Four Ways Our Daily Conversations Shape Our Children’s View of the World

1. Our daily interactions and habits help our children define “normal.”

The other day our dining room table was surrounded by teen girls, gathered to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. From the kitchen, where I was cleaning up the remnants of the requested protein bowl dinner, I heard a seemingly insignificant conversation unfold.

“My lips are chapped, do you have a chapstick I could use?” a friend asked my daughter. 

After a beat, my daughter answered, “I don’t know…we’re more of a tub of Vaseline type of family.” Before it became too much of a thing at the table, another friend produced chapstick, and they returned to their conversation. But it struck me as funny, the way my daughter labeled our family. It’s a true observation, but it’s not like we sat our kids down one day to explain to them that some families have chapstick in every room in the house, and our family—while using an occasional chapstick—will generally rely on the seemingly never-ending tub of Vaseline in the bathroom to treat dry skin and lips. 

This caused me to think of the ways that our children learn about the world from us. As the saying goes, they learn from what is taught and what is caught. We teach them things intentionally, but they also catch a lot about the world through their observations and the connections that they make watching their parents and others navigate their world. 

As I reflect on my experience as a parent, I think it’s safe to say that we’re much more intentional about what we teach and probably less attentive to what our kids might be learning from listening and observing our communication. However, as we consider equipping our children with an understanding of the use and importance of words, we must pay attention to both the things that are taught and the things that are caught.

2. Our words teach our children how to see and speak about other people.

It is of course important to encourage our kids to use words that reflect respect and dignity of God’s fellow image bearers. We are wired to label and categorize, and from our earliest days we are trying to make sense of the world and attribute meaning through natural attempts to codify our world. God’s common grace, extended to us as social beings, enable us to make sense and meaning of our social world. However, because of sin, we know that our use of words and our attempts to categorize can be distorted. To use distorted or demeaning labels is to, as Richard Mouw puts it in Uncommon Decency, bear false witness against others. We can miss unique and beautiful aspects about people with our unexamined labels and categories. We can help our kids expand their views of people by pointing to the observations of people that point to their uniqueness rather than reinforcing stereotypes. Additionally, in leadership and organizational communication, best practices encourage use of observational statements rather than statements that include moral or ethical judgments. In practice, conversations about performance might start with observations instead of labels. We might say things like, “she missed two deadlines last month” rather than “she’s unreliable” or “she’s not a hard worker.” Rather than assigning labels, these observations might open the door to fruitful conversation about what is underlying a missed deadline or a prickly interaction between colleagues.

For our kids, then, when they label others— “he’s the smart one” or “she’s a theater kid,” or “they’re the popular kids”—we can encourage them to think beyond these labels. In the swirl of adolescent social drama, these labels will seem fixed and immovable from the perspective of a teenager. Employing language that reflects a growth mindset when talking about people and situations allows our children to put themselves, and others, in a bigger redemptive social story. By focusing on behavior or other “evidence,” we can avoid the tendency to distort and recognize that, although labels can be a helpful sorting device to make meaning of our social world, people are always more than the labels we attach to them. 

3. Our everyday conversations prepare our children for a changing culture.

A tricky part of navigating our social world is recognizing that word usage is dynamic. Certain words or phrases can be co-opted by political or social ideological camps as a way to virtue signal, or to determine loyalty and allegiance. Professional and academic circles also regularly transition words and labels, and the old terms become outdated or problematic. For example, the homeless are now more often referred to as the “unhoused.” Or a historical example, the term “moron” was once considered a clinical term as a category of intelligence in the earlier parts of the 20^th century. Now, that term is used as an insult. 

For each generation, youth culture uses slang to help distinguish itself from the “old” people. If you’ve had an “Ok, Boomer” directed your way, you know what I’m talking about here. Their use or cooptation of certain words and phrases can be a funny and creative way for them to express themselves, but there can also be problematic things that we can help them to understand and refrain from using. As parents, we can keep engaging in conversations about words and their meanings to help our kids recognize the simple truth that our words, and our use of words, matter deeply. 

4. Our children catch what we believe is worth loving through our daily interactions.

A final thing to consider is what is caught as our kids listen to us navigate our social world. How are we talking about people, and how we are talking about the institutions and communities of which we are apart?  What does our involvement with the institutions that make up the social fabric of our lives—family, church, school, community—communicate? Do our everyday stories of life reflect their important value in our lives in Christian community? Does my social commentary reflect God’s big story in our life and in our world? It can be easy to fall into routines of Monday morning quarterbacking or conversational patterns that involve critique of others—of bosses and coworkers, teachers and pastors. Instead, are big gospel ideas like God’s grace and mercy reflected? Do I speak in ways that seem to imply that the world is a place of scarcity and deficit, a place to fight for what’s mine in the workplace and at church? Or am I telling the everyday stories of life where God’s love and grace is abundant? 

If my daughter can pick up on the fact that we use Vaseline for chapped lips, I pray that she is catching the more important and greater lessons of life—one in which the world, although distorted by sin, is a place where God’s beauty, grace and life is evident in words and in our social relationships with one another.