Your kid is six. You are driving, or doing dishes, or halfway through turning off the light. And she says something like, does God see us when we are sleeping.
It is a small question. She picked it up at a birthday party or off a show, and she is asking it the way she asks why the moon follows the car.
And you go blank.
If that happens to you when your kid asks about God, the short version is this. Something old fired before she finished the sentence. It was installed in you long before you could evaluate it, it does not run on argument, and it is considerably faster than you are. She asked a small question. You heard the whole building.
That gap is the subject of this post, and in a sense it is the subject of the whole year.
The Freeze Was Installed Before You Could Argue With It
Most of us were not taught that God was interesting. We were taught that God was consequential, which is a different thing, and children learn consequence early and thoroughly.
Getting it wrong mattered. Not the way getting arithmetic wrong mattered. Somewhere in the arrangement there was a sense that a wrong answer about God carried weight, and that the weight attached to you personally rather than to the answer.
There was usually a second layer underneath it. Doubt itself got treated as a problem to be managed rather than an ordinary event in a thinking life, which meant a question about God doubled as a question about your standing. A child who learns that asking carries risk does not stop asking. She learns to ask more quietly, and eventually to ask nobody.
So a question about God became a question with stakes. Children get careful around questions with stakes. They learn to check the adult face first and answer second.
Then twenty or thirty years pass and your own six year old opens her mouth, and the old arrangement recognizes the shape of what is coming before you consciously do.
I want to be careful about how much I am claiming here. I do not know what happened in your particular church, and there is a real difference between an upbringing that was strict and one that was genuinely controlling, which is worth working out on its own terms. What I can tell you is that this specific freeze comes up in my office more often than almost anything else parents bring me, and that the people describing it are usually surprised to hear that it is common.
Your Body Answers Before Your Theology Does
Parents describe this to me in physical terms. Chest, throat, stomach, hands. They tend to apologize for it, as though the correct response to a theological question from a child would be a thought.
I am a pastor and not a physician, and I am not going to tell you what is happening inside you. What I notice is that the reaction arrives well ahead of reasoning, and that it seems largely indifferent to what you currently believe. People who walked out fifteen years ago describe it. People who never fully left describe it. People who have made peace with all of it and are perfectly happy describe it.
The sentence I hear most often, right after somebody describes it, is that they thought they were over this. Usually with a small laugh, usually while looking down at a cup that has gone cold. The embarrassment is rarely about the theology. It is about the body still having an opinion.
Whatever went in, went in early and went in whole, before you had the equipment to sort any of it. That is not an accusation against your childhood church so much as a description of how childhood works.
Your Kid Asked a Small Question and You Heard the Whole Thing
The freeze is thirty years old and your child is six.
She is not asking you to resolve anything. She wants to know whether God can see her at night, in roughly the way she wants to know whether the dog dreams. She has no idea there is a building behind the question, because for her there is not one yet.
You know. That is the whole difficulty. You are answering the question she asked and also a question she did not ask, and the second one is the one making your hands cold.
Separating the two is most of what this year is about. You will get better at it, though not by settling your own theology first, which would take longer than her childhood. You get better at it by noticing, in the moment, which of the two questions you are actually being handed.
What to Say in the Three Seconds After You Freeze
You do not need a prepared answer. You need something to say while your hands catch up.
Ages 3 to 6. Short, true, and turn it back to her. That is a really good question. What do you think? Or, I do not know for sure, and I am glad you asked me. A four year old is not after a doctrine. She is checking whether this topic is safe to bring up in this house, and your face is the answer she is actually reading.
Ages 7 to 12. This age can handle process. Different people answer that in really different ways, and I have changed my mind about it more than once. Say it plainly and without ceremony. A nine year old finds adult uncertainty interesting as long as the adult is not visibly frightened by it, and she will take her cue from the second thing rather than the first.
Ages 13 and up. Give a teenager the real version, including the part where you are still working it out. Then give them the sentence almost none of us got. You are allowed to land somewhere different than I do. Say it out loud, in those words. They will test whether you meant it, and the testing is the point rather than the problem.
The one move worth avoiding is making a habit of changing the subject. Once in a while means nothing, and sometimes the pasta really is boiling over. But a child who gets redirected every single time will often draw the obvious conclusion, which is that this topic is closed in this house. That is the same lesson most of us were given, delivered more gently, and it tends to produce the same silence about a decade later.
None of this requires your own position to be settled. Week 11 takes up the direct version of the question, whether God is real, and the answers there are built to survive a parent who does not know.
The Freeze Will Probably Not Leave, and That Is Survivable
I would like to tell you this gets fixed. What I have watched instead is that it gets quieter, and slower, and that the gap between the flinch and the answer eventually gets wide enough to walk through.
That turns out to be enough. Your child does not need a parent with no history. She needs one who does not hand her the history along with the answer.
And you do not control where she ends up. She may believe more than you ever did, or nothing at all, and you will not get a vote. What you control is whether asking was safe in this house. That is the whole job this year, and it is smaller and harder than it sounds.
Next week we go after the specific god most of us met first. The one who was watching.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and raising children who never have to be afraid of God.
If you are raising kids after leaving the faith you grew up in, and you want a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and nobody has to pretend to have it all figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All