How Do I Talk to My Kids about Suffering?
Children experience suffering in different forms, from living with food allergies to having a disability, from losing a grandparent to moving away from the only home they’ve ever known. Their friends can sometimes be cruel. They suffer alongside a sibling with physical and mental limitations. For adopted kids, trauma is likely part of their story. As parents, we hate it, but the truth is our kids can’t escape growing up in a broken world, filled with disappointment, grief, and death.
The older our kids get, they not only suffer, they also want to make sense of their suffering. They ask questions like, “Why does God allow this?” and “What good can come out of this pain?”
God gives us the precious privilege of shaping our children’s response to suffering. We don’t always have neat answers and it is heart-wrenching sometimes. But we get to be ambassadors of the Shepherd who walks with them in the valley.[1]
So how can we show them the heart of the Father when we talk to them about their suffering?
1. We Welcome Their Questions
Our children may ask many questions, express doubt, and even voice anger at their inability to understand why God allows pain. It can be tempting for us to respond with impatience and exasperation (ask me how I know).
Thankfully, this is not the way our Father responds to us. We see kindness over and over in God’s dealings with his children. For example, God promised to make Abraham a great nation. After years of waiting, Abraham was afraid. Would God really keep his word? When Abraham asked how God would fulfill his promise to him, the Lord responded by committing himself to bless Abraham with an eternal covenant.[2] Abraham had fears and the Lord, rather than turning him away, graciously drew near.
Trusting God’s heart of mercy for us in Christ moves us to be a safe place for our kids’ questions. Instead of rebuking our kids for asking questions about God, we can teach them to bring their questions to God. We want them to feel free to pray honest prayers to the One who handles us with care and grace. We can say, “Those are important questions. I am so glad you are bringing them up. God loves it when we bring our questions to him in faith. He is near to those who call out to him in truth.”[3]
2. We Feed Them God’s Word
When we suffer, our human nature looks for ways of dealing with the pain. I see that not only in myself but also in my children.
But here’s the clincher: where we go for life, strength, and refuge shapes our hope. We are often tempted to reach for screen time, books, food, and more to fill the emptiness, anxiety, and grief of our souls. But man does not live by double fudge ice cream or T.V. shows. Rather, we live by every word—found in the scriptures—that comes from the mouth of God.[4]
During difficult times, God’s word gives us the strength we need.[5] We are loving our kids well when we teach them to read the word, sing the word, and pray the word.
When we read, we have an opportunity to focus our attention and their attention on what each passage teaches us about the unchanging character of God. When we sing songs chock-full of scripture, they discover God has given them a language to speak to him about their feelings. When we pray, we can teach them how to pray through the Psalms. For example, we might teach our kids to pray something like, “Lord, you are my light and my salvation. You are bigger than anything else I fear. You are better than screen time and my favorite friend. Teach me to trust you more.”[6]
3. We Point Them to the Good Shepherd
When we suffer, it can be easy to doubt God’s love and care. If our kids bring up these doubts, we can talk to them about Christ as a shepherd who gave his own life for us.[7] We want them to know how personal the care is that God has for us in Christ. Just as a good shepherd knows his sheep intimately and provides for them exactly what they need, Christ knows us so well that he provided what we need by taking on our skin and giving us himself.
We can explain this to our kids by saying something like, “Honey, the amazing truth about Christ is that he became man so that he could actually carry in his body the weight of all our burdens. He chose to know what it was like to feel pain, experience exhaustion, rejection from his family, homesickness, hate from others and every single thing we suffer, including death...because he loves us. I know right now it doesn’t seem like it. But Christ truly is the Good Shepherd who has the best kind of love: the kind that lays down his life for those he calls friends.”[8]
We plant these seeds in our kid’s lives and trust the Spirit to water them. He is powerful and tender-hearted to our children as they suffer, and may even use their suffering to create faith in Christ. So we trust his work as we do ours.
Mama, I know there are few things harder than seeing our children suffer, especially if we are not able to take their pain away. But with eyes of faith we can see suffering in our kids’ lives as a gift that can reveal to them the heart of our Father for them in Christ. So ask for grace to speak his words and show his heart. He has promised to answer.
[1] Psalm 23: 4
[2] Genesis 15: 1-5; Hebrews 6: 13
[3] Psalm 145: 18
[4] Matthew 4: 4
[5] Psalm 19: 7
[6] Psalm 27: 1
[7] John 10:11
[8] John 15: 13
