A young child declares to you that "Jesus died on the cross to pay the price for our sins." Now the ball is in your court: what do you say in response?
I'm convinced the key to great discipleship lies in the answer. This weekend and every weekend millions of questions were thrown out in Sunday school classrooms around the globe. I wonder how many of them created exchanges that led to real spiritual understanding?
I don't normally get the chance to dialogue with preschoolers (on anything, much less religion) as they're about six years younger than my age group. But on my recent vacation, I had ample time with this age set, including a little "exploring" session with my nephew, who is five. The occasion was my parents' 40th wedding anniversary and family reunion, and the setting was a restored farmstead redeveloped to accommodate groups like ours. On the grounds was a relocated one-room schoolhouse and a country church - which of course made for irresistible exploring territory.
Inside the church we spotted a banner with a giant heart shape covering the front of a cross. Wanting to gauge his perceptiveness after a year of Christian pre-school, I innocently asked, "Why is there a cross on it?" To which he responded, in a nearly exasperated tone, "Because Jesus died on da cross…to pay da price for our sins." He didn't say it, but his tone said, "dummy." Which I deserved, for underestimating him.
His response left me with a number of options. I could have left it alone - he had, after all, answered the question. I could have slathered him with praise: "R-i-g-h-t! You're such a good listener in school!" I could have asked him to tell me where he learned that, to see if I could ply any more details about the setting and context from him. I could have asked him if he knew any songs or stories about the cross. Or, I could have played dumb and asked more follow-up questions.
I opted for a last approach, which was to ask, "What are 'sins'?" in a way as if I'd never heard the word before - one of my favorite techniques because it makes kids feel important when they believe they're telling a grown-up something they don't know. As it turns out, my question only elicited, "Umm…they're bad things," before his five-year-old brain shifted to other things. But the point isn't that I chose the perfect follow-up. The point is that we ought to follow up more often when kids deliver right responses, and we ought to give real attention and deliberate effort to the way in which we follow up, rather than meeting those answers with either silence or praise.
The trouble with letting an answer be (ignoring the response or moving on and changing the subject) is that it communicates to the kid that what they've said really wasn't terribly interesting or worth further comment. Adults sometimes accept "right answers" as affirmation that teaching is "getting through" (as in, whew, they're getting it). But a correctly-phrased response doesn't necessarily indicate that at all. Kids are often asked to say words that mean a great deal to adults but little to them. The only way to know for sure that there is understanding behind the words they've spoken is to probe deeper. You want to get kids to flesh out their own understanding by attaching words to the ideas they hold. Just as writing a book or an essay (or this blog) forces an author to organize and hone their thinking, so can conversation do that, in a less formal way.
The second common, but perhaps even more flawed, response by adults when kids give "right answers" is to pour on the praise: Good job! Wow! Right on! Yes! You're so smart! and on and on. Now what on earth could be wrong with praising a child, you ask? Well, bear with me. The instinct to want to praise kids when they've performed well is well-founded. We want kids to feel good about their accomplishments, and we want them to be positively reinforced so they'll be likely to run/jump/write/answer/act/try/or whatever in an exemplary way the next time. The problem comes when praise acts like a straightjacket. Authors Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish identified this in their book, How to Talk So Kids Can Learn at Home and at School, where they point out that labels, both negative and positive, force kids into playing roles. One becomes "the funny one", another is "lazy", another is "shy", another is "really responsible". Faber and Mazlish advise against hanging labels on kids, even positive ones, because there is an implied "always" quality about them that shapes kids' behavior long after we pronounced it to be so. Thus, it's ok to point out particular instances of responsibility or kindness or maturity, as long as it's not generalized: "When you set the table without being asked, that really helped me," instead of, "You're so responsible and grown up. I can always count on you." The distinction may seem slight. But one identifies and casts value on particular actions; the other makes kids out to be the product of their actions, and in so doing, pronounces value on the child.
I would suggest that the kind of praise we commonly dish out in Sunday schools has the same effect as a label in that it creates a category of responses that are acceptable and that will either a. earn a reward or b. get me out of having to answer any more questions. Savvy Sunday school goers figure this out: say "God" or "Jesus" in answer to a question and you're bound to be right 80% of the time, while "We should obey God" and "We should be nice to others" are reliable standbys for answering any personal application question. Of course, we should obey God and we should be nice to others, but even a preschooler is not to young to be asked how they might do that. And it may take them considerable time to formulate a real-life example, and they may answer wrongly, and sometimes they genuinely may not know how it is that a five-year-old (much less a ten-year-old) is supposed to obey God, in which case we'll need to map it out with them. But isn't that what we want - for them to connect some abstract, nice-sounding idea to the way they live? Isn't that why they're there? Or is it to earn some star or point or prize or make a grown-up gush?
The alternative to praising answers is not criticism or dismissal ("You're just a kid, you don't even know what you're talking about"), but engagement. Coming back to a child and asking them to clarify ("What did you mean when you said…"), substantiate ("Can you give me an example of where you think that's true?"), elaborate ("Say more about that…"), or defend something they've just said is very validating to them. When you answer their answer with a question, you've dignified their statement. You've opened a dialogue. Discipleship happens here.
When kids express themselves, we should never regard those expressions as final - for good or for bad. Consider two kids: one declaring that Jesus was the Son of God, and another saying Jesus might not be the only way to heaven. Both are giving us insights into their present understanding. We would surely use the second kid's assertion as a teachable moment, to dialogue about the means of salvation, rather than shutting him down with "you're wrong". So why are we so quick to shut down the first child with "Right!"?
The more kids are willing to talk, the more malleable they remain. I have a better chance of influencing a teenager who is willing to tell me he's tempted to have sex with his girlfriend than one who feels he cannot admit being tempted because he's taken a high-profile pledge for purity. A similar factor was at work in Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18). The tax collector, with little to lose, confessed all and cried to God for mercy and was justified; the Pharisee, with a public face to save, could only boast of his own righteousness and pray deceptively. May we never box kids into that corner because we've praised them onto a pedestal.
The bottom line is that we need to learn to dialogue with kids. And that's hard because kids and adults are locked into well-defined roles that govern our communication. Most of the time when an adult asks a child a question, it is to judge them: Did you clean your room? Have you finished your homework? What is the capital of Oregon? A more collaborative style of communication, where adults are alongside kids helping them figure out problems, mysteries, and projects rather than quizzing them, lends itself to the sorts of questions that will help grow our kids' faith, in a way that stickers and trinkets never will.
What do we do when kids are saying all the right things? How do we respond in a way that encourages their curiosity, that they will continue to question and wonder and speculate? In short, how do we get them to think? Then they might regard God as intriguing and fascinating and worthy of their attention, a bigness not easily fathomed or readily reduced to easy formulations. They might just want to know him.
Info, articles, and thoughts for parents of kids at North Coast Calvary Chapel.
