bit more carefully about how it is that we are teaching and training them on these important issues.

Andrew Walker
Thank you.

Christian Walker
Thanks for having us.

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