How Morality Tales Might Undermine Your Kid’s Morality

What do Kirk Cameron’s kids books and Nexxus commercials have in common?

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

There’s a growing movement nationwide that aims to teach kids moral lessons through wholesome stories. Stories with an obvious lesson, like these books championed by Kirk Cameron, are popping up everywhere.

While I cannot speak specifically about the above-linked books, having never read them, I regularly see such books advertised. For some reason, social media algorithms think I’m the perfect target for these ads, constantly serving me up morality tales with “easy takeaways,” discussion questions, and stories designed to tackle modern-day problems for kids.

The problems they wish to tackle are quite often incredibly important and should definitely be discussed with children. So far, so good. However, not only do these ads miss their mark with me, I actually believe that these types of stories could be doing more harm than good when it comes to shaping our children’s sense of right and wrong.

The Desire to Raise Good Kids Is Natural

I understand the motivation behind the surge in morality tales—it’s natural to want our kids to be kind and honest, not hit strangers, and grow into the kind of people who pay their taxes. We want children to think seriously about important topics from a young age. Parents, Sunday school teachers, children’s ministries, and youth programs all share a desire to pass on their love for the Lord, not just to raise well-behaved children, but so they can experience the joy and freedom that comes with faith in Christ. This is a commendable goal, no doubt about it.

However, while the “why” behind these efforts is easy to understand, the “how” often becomes problematic.

Are We Asking the Right Questions?

Here’s where things often go astray: many within the church and broader Christian community seem to take for granted the best methods for teaching morality to children. There’s often little discussion or questioning of whether these methods are truly effective—or where they originated.

The prevailing philosophy can be summarized as: “Do what works.” Why do we assume that the most effective way to teach kids is through stories with clear, direct applications?

For example, younger children might be encouraged to be brave like Daniel from the Bible, while teens are taught to resist peer pressure using the same story. This approach simplifies complex narratives into bullet points or quick moral lessons. But why do we assume reductionist methods are the best way to teach? Is it working?

The truth is, a good story does the opposite. It draws us away from our everyday lives to the universally transcendent. More on that in my next article.

The Flawed Assumption of Relevance

As a culture—especially in America—we’ve embraced the idea that the best way to convey information is to condense it into quick, easy-to-digest soundbites. We believe that reducing complex ideas into practical, relevant takeaways is the key to making them memorable.

C.S. Lewis once said that when we aim for originality, that is the last thing we get. The same can be said of relevance. Yet, many children’s ministries, Bible story retellings, and modern moral tales operate on the assumption that relevance is paramount.

I recently saw a Nexxus commercial for a women’s hair product. It started with a woman flaunting beautiful, shiny hair, followed by a scientific-looking graph of hair follicles featuring sciency words like “amino acids” and “DNA,” all under the tagline: “Nexxus, see the science.” 

Commercials like these present a biased narrative under the guise of delivering straightforward, neutral facts. They say nothing whatsoever while pretending to have academic depth. In this same way, we’ve stopped genuinely thinking; instead, adopting a code that masquerades as thinking. 

It’s easy to spot this tactic in a silly hair product ad, but the same approach is used in far more subtle and academic ways everywhere you look. 

What do morality books and a Nexuus commercial have in common?

The Danger of Oversimplification

This overly simplistic approach to teaching also affects how we tell stories to our children. You can regularly encounter stories being “fixed” to deliver straightforward moral lessons—as if saying less is saying more. 

Here’s the problem: it doesn’t seem that God subscribes to our pragmatic worldview.

The Bible itself resists this type of usury. God meant for the Bible to use us, not the other way around. You might open the Bible searching for a lesson to help your son stop hitting his sister, and instead, you get the book of Judges.

Children need to be introduced to the entirety of God’s word and allow it to work on its own rather than slicing, dicing, and reshaping it in an attempt to “help” God. By trying to make the Bible more “accessible” or “relevant,” we might actually be holding back the very thing that can truly transform our children.

Utilitarian human reasoning suggests that people retain information best when it's presented in simplified, practical terms. We assume this is how we learn and grow. But if that were the case, why isn’t the Bible—the most crucial source of knowledge—written like that? Did God somehow miss this memo? Or does He just need help?

Children need the Bible as a whole and good stories based on similar lines.

Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash

Lewis described his experience with excellent stories this way:

“[H]ow stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings…The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical.”

Good stories have the power to transform children from the inside out, not by mirroring what they already know back at them (like relevant stories) but by drawing them into a new and deeper understanding.

Letting Stories Do Their Work

Good stories partly work because children are totally unaware of what they are learning. They “steal past inhabitations” and make them citizens of another kingdom—children who love what they should love and hate what they should hate. As soon as we hyperimpose a clunky moral teaching, we’ve undone everything a good story does. Instead, we need to simply let kids “breathe Narnian air” and become an increasingly new creation. 

I have done a lot of research on this topic, and this article doesn’t even scratch the surface. I could write a book, but at least I plan to write a few more articles. Please let me know if you have any specific questions or topics you want me to cover in the comments.

Note—after publishing this article, it occurred to me that I omitted a necessary clarification: I am not criticizing tales with morals, but rather “morality” tales. I published an addendum to this article explaining what I mean, which you can find here.