Tactics and Tools

Quick Thought: Avoid Sheltering Kids Too Much

Author Alan Shlemon Published on 05/20/2015

There are legitimate things to want to shelter your kids from. However, there are some things that are appropriate to expose our kids to.

We need to inoculate, not isolate, our kids from bad ideas, so when they run across a real person who holds false ideas, they are prepared. If you think about inoculation when it comes to medicine, we take a dead or weakened virus, and we insert it into the body. When you get exposed to the real virus, your body says, “I’ve seen this before. Now here is the army of antibodies I have prepared to destroy this virus.”

The same is true when it comes to the inoculation of false ideas. We need to teach our kids false ideas enough so they understand why people believe them and so they can give reasons as to why they’re false.

This is powerful because our students don’t just survive with their faith in tact; rather they become agents of change. This is why inoculation, not isolation, is one of the key ways that we can help prevent parents from sheltering their kids too much.

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