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For a long time when we put him to bed, my now-nine-year-old son, Jase, would beg my husband and I to tell him a “childhood story." He would crack up when he heard about the time his dad slammed a ketchup bottle on his desk in the 4^th grade, resulting in a mess on the ceiling and a harsh punishment from Grandma Helen, who happened to be the 4^th grade teacher. He wanted all the details about the time my older sister and her friend cornered me in our yard and threw pinecones at my head or dangled me off the side of our elevated porch. However, the most profound moments of storytelling with him and his sisters have happened when we are able to use our own stories to help them understand the delightful, tricky, euphoric, or painful moments of their growing-up years. They need our stories to help them realize that they are not alone, that this too shall pass, that small things are sometimes big things (and vice versa).

Stories can teach these and other lessons gently, revealing truth through beloved characters, intriguing plotlines, and beautiful narration—a much more effective route than a series of bullet points in a lecture. I think of the prophet Nathan, who God used to move King David to repentance with a story (2 Samuel 12); and Jesus, who consistently used parables to teach the people about the nature of His Kingdom. Stories are a powerful tool, one that Christian parents have used for millennia to help us shape our children’s hearts and imaginations.

Here in 2025, though, our kids are encountering stories in many more places than the pages of their Bibles or during their bedtime rituals. There are Facebook and Instagram “stories” where we are all tempted to spin our everyday lives into an opportunity for connection, attention, or “likes.” There are YouTube influencers and TikTok creators in addition to the TV shows, books, and movies our kids are consuming. What are some things that we should consider when we think about the stories being told through these mediums? How do we evaluate which stories add value to our children’s development as image bearers?

While these are complicated questions with nuanced answers that each household must prayerfully consider, there are also two main ideas that we can keep in mind as we evaluate the stories that that we read, watch, listen to, and discuss with our kids.

1. Stories should inspire us to love Truth and beauty.

A well-written story can form our children to love whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, and whatever is praiseworthy (Philippians 4:8). They can vicariously experience Katniss’s noble resistance to President Snow’s violent dictatorship in The Hunger Games. They can contemplate the relationship between love and sorrow with Jonas in The Giver as he struggles to decipher truth in his dystopian society. They can cheer on Atticus as he defends Tom Robinson in To Kill A Mockingbird and have their hearts broken when the outcome is not right.

None of these stories are without controversy, and not all of them work in every context. When approached in thoughtful and developmentally appropriate ways, however, they and other stories like them can help point us to the underlying cosmic story: God created a good and delightful world that has been tainted by sin, and we as humans get to actively participate in God’s redemption and restoration of it. Stories can help us imagine ways to partner with God in His restorative Kingdom work and can help foster our love for virtue.

In addition, the stories we consume should be aesthetically excellent. Much like an exquisite sunset or the sound of the ocean, stories and words are a piece of God’s creation that can inspire wonder. Our household collection of children’s books is a delightful example of literary and artistic beauty, a collection my children and I return to in our holiday celebrations, in our spoken phrases to one another, and in our appreciation for a wide variety of art mediums. God delights in beauty, and we should be teaching our children to delight in symbolism, character development, figurative language, and beautifully crafted text.

2. Stories should challenge us to consider diverse perspectives and experiences.

In addition to forming us to love truth and beauty, stories should also challenge and shape our thinking by exposing us to ideas from outside our own limited perspectives and experiences. The best argument I’ve ever heard for this use of story is from Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her TED Talk, “.” In this captivating lecture, Adichie explores how stories told from only one perspective—a single story—can lead us to assumptions that are incomplete, inaccurate, and detrimental. Throughout the talk, she gives examples of single stories she has encountered. Reading only British children’s books in Nigeria gave her a single story of books, and she believed that all fiction must contain blond-haired characters who talked about the weather and drank ginger beer. Her American roommate in college had a single story of Africa, leading to surprise when Adichie could speak English and listened to Mariah Carey instead of “tribal music.”

Instead of the single stories that so often get told and reinforced, we should strive to tell a variety of stories to our children, leading them to consider and appreciate perspectives from other cultures, other parts of the world, other economic situations, other political perspectives, and many more “others”. We should intentionally pair these diverse perspectives together, inviting conversations about complex issues or events that do not have easy answers. In my own reading with my kids, for example, we paired Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series with Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House series, examining Westward expansion through the perspective of both white pioneers and Native American families who had lived on those lands for generations.

When we intentionally and wisely structure these reading experiences and conversations in our homes and schools, we are preparing our children to enter God’s wide and diverse world with care and awareness. What an amazing opportunity to foster conversation and love for our neighbors.

Inside these two guidelines, parents and teachers may still come up with vastly different book lists, movies, or shows, depending on their contexts. That’s OK! But let’s keep asking these questions as we curate those lists: How does this point back to truth and beauty? Whose story does this tell, and how can we use it and others to consider diverse perspectives? And if you have any good recommendations, send them my way.