I definitely shelter my children more than my parents did. My dad used to let us watch whatever he was watching.

Which meant that at too young of age I had seen too many Stephen King movies and was tormented by terrible dreams. At least until college when I had the sense enough to decide I shouldn’t watch scary movies anymore. The bad dreams stopped, mostly.

So my kids are given a short leash with the remote control.

They don’t get to watch anything remotely scary. We don’t want them to have nightmares.

We try not to let them watch things with violence. We don’t want them to hit.

We don’t let them watch anything that promotes mean behavior or disrespect towards anyone. We don’t want them to be mean or disrespectful.

But a couple of years ago, when my daughter was three, we had a dilemma.

We were watching the news in which they were showing Syrian children pouring into the hospital and Libby was watching too.

A little girl named Zarah lay on a hospital bed with her head bandaged up. She was 3.

My husband and I looked at each other. Do we turn it off? We don’t want her to have nightmares. We don’t want her to be scared. We don’t want her to think that was going to happen to her.

We decided to leave it on and talk her through it.

We told her that in some places there are people who are so angry with each other that they want to hurt each other and that is why Zarah got hurt. She looked as though she didn’t understand.

But that night as we prayed, she added a prayer for Zarah. We then spent the next year praying for Zarah every night.

At first my prayers were that God would protect her, but then I realized that was setting up a false expectation for my 3-year-old. Why didn’t God protect Zarah? Will that mean that God won’t protect me?

So we started to thank God for never leaving Zarah, even when things were really bad. We prayed that Zarah would know God was with her and her family and that she would know even in the scariest times God would not leave her.

That was two years ago and the Syrian war has been going for at least four years.

Last night the pictures of the 3-year-old boy washing up on shore, along with his 5-year-old brother hit me hard. Libby is 5 and my son Sam is 3.

My kids watched me sob at the news.

We didn’t turn it off.

I want to protect my children from the false story line of redemptive violence that permeates our world.  I want to protect my children from fear of harm or nightmares. I want to protect my children from bad things.

But I also don’t want our kids only to see us cheering as we watch football on television. Or booing as we listen to ridiculous political showboating. I want our children to see us be moved by the things that move God. I also want to teach my children that God calls us to weep when others are weeping. I want my kids to be able to respond to the brokenness portrayed on the news even at the tender age of three.

This is real life. I’m not sure how we can protect them from that. The world is full of brokenness and horror and pain. How do we grow a generation that is more concerned with the welfare of children from Syria than they are with the new toys they already want for Christmas?

Lord have mercy on us, as we grow the heart of God in our children.