By now the school year is no longer coming — it’s here. The backpacks have lost their first-week smell, the routines are settling in, and our children are spending their days in rooms we’re not in, hearing voices that aren’t ours.
We can’t script that year for them. We can’t pre-answer every claim a classmate, a curriculum, or a screen will make. And if this month has been about anything, it’s that we shouldn’t want to. A child armed only with our answers is armed for exactly the questions we predicted. A child armed with good questions is ready for the ones we didn’t see coming.
Paul warned the Colossians: “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition… and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8). Notice the assignment. He doesn’t say, avoid every philosophy. He says, see to it — be watchful, be discerning, examine what’s being handed to you before you carry it home. Captivity, in Paul’s picture, doesn’t happen to people who thought too much. It happens to people who didn’t think at all.
So as this year picks up speed, here are the questions worth sending with our kids — not as a script to memorize, but as habits to grow. Is that true? How would I know? What does God say about it? Who benefits if I believe this? Three of those are thinking questions and one is a discernment question, and children need all of them. A child who asks “is that true?” but never “what does God say?” can become a skeptic. A child who asks “what does God say?” but never learns to test what she hears may become an easy mark for anyone who quotes a verse with confidence. We’re raising Bereans: eager and examining.
Here’s a practice to try for the rest of the semester: once a week, ask everyone at the table, including yourself: “What’s something you heard this week that you’re not sure is true?” Then think it through together in a lively discussion. Some weeks it will be silly. (A kid at school said crickets sleep with their eyes open.) Some weeks it will stop your heart a little. Both kinds of weeks are the point. You’re not building a fact-checking service. You’re building a family where uncertain things get discussed instead of carried alone and questions are welcome.
Teaching our kids to think is the foundation — but it’s not the finish line. Sooner or later, every child who learns to recognize the truth has to decide whether to speak up: when the joke isn’t funny, when the crowd is sure, when the truth costs something. That takes more than clear thinking. It takes courage. And that’s exactly where we’re going next month.
If your family could use help building habits like this one, the 7-day Family PEACE Challenge walks you through it a day at a time.