“Helping Kids Discern What’s True in a Disinformation World”

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Episode Summary

It’s your job to equip your kids so that they don’t get fooled by people and organizations with hidden agendas.

Your kids must be equipped to be able to discern what’s accurate in a world that increasingly projects inaccurate information.  Whether it’s from teachers, coaches, leaders, or the news you will want your kids ready to decipher what’s real. The Tolpin’s share with you what they are teaching their own kids in this regard so they are able to make their own sound judgments about information projected at them.

Main Points in This Episode:

  1. The enemy is orchestrating evil through disinformation.
  2. Reflect on your knowledge anchor points about the issue.
  3. Be wary of trusting information from those who: Use manipulation, Aren’t good critical thinkers, Have a limited paradigm, and have a track record of being swayed easily.
  4. Spiritual discernment is vital.

Scripture in This Episode:

Psalm 33:8-12 –Let all the earth fear the Lord: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast. The Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought: he maketh the devices of the people of none effect. The counsel of the Lord standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance.”

Proverbs 15:14 –The heart of him that hath understanding seeketh knowledge: but the mouth of fools feedeth on foolishness.”

1 Corinthians 2:14 – “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

Matthew 10:16 – “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”

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Full Transcript:

Note: This is an automated transcript and misspells or grammar errors may be present.

Welcome to Courageous Parenting podcast, a weekly show to equip parents with biblical truth on raising confident Christian kids in an uncertain world.

Hi, I’m Angie from courageous

Mom and I’m Isaac from Resolute Ma’am.

We’ve been married for twenty one years and have seen the fruit from raising our eight kids biblically. Based on the raw truth found in the

Bible, we can no longer let the culture win the hearts of children. Too many children from Christian families are walking away from their faith by age 18, and it doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. Join us as we start an important conversation about effective parenting in the fall. Welcome back to the podcast.

Hey, everybody.

Oh, we’re back together, and

I know today we have an exciting topic we’re going to be talking about. There’s a lot of disinformation everywhere.

There is. So it’s a very important your kids understand how to think clearly in the midst of disinformation. So helping your kids discern what’s true in a disinformation world. So there is so much. It’s even hard for us parents to keep track of what’s true, isn’t it?

Well, and as our kids get older and they’re not necessarily living with us anymore, we want to equip them to be able to stand firm in what we know is true and to be a light to make, to be an influence in their generation, if you will, and to be able to raise their kids in a way where they’re going to be able to distinguish between disinformation and what’s true. And so in the process of that equipping that you’re doing, you’re going to have to deal with some of these issues that we’re seeing today.

Absolutely. Because as you probably have noticed, even in Christian circles, people are making a wide array of different reactions and decisions based on the information coming out about different things you can see. And so your kids need to be equipped to make really good decisions for their own families and for their own lives that are biblical, but also are acting in wisdom. And a lot of times, if your kids aren’t really equipped for this, it’ll be very hard for them because a lot of times making the very best decision is uncomfortable and goes against the grain of the people around them.

And here’s another big, big thing. Guess what? The disinformation is probably going to get worse as time continues on. Yeah, it is. It’s going to get worse. So take a few of the topics that are rampantly out there and use those to teach your kids today. Walk them through the process, and we’re going to go through that with you guys today. But first, we wanted to just say thank you for joining us on this one million legacies movement. We are getting even closer to two million downloads, which is exciting, but we just wanted to ask you for a favor. Can we ask you for a favor if you’ve been listening to the podcast and you’ve enjoyed it? Would you mind taking time to give us a review on iTunes or even if you’re part of our app? It would be so awesome if you could give us a review for that as well.

And by the way, courageous parenting also notes free resources and lots of good information and even video version of every episode. So courageous parenting. Also, if you were curious about the app, the Bee courageous app, there’s a whole tab there. We can learn all about that, and you can also see about the home school blueprint and other courses, too. So thanks so much for joining us. We’re going to dive in. This is a really important topic. I thought we’d kick it off, though, with a good verse. A friend of mine actually texted me this week and I appreciate that because it’s a very good one. Psalm Thirty three, eight through 12, it says Let all the Earth fear the Lord, let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. Four. He spoke and it came to be he commanded and it stood firm. The Lord brings the Council of the Nations to nothing. He frustrates the plans of the peoples. The Council of the Lord stands forever. The plans of his heart to all generations, blessed as the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.

That’s awesome. I love that. I know and you know, it’s interesting because there’s scripture in the New Testament to that talks about how God will frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent and different things like that. And I think that there’s been a lot of that happening in today’s society where there’s, you know, doctors and people who have been well educated in different industries who they’ll speak on something. And then all of a sudden you find them later, completely speaking to the opposite, right? And so the truth is, is that there’s been a lot of confusion. And whenever there’s confusion, you definitely can see the footprints of the enemy because he is the author of Confusion. Yeah. And so in today’s society, when we we’re going to start digging into this concept of helping your kids to discern what is true. We live in a world where there are principalities in high places. There are the rulers of this dark age right there. These are the the true realities that are spoken of in Ephesians Chapter six. Go check that out, and we need to realize that the confusion that is happening out there is to get people to do what, to take no action because unless you’re confident, usually you don’t take action on something.

Yeah, most people don’t. And so this is so important. This information is everywhere. Now you might be thinking about what’s happening in a geopolitical sense or what’s happening with pandemics or what it’s happening with all kinds of. Situations, but this very topic is also important for your kids when dealing with friends, we get a lot of questions about, well, what do I do when my kid makes a friend and then they turn out to be not such a great friend down the road? Now, what do I do as a parent when they relationally are connected to that person? And how do I help them? And so this is really important. We always believe it’s best to equip your kids so that they make the best decisions about friendships you’re there to influence and enforce when needed. But the ultimate goal is that your kids actually can discern what’s best. So this is down to a friendship level to, you know, things happening in the world,

To even with family members and just being able to for your kids to discern and not have necessarily a desire to be around on a deep level with people who maybe are going to tempt them to sin or tempt them to be in aligning with them in something that they actually inherently disagree with. And so a lot of this comes down to when you’re equipping your kids, you have to teach your children about all sorts of things and you want to be the one that is taking them back to the why, which should ultimately always go back to scripture on any given topic, right? Regardless of if it’s gender issues or even how to determine what’s happening in the government right now, right? We want to make sure that our kids are learning history, real history, that they understand those things. Yeah.

How did you get to your opinion about something? Do you just share your opinion with your family or do you teach them how you got to it? And if you’re not teaching them how you got to it, you might want to think about your own process as we go through this because it’s important to be able to have a process. Otherwise, we can easily be swayed by our feelings or our emotions and versus really going through a process of understanding what’s real and what’s not here. And what do I discern?

And go ahead. Oh, and I was just going to say, you know, we were mentioning kids friendships because this is actually one of the biggest reasons why I think that the younger generations tend to be more grouped into one category. Even politically, they see eye to eye very strongly, like large portions of society. And I think it’s because of this concept of being swayed by their feelings and not wanting to be the odd man out, not wanting to be ostracized by a friend group, not wanting to be unpopular, not wanting to be. Let’s just take masks, for example, or even vaccination. You could use any of those topics of what has recently occurred within your world in the last two years. And if you think about it like when kids are given a choice, either get this or don’t play sports, what are they going to choose? It’s based, all going to be based upon their feelings and how it’s going to make them feel if they’re left out right. And so the reality is, is that kids, especially younger kids, are highly influential. They are highly impressionable. And so if if we know that this is true about our children, we want to teach them how to make wise decisions in the friends that they choose. But we also need to try to help them find those like minded friends also so that they have someone to stand strong with them.

Absolutely. So let’s dive in here. So the first section here is knowledge anchor points. So when you’re faced with understanding a relationship, if they’re good influence on you speaking from a kid’s perspective or what is true in the news or what is true about what’s happening with an organization, even local organizations

Or even discerning like in a classroom, right? Like if a teacher is teaching something about history or teaching something about economics or even teaching something about math, because apparently math is something to fight over these days. But the truth is is, can your kids discern when they’re being influenced or manipulated? Can your kids tell when they’re being taught something

Like, So what are knowledge anchor points is what do I know verifiably to be true about this situation or this person or this organization? What do I know is true? And the best truth comes from things that have already happened? So history becomes very important for kids to know all kinds of history as much as you can teach them, because history often repeats itself because new generations weren’t taught what’s happened in the past, so they can’t learn from the past to make better decisions in the present. And so then they make the same bad decisions that previous generations have made. So it’s really important that our generations understand and can learn from what’s happened, and those can be knowledge anchor points based on what’s happening today, what’s happening in the situation. So what is history and history can even be about a person like, what is the history I have with this person, too? And drawing upon, what do I know to be true in this situation? So we always want to start there. I’m not talking about biblical truth right now. I’m talking about. What are the facts about a situation

So like a good example would be just even regarding the the war Russia and Ukraine and the reputation that certain world leaders have had in the last two decades, right? So if you think about a 10 year old or 11 year old, they aren’t probably very familiar with Putin, for example, and how America or most Americans have viewed Putin over the last two decades. Unless you’ve taken time to actually talk to your kids and teach them your perspective on what his reputation is and what he’s done right, and so the facts about what they’ve done. Help us to make an analysis of is this person inherently good as a person or have they been doing evil or like? There are questions that need to be asked, but the reality is, is if that history and not being having even been alive, which is the case for most kids, they’re going to make assumptions based upon whatever is being told to them now in real time, either by their friends or social media or even by you and other teachers, right?

Absolutely. So you also have to ask the question, what agenda does this support? So sometimes we could be reading some information. We can be hearing information in a classroom or reading it in the news or whatever is the case because we have teenagers and so forth. If you don’t have older kids, this is preparing you for that, of course. But what agenda does this information support? And if it supports the agenda of somebody evil or an organization that’s been wrong in the past and these kinds of things, you really have to question that information. You have to go, OK, even though this is compelling, this is convincing. There’s even make sense in some ways, some regards. Whose agenda is this actually supporting, right?

I think another good question to ask aside from who’s agenda, is this narrative supporting which is what you’re talking about with the news, looking at the news outlet and going, what agenda do they have? A track record of having supported would be an extra step deep in whether you can trust them or not, right?

And I would say this is same with the football coach. This is the same thing with people in school. There’s the same thing with pastors, with leaders anywheres, OK, whose agenda is this serving? Is this serving the edification of the people or is this serving the leaders agenda or some other agenda from having a knowledge base, an anchor point of knowledge about that situation? A person? Ok, so what agenda is this support? That’s super important. We talked about lessons from history, incredibly important to be teaching your kids history in all kinds of ways. I know Angie has been serious about that with our kids.

You know, when I think about lessons from history also brings up the importance of your kids knowing what your world, what your country’s constitution is or what your country’s rights are, for example. And that impacts how they are going to operate when control of power is potentially being taken away from them, when freedoms are starting to get stifled or taken away, even and I think about us. So for example, we live in the United States, and so one of the things that’s been incredibly important to us, that’s, I would say, just as important as learning science or or even writing and reading would be knowing the U.S. Constitution, knowing what has been fought for and what our rights are as American citizens. And I think that, you know, regardless of where you are seeing that and recognizing that you have a choice in where you are OK and evaluating that and teaching your kids, that is critically important. And the problem is that a lot of kids are not being actually taught just basic human rights.

Yeah, absolutely. So here’s what to watch for in other people. So and organizations, you name it, whoever’s giving the information, right? So here’s what to watch for. It’s really important that we’re sensitive to when we’re being manipulated. The common tactic when I’m trying I or an organization is trying to get somebody or a group of people to believe something is the use manipulation. The most simple form of using manipulation, which, by the way, in my younger years I have done in leadership roles before. I know this well because I’ve done this right and it’s where you minimize the hard truth you don’t really want people to focus on and you maximize just the positive things. And so you have to be aware of people that do that because it really disrespects your intelligence. And I have found

Other people’s intelligence that you’re leading. Absolutely.

And it makes you makes people feel uneasy. They won’t call it manipulation. Always, but they feel something, especially if they’re Christians and have the Holy Spirit, that spiritual discernment, which we’ll get to in a second, but they can feel that manipulation and there’s a trust gap starting to happen, meaning trust is withering away because when manipulation happens, nobody feels good about it, even if they don’t know, quite can’t pinpoint that they’re doing it to them.

Right. It’s true. And people who’ve experienced it before can kind of I would say that we’re probably hypersensitive to that just because of that right? And so being able to discern that and label it quickly and recognize, OK, so if spin is happening, why is it happening? And that’s the next question that I think would be a good question to ask your kids, like if they’re in a situation where a teacher is teaching something specifically, yeah, to say, OK, but why are they teaching that? Are they going to be enforcing a rule that goes along with this thinking soon and teaching your kids that there is there? There is a threat against your rights and liberties as humans and recognizing when certain things are pushed, it’s for a bigger agenda, too.

So if, for example, the teacher example, if they’re maximizing something and minimizing something else, your kids could test that by studying on the thing being minimized. And if in fact the thing being minimized should have been a more elaborately explained thing compared to the other things, then you start, your kid is starting to learn the agenda of the teacher, which is to maximize these positive things that happened in history or whatever and minimize these negative things.

So one of the ways that that happens is when kids are learning historical narratives about presidents who are in office right and where they will minimize or maybe not even bring up scandals that happen with certain presidents. But then they only talk about the few things that all people would be OK with them doing. That maybe looked good, right? Or teaching about something that even though it looks good on the outside, deep down inside it ended up hurting the other people, and they teach it from a perspective that gives a very slanted view. If you if you gather where

I’m going with this now, you are the most important teachers for your kids. You’re the most important leaders in your kids’ lives. You’re the God authorized leaders in your kids’ lives. And so we ourselves have to be careful not to be spin machines, not to be manipulating our kids. It’s so easy to do actually when your kids are little, but they will catch on to that and they will not trust you in the teenage years if you become accustomed to spinning with your kids. Now there’s a difference between age appropriate information, not talking about certain things and only talking about the good. When kids are really little, that’s totally appropriate and you’re the parents, you’re very

Striking to serve them, right?

To discern when things are appropriate to talk about when it’s OK to talk about the hard things and not minimize them, that is OK. But at certain point, if you keep doing that as your kids get older you, you will literally witness their trust in your words diminish.

And yeah, and you could potentially be sacrificing your relationship with your kids when they’re older, because they if they are smart, if they are smart and they have their own children and they start to see the truth, they’ll come back. Or they’ll have disrespect for you as as a parent because they’re like, they didn’t prepare me for this or they kept that from me or they they just they didn’t care enough to do research or whatever it was, right? And we don’t want that kind of relationship with our kids when they’re older. We want them to come to us for advice, to trust us, to have deep walking relationships with them. Now this all comes from a place of humility, right? Like, I’ve run into so many parents and grandparents who are like, Oh yeah, I screwed up so bad. I didn’t do this or I didn’t do that, and we just didn’t have the resources that you guys had or we didn’t know, right? And there is an element of having grace with a generation like that. But when you start putting that blanket statement over absolutely everything, it’s hard to have respect. It just is. And this is a warning because you don’t want to be that kind of parent. Now, Proverbs 15 14 says the heart of him who has understanding seeks knowledge. The heart of him, who has understanding, seeks knowledge. We need to seek knowledge, but the mouths of fools feed on folly.

We don’t want our kids to be fools, we don’t want them feeding on folly. We want them to seek knowledge to have understanding and says all the days of the afflicted are evil, but the cheerful of heart has continual feast. Listen, this this is an important aspect. We’re about to talk about critical thinking here. We need a watch for critical thinking. We need to equip our kids in critical thinking. We’ve talked about this in the past when we’ve done podcasts on like teaching your kids how to think logically or how to think better as critical thinkers. And part of that is like when you’re when you’re having a lesson with your kids and you’re teaching them about logic, you want to keep apples with apples and oranges with oranges. A good example is in one of our previous. Podcast where we talked about the importance of deciding whether to partner with a company. And and there are different ways that you kind of can associate with the company. One is buying and one is endorsing and you see a lot of people out there who do this all the time where they’ll put apples and oranges together, right? And we when we’re teaching our kids to think critically, there is a the outcomes of the way they think are either accurate or inaccurate.

Absolutely critical thinking is so important. Just a couple of things about it that you want your kids to watch for and that’ll help them to be critical thinkers, which is they need to suspend the person or organisation’s influence on them. So if it’s a news outlet, for example, and they’re teenagers, right, and they’re looking at this news outlet, they to have critical thinking you need to suspend your respect for that person or that outlet for long enough to be able to hear everything because we tend to want to hear things right. And that’s the next thing we have to suspend sometimes is what I want to hear. Don’t we want to hear certain things if you ever ask somebody for feedback? A lot of times you’re hoping to hear what you want to hear. And then when we don’t hear what we want to hear, there’s a moment of decision that will probably determine your relationship with that person moving forward or whether you heed that feedback. That’s not what you want to hear or not. We tend to only want to hear things, and so we

Have to listen. We have to

Hear. We have to suspend what we want to hear to be able to hear everything objectively right. And the other thing we have to suspend is our personal experience. The reason is is because you need to rely on that at sometimes to write in critical thinking, but also for a moment, at least you need to suspend your experience because sometimes it clouds. It gives us bias towards listening to maybe false truth. So it’s really important. So the influence they have over you, your experience and what I want to hear. Suspend momentarily to be able to hear everything and then go back to relying on your experience again and test it that way, too.

One thing that I think parents need to be on the lookout for, too. I even see this like sometimes with teenagers when they have like a friend that believes a certain thing, right? Or that friend has parents who believe a certain thing. And so of course, their kid believes the same thing they believe and they have a level of respect, maybe because of how successful they’ve been. And so they have a lot of influence on your child because I’m just going to say kids are fickle. They are fickle sometimes and sometimes their influence ability is greater with people that they admire. Ok. And so since children are fickle, they’ll look at outward success, for example, and go, Oh, that person’s been super successful. And so I want to believe what they tell me because they have wisdom, right? And so it’s just something to be aware of, and we need to teach our kids to be on the lookout for their own feelings of looking to people who, on the outward appearance, look to be successful and just believing what they say as truth all the time. Because the reality is, is those people can be just as deceived as anybody can.

And so where this is coming from, we had a discussion this morning with our kids. All of our kids were there, but the older ones, this was even more directed to, which is just how to discern information that’s coming out. And you just look at, for example, this Ukraine situation or we look back on the COVID shenanigans and we look at these things and we look at how many people get swayed in certain ways and then how much it’s how difficult it actually is sometimes to actually know what’s real and what’s going on. And we gave them some warnings. So that’s where this comes from. But also the paradigm that someone that’s giving us information is coming from. Paradigm is the lens that they look through the world. So do they have a biblical paradigm? Do they have a spiritual paradigm? It’s OK, by the way, you’re going to get your kids need to be good at getting information from people that don’t have a biblical paradigm. But that is a good thing. We can trust it even more, obviously. But if they don’t have a biblical paradigm, that’s OK. But what is their paradigm like? How do they see

Their world and understanding that that actually influences what their belief or their conviction or their stance is going to be on?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s important. And then is is the person giving information? This might have to do more with a personal relationship. But are they swayed easily? Mm hmm. Do they get swayed easily? Have they been swayed in the past? Your kids, friends? Have they been swayed in the past and they’re giving information? Is there a pattern or a trend here that would cause a little more wariness of taking information?

You know, it also reminds me of not only do so, there’s a few things that we’ve kind of given insight to is that a lot of kids can be fickle. To say all kids are fickle is is quite unfair because if you’ve been equipping your kids, they likely are able to see through stuff, you know, hopefully they can see. Through some phony things or people who are maybe just giving face, the Bible talks about that not being man pleasers or doing eye service, right? It talks about Jan. six and doing things an outward appearance that are going to get approval from other people, right? We want to teach our kids God’s word because that truly prepares them to be able to discern, is this person truly who they say they are? And are they sharing what they’re sharing from a place that’s wanting to manipulate me or has my good at heart? And this literally plays into every potential topic possible? You guys, the the reality that we need to be aware of is that families are just not in harmony these days. Are they like when you think about extended family and different things? Not many families are not in harmony. And so even families that maybe they all do believe in scripture or they have, they believe in Jesus, and there’s a like mindedness there. They may be in division on some of these topics, like Isaac was saying, like, if we look back at COVID, right? Like, maybe there was division in your family and that can be confusing for kids when they’re like, well, but that family members are Christian and this family members are Christian and they argue about this, right? And so the reality is that this is much more complicated than we’re able to fully cover in a podcast today.

But we understand that and we think that these tips are some of the most critical ones for teaching your kids how to discern, because ultimately, that’s what this is about. This is about equipping your kids so that when they launch out of your home and they’re working for other people and they’re in the real world and they’re going to a different church and they have maybe in-laws and they have friends that you’ve never been in contact with and all the different interactions that they have in their life that they would be able to stand strong than things that you do know is true and that they would be able to discern wisely. First Corinthians two 14 Yeah, says the natural person does not accept the things of the spirit of God, for they are falling to him and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

So if somebody isn’t a believer, it’s very hard to take wisdom from them. Now we can learn for sure we have to get data points from organizations and books written that are not biblically based and all those things. But we need to be discerning as we go through them so we can discern what’s real and what’s not real. Most importantly, your kids need to be equipped for that because the disinformation campaign, the rewriting of history all around the world is rampant. And so it’s really important that your kids have a rock solid

Relationship with God. For sure. I mean, this was like when we were talking about what to watch for. So just to brief Capp over, we talked about the importance of them on the lookout for manipulation, for spin, for them to be equipped and critical thinking to be able to suspend what they want to hear. That was really good to be able to suspend influence from other people to actually look at what’s being said from a critical lens and paradigm, understanding that they need to discern, OK, what are this person or this company or this organization’s paradigm? Where is this information coming from? And then are they swayed easy which that being able to be swayed easily oftentimes does go in alignment with if someone has a solid rock relationship with God? But sometimes some personalities or some people are just a little bit more or less mature or maybe more naive as far as people like even being aware that other people would try to sway them like there can be a naivete or and and sometimes it’s just that some people trust other people so much more than other people do, right? And so like, I would definitely say that I tend to be more skeptical just because I’m a little bit older and we’ve experienced some things over the last 20 years that made me kind of lose faith in humanity in some regards, and I’ve had to really go to the cross and forgive and be aware of who I am and and heal in that. But I am more skeptical because I’m protective of my kids, right? And people have to earn that trust with me, whereas some of my kids might be more like me or more trusting than I am because they haven’t necessarily been burned before.

Neither way they are. These things can help them. They can be equipped. And so spiritual discernment is so important. We need to teach our kids to trust their gut instinct because if they’re believers, it’s not necessarily their human gut instinct. A lot of times the Holy Spirit can prompt us through a gut instinct, through a gut reaction. You feel it, you feel something’s wrong, and you can’t pinpoint it. We need to teach our kids to trust that that’s really important. Also, our kids need to be good at asking God for wisdom. Are they good at that? Are your kids good at that? Or do they only pray when you’re praying with them? Do they have their own prayer life with God when they’re alone?

And do they believe that the Bible can actually be a place that? Gives them guidance into their path today, right, like the Bible says, thy word is a lamp into my feet, and I think that sometimes if kids don’t have an actual relationship with God, were there reading in the word and they’re getting guidance from it and applying it to life. Do you see how there’s this equation happening here? Read the word. Take it to heart, make decisions based upon that. If they haven’t experienced that in their life, then they may not go to God asking for wisdom and recognize, Oh, why? I need to take it a step further. I need to do the action of actually reading the word because God’s word does have wisdom for me today.

And when the when the spirit is prompting someone to get have a gut reaction or it doesn’t align with biblical truth, that’s when your kids should be trained to slow everything way down. Yeah, slower to go faster. I’ve often said sometimes you’re going to have to slow things way down to discern what’s real. And because you did that, you made a better choice so that whatever you’re doing or whatever’s going on, you can go faster later. But if you make a bad decision, if you go fast in the beginning, even though your gut was telling you something was off, now you’re going to have to go slower later and it’s going to be harmful because you’re going have to either stop correct directions, you know, apologize to people, lose money, whatever the situation is, for sure.

And the next thing would be biblical truth. So do your kids actually know enough of the Bible that that’s actually what triggers that like maybe upset stomach for a second, right? When they see something, hear something when they get advice from someone that isn’t in alignment with God’s word. That only happens when you’ve read the word like you can’t recall what you haven’t read, right? And so we need to be putting as much biblical truth into our children as possible, whether that’s reading that out loud to them, giving them time every day. We’re in there in the world listening to worship music that is scripture based. There are so many ways to get biblical truth into your mind, and that needs to be a high, high, high, the highest priority, I would say, for families regarding child raising

And there needs to be people, they can ask questions. You should be the most important humans that have wisdom for them and there should be a relationship where they do go to you as they get older. There will be some others that they ask wisdom of, and that’s good and normal. However, you need to teach your kids that you should not ask lots of people for wisdom. There should be a few trusted people that have earned through a long period of time the ability to give wisdom because, you know, they’re going to give it from a biblical standpoint and they’re not going to give

It for life.

Yeah, and they’re not just going to get it from their own experiences. Only experience can play in, but it can’t only because, you know, your kids might have a different experience with the same thing, so we have to be careful of that. In Matthew 10 16, it says, Behold, I’m sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. There’s a contrast there, but it’s so important to do both. We need to be wise as we go into this world. The enemy is lurking, but God is way more powerful. But it doesn’t mean the enemy isn’t doing things and projecting communication to deceive the Saints, to deceive believers and non-believers. And we have to be very careful. We have to be more wise about how we view information, what we share, the information we share to others and discern what is true, what is worthy, what is right and what is edifying to other people.

Hmm. Amen. So good. Thanks for joining us today. I hope that this was really helpful to you as a parent. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode. For more resources, go to courageous parenting and courageous mom for free online workshops, blog posts and best selling courses. Also, we wanted to quickly tell you about our six week online parenting mentor program. Isaac and I created a powerful biblical curriculum. Here’s how it works. Each week, we release a video with a downloadable parenting packet to make it easy for you to incorporate those teachings directly into your parenting.

This is an incredible, self-paced program where we cover everything from obedience training to overcoming mistakes most Christians are making. But more than that, it’s a supportive community. You’ll have access to our private online group, live webcasts and the courageous parenting text message line where Angie and I can send you weekly encouragement straight to your phone

If you’re interested in joining our next online parenting mentor program. Secure your spot now at CourageousParenting.com

Written By Angie Tolpin
Angie has been married to Isaac for 19 years and together they have eight children, whom she homeschools. She is the Founder of CourageousMom.com, a doula, the author of the best-selling book Redeeming Childbirth, and the creator of the first ever Christian Postpartum Course. Angie loves ministering to Women and has created a few online Bible Studies on Biblical Friendship and Motherhood.

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