Just(ice) cream

Equipping the kids in our lives to be agents of justice

Do you wish you were raised with a fuller imagination of justice? The skills for knowing what to do about injustice? Discernment to recognize and understand injustice? I do! And now we have the chance to provide that as the Sunday school teachers, aunts, uncles, pastors, family friends, grandparents, and parents of the kids in our spheres.

Justice topics come up regularly with kids, who seem to emerge from the womb with a beautiful (if self-oriented) sense of what is fair and not. May we always be those who build on this innate desire! But there’s SO much that we’re not born knowing. If we aren’t teaching the kids around us about justice, we’re leaving a crucial part of their social and moral development to chance.

In our family, we talk a lot together about restitution when we wrong someone - we’ve experienced how restitution facilitates reconciliation. We have talked a lot as a family about how wrong it was for Pharaoh to force the Hebrews to work for free (and how that has played out in US history as well). We work a lot on developing the habits of slow, collaborative, nonviolent communication that prevent injustice. Side note: I learned how to develop these communication habits from the book How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk, a book I highly recommend for those of us wanting to undermine coercion and deception (the two foundations of relational injustice) in any and all of our human relationships. It is definitely not just a book for parents!

Great books for justice discussions and skill building for kids: You Are Revolutionary; God's Dream; Justice-Minded Kids by my friend Elisa Johnston; and How to talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk - scroll down for links to these and more

But I want to be more intentional in equipping our three boys (ages 4, 7, and 9) to be agents of justice. I want my kids to have a vision of justice, a well-honed injustice radar, and the skills for both confronting injustice and building toward justice. I want them to leave my home with a framework for discerning justice and injustice. I want them to be proactive and supportive in the spaces right around them. I also want them to be able to identify the injustices people may be perpetrating on them - or trying to justify as no big deal. Their level of preparation can be the difference between neglect/abuse and care/protection for their current and future friends, classmates, colleagues, and neighbors.

Earlier this year, I decided to tackle developing a biblical conception of justice, a positive idea of what we’re working toward, a holy imagination for just community.

The Content

Y’all. Even as a writer on this topic who is immersed in this topic, believe me when I say I had no idea where to start. There are so many potential ways to approach so many different justice topics. Plus between soccer practice, legos, scraping pumpkin pie off the floor, and attempting to feed picky humans, my brain doesn’t always have the oomph to switch over to those bigger picture things. I rely heavily on other writers to help me frame how to tee up discussions with my kids around other topics – then I remembered that I wrote an article on equipping kids for justice haha. I’m not being cute when I tell you I had to pull up that article and re-read it to put a plan together for my own discussions with my kids.

The full framework is in the article, but it roughly follows putting the six pillars of justice in terms kids can understand, explaining the three types of injustice, and talking through and practicing the six skills of doing justice. (I’m thinking about developing this further into a short printable handout – let me know if that would be helpful for you!)

The Setting - JUST(ICE) CREAM!

Then I had to think of when and how to have these discussions. I heard someone online reflecting about their own childhood discussions about important topics around bowls of ice cream – ice cream would definitely be a winner with my kids. So my husband Cory and I developed a calendar of monthly ice cream outings to talk about justice topics. We hit different ice cream stores every time, just whatever ones came up on google that we hadn’t tried before – and all of them out of town. This last feature turned out to be important because I realized as we were driving to our first ice cream shop that it would be impossible to corral our three energetic sons around a table to discuss serious topics while they’re eating ice cream. So, we had the chats in the van on the WAY to ice cream. We explained it to the boys and our oldest said “Oh so it’s justICE cream!” We loved that and that’s what we call it now.

Explaining to them why we’re talking justice

We used our first justICE cream outing to frame for the boys why justice matters. Here’s how I teed up the conversation:

How does it feel when things are fair? How does it feel when things are unfair? Things being fair is really important isn’t it?

Do you know why we want to learn how to make things fair? It’s because:

1. We want other to people to feel as good as we feel when things are fair.

2. We don’t want other people to feel as bad as we feel when things are unfair.

3. God LOVES things being fair.

Making things fair is a way to love God and love other people. And those are our two most important jobs.

Really simple, really straightforward. And it was a great conversation. I love how a handful of lines with two points can tee up some incredible reflections in kids.

During the rest of the summer, we explored one or two biblical justice topics per outing. Here are the ones we covered:

1. We all need to look out for each other and take care of each other, especially people who need extra support (Matthew 25 to start).

2. Everyone should be paid fairly for their work (Hebrews in slavery in Egypt and the Exodus story), and no one should ever be paid late (Leviticus 19:13).

3. It’s important to have parties and invite all kinds of people so no one is left out (Deuteronomy 16 and Luke 14:12-14).

4. Everyone should have regular days of rest (Sabbath). No one should have to work everyday. Everyone needs breaks. We need to make sure everyone has breaks and rest.

5. God wants us to share with each other so that nobody is too poor or too rich (Luke 3:11, 2 Corinthians 8:13-15). When we don’t have enough, we can ask for help and people can take care of us. When we have too much, we can give things and money away to take care of other people.

6. When we hurt someone, we need to make it right, above and beyond what we did wrong (Leviticus 6:1-5, Exodus 22:1-15).

7. Our decisions should be made without bias (Leviticus 19:15, James 2) or self-interest (Philippians 2, Deuteronomy 16:18-20). We need to be fair even if it means we lose something (like a board game!) and the same rules should apply fairly to everyone.

For the first one (looking out for each other, especially people who need extra support), we defined vulnerable as people who have a harder time defending themselves or taking care of themselves. We talked about examples like people who are here from another country and don’t know how things work here or maybe how to speak English. That would be hard if we moved to another country and we didn’t understand how things worked, right? We would want someone to help us. We happen to have lived in Morocco for four years while our older two were young so we talked about the many ways people helped us, and how we can return the favor. We also talked about the other types of vulnerability discussed in the Bible or that they may see around them: People who don’t have dads, people who are new to school, people with disabilities, people who are sick, people who are in prison, people who don’t have enough money, people who are hungry and thirsty. We talked about how we can take care of them, look out for them, and become their friend. We asked: What are some ways we can do that? Why is that important to do? What would we want someone to do for us if or when we are in those situations? It was a great conversation.

The last topic (making decisions without bias or self-interest) was the hardest for me to articulate clearly to the boys. I would love help with that if you have done this well or have ideas!

I absolutely LOVED our justICE cream discussions this summer. They were so rich. They provided a framework that we can refer back to now in discussions. They laid a foundation that I am looking forward to spiraling up into more complexity as our boys get older.

Our worlds shift so beautifully in the direction of love when just a handful of people are ready to do the next right thing – let’s make sure the kids around us are among those ready to seize the opportunities to do justice.

What are you doing or seeing done to raise justice-equipped kids? We would all love to hear so we can try it too!

A few children’s books (for littler kids) - there are so many more!

• God’s Dream by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Douglas Carlton Abrams

• You Are Revolutionary by Cindy Wang Brandt

• How Much Is a Little Girl Worth? and How Much Is a Little Boy Worth by Rachael Denhollander

• God’s Beloved Community by Michelle T. Sanchez

Family and teaching tools:

• Justice Journey for Kids, free 24-lesson curriculum for ages 7-11

• Justice-Minded Kids by Elisa Johnston - 36 weeks of learning and doing justice as a family