NC Family Staff | January 4, 2025 | SHARE: 
As we’ve seen in the last decade, if we don’t intentionally disciple our children, the culture will. This has been especially true for issues such as abortion and the transgender agenda. These are heavy topics, though, and it can be hard to know how to talk about them with children in an age-appropriate manner.
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Andrew Walker, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and co-author of the book What Do I Say When…?: A Parents’ Guide to Navigating Cultural Chaos for Children & Teens, to discuss how to intentionally disciple your children in an age-appropriate way.
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TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. How can we help our children and grandchildren navigate a deeply confused and rapidly changing culture? Andrew and Christian Walker, parents to three daughters, recognize that, “If you aren’t discipling your children, we can be sure that secular classrooms, peer groups, and social media will.” So, they decided to write a practical guide for parents. Andrew is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Policy at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Christian is an accomplished curriculum writer, elementary school educator, and former children’s ministry leader. We’re grateful to have Andrew with us today to discuss their new book, What Do I Say When? A Parent’s Guide to Navigating Cultural Chaos for Children and Teens. Andrew T Walker, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
ANDREW WALKER: Traci, thanks for having me on.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Well, let’s start with what you think is making today especially hard for children and young people, and then especially confusing, possibly, for parents?
ANDREW WALKER: That’s a great question. So, I’m 39, inching close to 40, and the America that I grew up in is an entirely different America than we have today. I think when I was growing up, there was this assumption that the culture around me more or less kind of mirrored a nominal or vaguely kind of Christian culture, Christian worldview. And so, what that presented parents with was an opportunity not to have to be forward thinking and kind of aggressive towards discipling their children on controversial issues when there weren’t as many controversial issues happening in the culture. So in, you know, the 1990s the early 2000s, obviously we have the abortion culture, but there’s still issues of gender sanity at the time. There isn’t same-sex marriage at all in the United States in the late 90s and early 2000s. And so, we find ourselves in in a completely different moral landscape, which requires us to have an entirely different approach to discipling our kids in this culture. The previous culture was one where you could just take your children to church, you could teach them all of the Bible stories that are essential to gaining biblical literacy, and we need to do that still today, but that has to be kind of complimented by the reality that all of these assumptions that were there in the previous generation are no longer there, and that requires more diligence on the part of parents.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. A bit surprised to see the table of contents, I mean the chapters, I’ll read them: human dignity, abortion, sexuality, gender, homosexuality, identity, transgenderism, technology, political engagement, hostility, and persecution. Some pretty heavy topics for a book for children and teens. So why did you think it was important to just go right there with this book?
ANDREW WALKER: What we’re dealing with are matters of what it means to be a human being. Biblical anthropology is under assault. And if you’re taking all of the issues where Christians find themselves in the cultural crucible, they’re all, I think, under the umbrella or the canopy of what it means to be a human being. All of those assumptions that we could have shared 30, 50, even 200 years ago, are no longer the case. And so, my wife and I, and this kind of gets to our personalities. We’re kind of more forward individuals. We’re not going to kind of beat around the bush. We just kind of want to throw parents into the deep end. We’re not trying to really, just kind of get their feet wet. Now, obviously, we approach the issues in the book cautiously, and we invite people into the issues, but we don’t hold back on the necessity to engage these issues very intentionally and purposefully.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, and your book is structured in a way that people can use it for younger children and older children. So, talk about that.
ANDREW WALKER: What we did is, this was kind of the idea of my wife, who’s very brilliant on thinking about how to relay these facts to children at various stages in their development. So, the book is structured where each part of the chapter has kind of a biblical, theological explanation of the issue, of here’s how parents need to think about the issue. And I wrote those sections, and then my wife kind of developed what she calls the different floors, and they’re meant to correspond to the floors in a home. And the first floor corresponds to roughly ages 4 through 8, the second floor corresponds to roughly 8 to 12, and then the third floor corresponds to roughly 12 to 16 or 14 to 18. And the idea here is we’re trying to introduce these topics in age-appropriate ways. So, we’re not trying to overwhelm the five-year-old with information that is really best suited for a 14-year-old. And that’s where my wife is really gifted in kind of helping parents think about easy ways to naturally have these conversations with children as they arise.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: And assuming you can revisit this book as the children get older and add in those more sophisticated thoughts.
ANDREW WALKER: Yeah, absolutely.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Could you give us an example? Take one of these topics and just give us a brief example on what that would look like on the different levels.
ANDREW WALKER: Let’s take the issue of human dignity, which is kind of underneath all of the issues. One of the very first important things we’ve established with all of our children is that God loves human beings. That’s one of the most kind of basic foundational principles that we try to instill in our children. And so, if you can affirm up front that human beings matter because they exist, that establishes a really necessary principle that human beings are worthy of a certain type of respect and dignity. And you know, to kind of apply this in one situation, we saw a severely disabled young boy one day entering into a restaurant as we were exiting the restaurant. And I noticed the young boy, he was in a wheelchair. He kind of captured the attention of my two youngest children as we were walking out of the restaurant, and we got into the car, and I said to my youngest two children at the time, I said, Girls, I noticed that you saw that boy, and you observed that that boy had some physical and health problems. I said, How should we treat that little boy? And my middle child said, Well, you know that little boy is made in God’s image, that little boy is loved by his mom and dad in the same way that you love us and you love me, and so that was one of these moments where you’re like, Okay, these kids are really getting this. Now, the four-year-old at the time, didn’t really have the vocabulary for the image of God. All the four-year-old really needs to know is that human beings are made by God and loved by God. At age 8 to 12, you can begin to bring in concepts like the image of God, this Imago Dei that we see in Genesis chapter one, and laying more detailed biblical foundations. As you would work that issue up to a 12 to 16 or 14 to 18-year-old, you really begin to establish out, okay, what are the ramifications of this idea that human beings are made in God’s image. Well, if they are made in God’s image, that means that on all of the issues that are a source of cultural crisis in our nation right now, it means that all human beings, regardless of the cultural controversy we find ourselves in, are made in God’s image. They’re deserving of respect and kindness and dignity. And that’s going to necessarily kind of bleed into the abortion discussion, that if a born human being is loved by God, well then let’s just carry that logic forward and ask, Well, why wouldn’t God love the unborn human being as well? So that’s how we derive kind of a pro-life position as well.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: You know, I’m so glad to see that you started with that chapter on human dignity, because it feels to me when you see even other Christians interact with each other, sometimes, you want to remind them of that, and I feel like it would really help us tackle all of those important issues.
ANDREW WALKER: No, absolutely, and I think that’s, if we’re looking back in the history of the church, the first kind of controversies were all kind of Christological in the Middle Ages and the Reformation era, all of the crises were pertaining to knowledge and philosophy and epistemology. And if we zoom forward to today, the issues facing the church are not kind of Christological and epistemological. They’re anthropological. And I know anthropological is a big fancy term, but we’re really getting at is the doctrine of what it means to be human being, and Christians affirm that every human being is made in God’s image. And so much of what our society takes for granted, the idea that you love your neighbor as yourself, ideas like human rights, all of these flow downstream from Christian origins and Christian foundations. And so, one of the goals of this book is not merely to be a defensive tool in terms of equipping our children to understand these issues. It’s also meant to be an offensive tool as well, because I want my older daughter, who is now 14, to be able to have the resources at her disposal, to be able to say, well, we live in a society where we have laws, we have these ideas of human rights. Where do those come from? They probably don’t come from secularism. And actually, they don’t come from secularism. They come from Christianity. And so, all of a sudden, my 14-year-old is more equipped to go out into the world with a more satisfying, coherent, compelling answer for all of these issues and topics that our society assumes, but really doesn’t have a clear explanation for.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: You know, you don’t strike me as an angry man, and I would assume that that’s important to you in how you convey these issues to your children, is that part of what you’re trying to teach them is how to address these in a way that maybe could be accepted by people that?
ANDREW WALKER: Yeah, I love that. That’s a great question. One of the things we talk about in the chapter on kind of cultural hostility and persecution is that to be a Christian, Jesus promises you’re going to experience backlash in society. But because we believe that every human being is made in God’s image, that gives us a framework and a vocabulary for learning how to disagree well, and to treating people with respect and kindness, and to know that if these truths are true, they’re grounded in the truthfulness of God. They’re not grounded in mere human opinion. And I think that kind of relieves anxiety and relieves us from a sense of, oh my gosh, all of these things rest upon my shoulders. No, they really don’t rest upon your shoulders. They rest upon God. They rest upon God’s Holy Word. And so, these are meant to be things that encourage us to engage the world with a cheerful, happy outlook, knowing that you know, we are a people who can disagree with someone while also extending charity and kindness towards them at the same time.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. Even when that charity and kindness doesn’t come back to us, right? Which is often the case. I think, even if we present an issue in a kind way, in a reasonable way, it’s not always accepted in that way, so.
ANDREW WALKER: And that’s one of the points we make in the book, that you can be really kind and you can have the smile, and that will still be met in the eyes of some with fierce opposition. But what we’re still called to do is to speak the truth and to speak it in the right way.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, when you start these conversations with your very young children, there’s got to be a little bit of a sadness to having to kind of go there with them. How do you begin?
ANDREW WALKER: That’s actually another really good question. One of the ideas for this book came from a conversation we had to have with our child, who would have been six at the time, because in the state of Kentucky, there was a debate happening about an abortion referendum that would be voted upon in November. And so, everyone had all of these yard signs posted in front of their homes with various phrases that my child could read at the time. And she was asking us, I see these signs that say pro-choice. What does that mean? That’s an uncomfortable conversation to have with a six-year-old, but we take the attitude of, okay, well, we’re not going to shield her from this. We’re going to talk about this in age-appropriate ways. And so, we communicated to our daughter that, sadly, there are people in the world who think that unborn children can have their lives taken, and that’s tragically sad. We think it runs contrary to what we see in the Bible. And so we’re able to communicate that biblical worldview, but then we’re also able to affirm our love for our child, because we said to our daughter, and I vividly recall this, I said, Catherine, I want you to know that is never an attitude or an idea that your mom and I ever had when we found out we were going to have you, we were going to have you, and we love you, and we’re so glad that you’re our daughter.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: I love this conversation, and I would love to keep going, but we just have a limited amount of time, so hopefully people will go and grab your book. At our church last night, actually, the pastor was talking about it and offering free copies to people. So, I was I was encouraged to see that, but tell us a little bit more about where people can go, of course, to find the book, but also to follow your good work.
ANDREW WALKER: So, I think the best place to probably purchase it is on Amazon. It was published also by Crossway Publishers, which is just a wonderful Christian publisher. You can buy the book at their website, Crossway.com and you can buy it in bulk as well through their website. But if anyone who is interested in kind of following my work, I hang out mostly on X, previously known as Twitter, and my X handle is @AndrewTWalk.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, so Andrew T. Walker, and of course, he and his wife, Christian are authors of the new book, What Do I Say When? A Parent’s Guide to Navigating Cultural Chaos for Children and Teens. Andrew T. Walker, thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.
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