The first time my daughter came home from preschool singing a song I didn’t know, I felt amazed—and a little unnerved. She was learning new things! How cool! So why did I feel, very unreasonably, a little upset, too? I had to admit the obvious truth that I would never again be in complete control over what she heard and saw and learned.

As parents or children’s ministry leaders, we try to protect them for as long as possible, don’t we? What they read, what they hear, what they do—we feel obligated to protect their innocence and to encourage them on their walk with Christ. It gets harder the older they get. Just how worried do we need to be?

Recently, the local writers’ group that I’m a board member of faced a question: should we invite an award-winning Christian author to speak to our group even though his young adult fiction had a little foul language in it? As a librarian and a parent, it got me thinking about books, censorship, and what we teach our kids. For example, do a few swear words cancel out the significance of a Christ-centered character transformation? What about violence? The Lord of the Rings trilogy, written by JRR Tolkien, who led C.S. Lewis to Christ, and beloved by millions, has plenty of it.

We could debate long and hard about which books/words/actions/etc. are acceptable at different stages of our kids’ lives. I even wrote an essay once during my librarian training that advocated for the protection of kids’ innocence as a factor of book acquisition in the elementary school. The professor called it the most unique perspective on censorship he’d ever read and made it required reading for future classes!

As a Christian author, however, whose work is in public school libraries, I actually hope and pray for my books to land in an open, uncensored environment. After all, censorship works in both directions! Atheist parents could insist on the removal of my novels just as easily as Christian parents could insist on the removal of books objectionable to them.

At the end of the day, it seems that the most profitable way forward is to ensure that our kids have a firm foundation in God’s Word. With the belt of truth and the sword of the Spirit firmly in place, our children will be “strong in the Lord and in his mighty power” (Ephesians 6: 10-17), no matter what they see or hear.

Perfect love drives out fear (1 John 4:18). If you feel anxiety over what your children may or may not be encountering at school or in the movies or wherever, trust in the Lord. He loves your kids even more than you do! Pray for them to see the world through God’s eyes. There are Bible memorization and other tips offered on this website (among others) that can help you give them the biblical foundation that will help them to grow, like Jesus, in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52). In the long run, your children will enter adulthood unafraid and confident in their ability to follow Jesus’ way, “testing the spirits” (1 John 4:1) in everything they are called to do and see and hear, wherever that may be.