“I just want to keep them little…a little longer.”
That’s the desire, isn’t it? The one that runs in the back of a parent’s head while they’re locking down the router, switching on parental controls, putting the iPad on the top shelf. The desire is not wrong. It comes from love. Most of us were raised by people who never had to think about any of this, and now we’re trying to keep our kids in a place we ourselves can barely remember.
When we sat down with Kristen Jenson on a recent episode of What We Really Want, she said something that didn’t soften the moment. It changed it.
“A lot of people say we want to protect a child’s innocence. I am going to make the bold statement that innocence is not the goal. The goal is wisdom, the goal is discernment, the goal is the ability to make a good choice.”
Kristen is the author of Good Pictures, Bad Pictures and the founder of Defend Young Minds. She has been writing and speaking into this for more than a decade. She is not careless about children. And she is telling us, plainly, that aiming at innocence is aiming at the wrong thing.
The Curb, and What We Actually Teach
Kristen used an analogy we keep going back to…
“We teach our children when they start to walk and run, we teach them to stop at the curb, don’t run out into the street. We’re teaching them some refusal skills. It’s the same way with the internet.”
Nobody fences the whole world. We teach the curb. We hold their hand the first dozen times, we say the words out loud, we let them practice with us next to them. The goal isn’t to make sure they never get near a street. The goal is to build something into them so that when a street shows up, they know what to do.
Most of us are doing the opposite with screens. We’re trying to keep the street away. And when a street appears anyway, which it always does, the child has nothing to meet it with.
That’s the gap.
A Nine-Year Old Knew What to Do
Kristen told us about a boy whose mom had read him Good Pictures, Bad Pictures. A few days later, a kid on the playground walked up with a phone and showed him pornography. He recognized what it was. He turned away. He went home and told his mom one sentence.
“I was scared, but I knew what to do.”
Sit with that for a minute. A nine-year-old, scared, and competent. Not protected from the moment. Equipped to walk through it.
That is what preparation looks like. It is not edgy or premature or stealing anything from him. It is the same posture as the curb. His mom held his hand before the street showed up, and when it did, he had words and a plan and a person to go home to. That is not a loss of innocence. That is the formation of a child who knows how to choose.
What We Get Wrong About Innocence
Here is the part we hope resonates with all Christian parents.
A child being shown something that they didn’t choose doesn’t change who that child is. There is a very important line in Good Pictures, Bad Pictures, Jr. (the younger kids’ version) that came as a suggestion from another parent, a man doing his own recovery work, who urged her that she had to put it in. She did.
“Even if you see a bad picture, that doesn’t make you a bad kid.”
That sentence is doing a lot of work. The shame, the silence, the head-down feeling of “something is wrong with me now” is what keeps a child from saying anything. If the goal is to keep them from ever seeing it, and they see it, the conclusion they draw on their own is that they’ve failed. They’ve lost the thing they were told to protect. So they hide.
A child who has been taught to recognize, refuse, and report doesn’t draw that conclusion. They tell you. They come home. The thing that looked like a threat to innocence becomes a moment of formation instead.
In our recovery community, a constant truth we see is that the men we walk with didn’t start out wanting any of this. Most of them were shown something young, said nothing to anyone, and built on that silence for years. The protection their parents thought they were giving them wasn’t protection. It was a closed door to the kind of communication that would have helped so much more.
What We Can Actually Give Them
We can still lock down the router. We can still put the iPad on the top shelf. None of that is wasted work. Kristen would say so herself, and she does. Doing our best to provide protection matters.
What changes is that protection stops being THE plan and starts being one piece of a bigger plan.
The plan is the curb. The plan is sitting on the couch with a kids’ book and reading the words out loud, even when you feel awkward, starting earlier than you thought you needed to…even when your child is two and a half. The plan is the sentence you give them ahead of time, in their own vocabulary, so that when something happens they have a way to tell you. The plan is the look on your face when they do tell you.
A child who knows what to do is not less innocent. A child who knows what to do is the one who makes it through childhood less affected by the dangers seeking them out.
A Word for the Christian Parent
If you’re a Christian parent reading this, you already know real human innocence ended in Eden, when Adam and Eve fell. Every one of us since has come into the world needing rescue, not just preservation. That doesn’t make our kids any less precious. It changes what we’re aiming at on their behalf. We’re not pretending we can keep them in a bubble. We’re helping them learn what we ourselves had to learn (often without help): wisdom, discernment, and a way to walk through a fallen world without getting taken apart by it.
If This Bubbled Up Your Own Story…
A lot of parents read a post like this and the first thing that comes up isn’t their kid. It’s their own story. Maybe an exposure they had when they were young that nobody ever named. Maybe years of using porn or some other coping strategy they never put down. Maybe a life or marriage that’s devaastated because of it.
If that’s you, Awaken wants to offer you some help. We hold weekly support meetings for men seeking recovery from unwanted sexual behaviors, and for women who have experienced sexual betrayal. We also host the Roots Retreat which offers a chance to dive into deeper therapeutic work.
If you’re not sure what you need, find help here.
