Teaching Values through Stories: Strategies for Christian Authors Writing for Kids

I am very fortunate to teach in a Christian school, attend a Bible-believing church, and know so many people with high moral standards. Because if I look around me, I see so much greed, corruption, selfishness and ‘I want it all now’ attitudes.

As authors, we can counter these attitudes, spotlight moral behaviour, and teach children, via our characters, how they should behave. Through the pages of our books, as our readers identify with our ‘good’ characters (although it’s important, for authenticity, that even our heroes and heroines have flaws), they will subconsciously want to emulate their behaviour.

Teaching Values through Stories

So, how do we authors teach values? How do we highlight attributes like kindness, a willingness to share, thoughtfulness, generosity, standing up for what’s right, and self-sacrifice? By making our characters so real that they will seem like real people. Allow your heroes and heroines to have failings as well as strengths, get them to behave in surprising ways, and make sure your dialogue sounds natural, like real-life speech, and isn’t stilted. If your dialogue doesn’t either reveal something about your characters or move the story forward, then it should be scrapped, and you should go back to the drawing board.

The Importance of Characters and Their Development

Your readers will be influenced by what your characters say, do, and think, how they deal with crises, where they receive help, and how they cope with the situations that are thrust upon them.

A few examples in my own children’s and young adult fiction of characters who make a difference in the world are:

1. Dumisa, the Joy-Maker (in Tapestries), who tries to cheer up her friends who are going through a hard time by making music with them. Howver, she has an ulterior motive for giving them make-shift musical instruments which she gets them to play: she wants them to praise God with her, so she boldly praises God and Jesus herself through song in the hope that they will join in her celebration of God’s goodness, mercy and love.
2. Claire in A Good Neighbour (in Explorations) who visits the mean Debbie in the hospital even though she doesn’t feel like it. And even when Debbie is totally unappreciative, she still tries to cheer her up by offering her favourite chocolate and asking her what she would like her to do for her.
3. Greg in Vuyo’s Love Lesson (in Tapestries) who risks his own life to save her from drowning. This sacrificial act ultimately teaches Vuyo about Jesus’ amazing act of love in dying for her sins on the cross.
4. Jeremiah in Stand Firm Jeremiah (In Explorations) single-handedly stands up to a powerful group of bullies despite the risk to himself. His courageous actions are even more commendable because no-one else, not even his best friend, is prepared to support or help him in his lone stand against the bullies.

Opportunities to teach valuable lessons in fiction

If you want to teach children valuable values that will stand them in good stead throughout their lives, embed the values in your plots, design your plots to highlight these values, and allow your characters to demonstrate these values through the way they behave, what they say and think, and what happens to them in the end.

In my Christian fiction, good behaviour usually gets rewarded in the end in the most surprising ways, with the help of prayer and God.

If you are interested in improving your writing skills for Christian children's books, I recommend checking out the following blogs:

• The Joys of Writing Children’s Books
• Want to Change Your Picture Book into a Short Story?