2 Ways to Fail Your Child

There are two ways to fail your child, and they move in opposite directions.

You can fail by keeping too much out. You can bring up a child so isolated from anything that goes against your faith that by age 18 she has no means of coping with a world that doesn’t agree with her. When she meets a compelling false idea, how will she know how to wrestle with a doubt if those have never been discussed? How will she be able to explain what she believes to someone who disagrees with her if she’s never had practice doing it, or even seen anyone else do it?

You can also fail by letting too much in. You can be so afraid of being labeled as one of “those weird Christian parents,” or want to keep dinner peaceful, that you end up treating your faith like a private matter not worth mentioning. You avoid filtering what your kids watch or listen to because you’re not going to be one of those legalistic religious types. So you skip the hard conversations. But kids get the hint: Christian faith is an optional preference. It’s not important.

Both are failures of love. Most of us are guilty of one of them, and probably both at some point.

I grew up in Manhattan, where childhood innocence doesn’t last long. Everywhere you look on storefronts, bus ads, even people’s clothes, there are messages about sex, money, status, and power, and no one asks if you’re ready for them.

Now, thanks to smartphones, every child in America is basically living in Manhattan. They may not walk through Times Square, but they scroll through it on their phone. All culture is right there in their pocket.

This puts a decision in front of every Christian parent. Do we build higher walls, or do we tear them down? Should we retreat or surrender? Is there any other option? Before we explore our alternative, we need to examine both well-intentioned failures: control and avoidance. I call them the Bunker and the Bubble.

Bunker: Strategy of Control

The first reaction is to build a Bunker. This comes from a real desire to protect your kids. Bunker parents see the culture around them as dangerous, and they try to keep it out. They limit most movies, ban secular music, and watch every digital interaction with the intensity of a secret agent. The idea is to seal off the house so their children stay safe.

Bunker parents see the culture around them as dangerous, and they try to keep it out.

The desire to protect your children from the world isn’t wrong. Parents should guard their children, and that will manifest itself in numerous ways depending on the child’s age and temperament. But what Bunker parents often miss is that sin and brokenness aren’t just outside—they’re already inside each of us. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, the line separating good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but through the middle of every human heart.

In Luke 15, the son who is most lost isn’t the younger one who leaves home and wastes his inheritance. It’s the one who stays and follows all the rules but still can’t join the celebration his father offers. You can mess up by running away, but you can also mess up by following the rules with pride and judging others. The Bunker builds walls, forgetting the real struggle is also inside us.

This approach often swaps one set of idols for another. A family might avoid Hollywood’s violence but still chase the idol of success. The Bunker creates hothouse flowers. These kids look healthy in temperature-controlled, windless environments, but they aren’t ready for the weather of the real world.

Bubble: Strategy of Avoidance

If Bunker parents control, Bubble parents float above it all. Bubble parents value relational harmony and their children’s immediate happiness more than correction, friction, and spiritual formation. They place few restrictions on their children’s world. Smartphone use is largely unrestricted. Content is mostly unsupervised. Bubble parents avoid hard conversations for fear that conflict will drive their children away. Their goal is to keep the peace at all costs.

Bubble parents value relational harmony and their children’s immediate happiness more than correction, friction, and spiritual formation.

The sociologist Christian Smith found that the single strongest predictor of a teenager’s faith isn’t youth group attendance or church involvement. It’s the religious seriousness of his or her parents. Children rarely surpass what they observe growing up.

What they often inherit today is what Smith calls “moralistic therapeutic deism”—a vague belief that God exists, wants people to be nice and happy, but makes no real demands on their lives. The result of this belief doesn’t necessarily spill out of the child as rebellion. It comes out as indifference, often mimicking the silence they see modeled before them in the Bubble parent.

The Bunker and Bubble strategies both fail, though for opposite reasons. The Bunker gives a child truth without grace. The Bubble gives a child grace without truth. Jesus, of course, is the ultimate combination of grace and truth (John 1:14). He ate with tax collectors, yet called them to turn from their sin. He never gave up one for the other. We shouldn’t either.

Embassy: Biblical Approach

In 587 BC, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and dragged the people of Judah into exile. The exiles face the same two options we face: separate or assimilate. Bunker or Bubble. The false prophets call for resistance: Don’t unpack. God will destroy Babylon soon. Babylon offers the opposite path: Become Babylonian. Lose your identity. Blend in.

Through Jeremiah, God offers a shockingly different way that satisfies neither camp: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. . . . Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it” (Jer. 29:5, 7, NIV). “Build houses” and “plant gardens” means stay, settle, invest. “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city” means don’t merely tolerate or survive Babylon but actively work for its flourishing. They should “pray to the LORD for it” because their horizontal engagement with the culture was never meant to eliminate their vertical dependence on God.

This approach is neither the Bunker nor the Bubble but the Embassy.

An embassy sits inside a foreign nation, and within its walls a different set of laws and loyalties applies. The embassy doesn’t exist to be a bunker hiding from the host nation, nor does it exist to be an assimilated bubble. It exists to represent, to engage, and to serve a mission. This requires learning the language, understanding the culture, and building relationships outside those walls.

The embassy doesn’t exist to be a bunker hiding from the host nation, nor does it exist to be an assimilated bubble. It exists to represent, to engage, and to serve a mission.

This is the calling of the Christian home. We live here. We love our neighbors. We engage the culture thoughtfully and courageously while operating by a different constitution. We raise our children to be ambassadors fluent in the language of the culture yet loyal to the one true King.

Every embassy has a set of instructions from its home government. Without this manual, the embassy is just a building with a flag on it. The Christian home’s manual has three parts. The first two come straight from the opening chapters of Genesis; the third comes from the rest of Scripture.

1. All culture was originally created good.

Genesis 1 tells us that God made the material world and called it good. Then he told humans to fill the earth and subdue it. Language, music, technology, sports, and storytelling aren’t the products of our fallenness. They’re part of the beauty and goodness of our design.

This passage protects us from the gnostic belief that the physical world is so contaminated that we must retreat into something purely spiritual. If God called creation good, and Jesus took on a physical body, then culture isn’t the enemy.

2. All culture is also deeply broken.

Sin isn’t only inside humans. It has corrupted institutions, stories, and creation itself. Genesis 3 shows that all of creation is now broken, which means every song, every political platform, and every film carries the fingerprints of the fall.

Often, this distortion isn’t obvious. Romantic love becomes the idol that promises ultimate fulfillment. Autonomy is raised to be the highest good. Understanding these cultural narratives protects us from the naive consumption of Bubble parenting. Your child is being formed by flawed content.

3. All culture needs to be redirected toward something better.

When Paul stood in Athens in Acts 17, he didn’t just turn away and condemn it. He found their altar “to an unknown god” (v. 23, NIV), affirmed the longing embedded in their worship, and redirected it toward something better.

When we know all creation is good but fallen, we can affirm what’s good, critique what’s fallen, and redirect it all toward Jesus. That’s the process: Affirm, critique, and redirect.

What Embassies Look Like

Take something as ordinary as the Disney movie Frozen. It was one of the first movies my daughters watched. Elsa sings about letting go, about being free from rules and judgment. The song is catchy. Who doesn’t want to be rid of shame and guilt? Who doesn’t want to stop hiding? God didn’t make us to live trapped lives in hiding. We can say yes to those longings.

But the song’s answer is freedom through self-definition, isolation, and breaking away from any authority. “No rules for me, I’m free.” That’s where the distortion comes in. Absolute autonomy doesn’t lead to flourishing; it leads to loneliness. In the movie, Elsa’s freedom builds her a castle, but she’s alone inside it, and it leads to a never-ending winter for everyone around her.

Once we show these flaws, we can redirect by saying, “Isn’t it interesting that the spell doesn’t break when Elsa lets it go? It breaks when Anna throws herself in front of a sword for her sister.” The film’s own answer to a frozen heart turns out to be self-sacrifice, not self-expression. True freedom in Scripture isn’t found in escaping limits. It’s found in rightly ordered love, being bound to God and to one another.

You’re not banning the movie, but you’re not blessing it either. You’re teaching your child to think. This is how you build spiritual antibodies. Ordinary moments—Disney movies, songs on the radio, commercials or ads you see—can become places of formation. Hard conversations don’t always start with a crisis. Sometimes they start with your child’s favorite song.

When you know the operating manual of the embassy, you don’t have to panic when your kids bring home confusing questions about identity, sexuality, meaning, justice, or morality. Instead of shutting down the conversation out of fear like the Bunker parent, or ignoring the moment like the Bubble parent, you can slow down. Affirm the longing behind the question. Identify the distortion in the cultural answer. Point toward the hope that Jesus is putting the world back together, and your child with it.

Raise Ambassadors

If you’re too tired and busy to imagine you could follow this manual, let me encourage you: You’ll fail. How is that good news? Because when we skip to the end, we see that no one parents perfectly. Some nights you’ll be the Bunker parent. Other nights you’ll be the Bubble parent. Some weeks the Embassy feels under attack from every direction, and you’ll want to wave the white flag of surrender.

Here’s the good news: An embassy doesn’t last because its staff always gets everything right. It stands because the authority behind it keeps it in service. That protection holds whether anyone inside is having a good week or a bad week. You weren’t sent out into the world to do the job perfectly. You were just sent, even if you don’t have all the answers.

The command God gave through Jeremiah wasn’t to build perfect homes in Babylon or to raise perfect kids who never mess up. The command was to build, to plant, to pray, and to seek the peace and prosperity of the city, however imperfectly.

The cross offers parents and children forgiveness for all our failures. God’s mercies are new every morning, which means they’ll be new tomorrow as well (Lam. 3:22–23). When your children watch you sit with a hard question rather than shut down or ignore it, they see the Christian faith in action. When they see you apologize on the nights you get it wrong, they learn what the Christian faith is actually worth.

When your children watch you sit with a hard question rather than shut down or ignore it, they see the Christian faith in action.

Jesus is the Lord of the city. He is the Lord of your children’s hearts. He loves your children more than you do, and he’s more committed to their faith than you are. This perspective frees you to be calm. You can be curious. You can be courageous. You don’t have to save your kids from the world. Jesus has already overcome the world. Your job is to walk with them through it, pointing out the idols, pointing out the beauty, and pointing them, again and again, to the only One who can satisfy the longings of their hearts.

So, stop building the Bunker. Pop the Bubble. Build an Embassy. Open the door. Invite the conversation. Trust the One who holds it all together.