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iQuestions Faculty, Dr. Tim Kimmel 
 
 
Question: 
 
Where should my husband and me draw the line with our kids when it 
comes to secular music and movies in our home? 
 
Answer: 
 
This is a standard question I get as I travel around the country and 
talk with so many people: where do you get that balance in your home 
between the world being on the outside and working its way inside? 
 
We want our homes to be a safe haven for our kids’ hearts. We want it 
to be a place where they can really relax and grow spiritually. But at 
the same time, we have got to use our homes as also a great lab 
experiment to grow their faith under a lot of pressure. 
 
Now, two areas make a lot of sense: music and movies. 
 
What we did with our kids, is we recognized that there are two 
dynamics in their lives. When they are younger, our job is to protect 
kids, because they are naïve. They don’t know anything. So we would 
protect them like that, and we would determine all the music they’d 
see, the movies they’d see, and so forth. 
 
But as they got out there, like six years old, we stopped protecting 
them as much. We started backing away from it, little by little by little, 
down to about twelve years old, and then we hardly protected them at 
all, because our second job besides protecting them is preparing them. 
 
 
 
So, as we were protecting them less, we were preparing them more. 
And when they got up to about twelve, thirteen years old, we were 
letting them make a lot more decisions about their music.  
 
Now, obviously, there were some bottom-line standards that we would 
not negotiate on. With movies and music, there were certain things 
that just weren’t going to get into our home. But there were a lot of 
other movies that could get in there. So what we had the kids do is 
choose carefully.  
 
And you know, the rating I was most concerned about was the PG-13. 
That was the one that was more problematic to me than anything else, 
because that’s the one that usually went after the sensual side of the 
teenage years.  
 
But what we would do is, they would bring home a movie, and when 
they were little, even when they were six, seven years old, we would 
have them do this—we called it “beeping the movie.” They’d be 
watching a movie, we could hear the movie. If anything happened in 
that movie where somebody said something inappropriate or they 
represented a value that we don’t embrace—like, it’s a Disney movie 
that would say, “Now, let’s not tell our parents,”—we would want our 
kids to say “beep” out loud.  
 
We called it “beeping movies.” And they would sit there, and they 
would just “beep” the movie. If they heard a bad word, “beep.” That 
means, “I just heard something I do not agree with. I filtered it. I 
recognize it for what it is.”  
 
That way, we knew, “OK. They are processing this thing through a 
spiritual set of filters.” And it was good practice for them in real life. As 
they grew older, because we brought them up to speed on this, then 
they could know how to choose movies better. 
 
 
 
What I have really appreciated about it is that they have been at 
movies, done their background check on it, think that it’s one thing, 
they get in there and find out it’s something else, and each one of 
them have at different times as they were teenagers gotten up, 
walked out, and said, “You know, I don’t want to watch this movie.” 
And I’m grateful for that. 
 
You know, if you just are the only filter and you make all the decisions, 
don’t assume that they have bought into that when they finally leave. 
That’s a way to set your kids up to really make some mistakes. Work 
with them.  
 
Now, you’re going to have to watch some of these movies with them, 
and you’re going to have to listen to some of this music with them. 
 
And then one final thing, if you do that, here’s a neat game to play 
with them when it’s all said and done: play the game “Find the Lie.” 
We used to do “Find the Lie” a lot. We would come home from the 
movie and find the lie. It would tell us that things were in the movie 
that misrepresented our value system and our belief system.  
 
You see, that’s wise parenting. That’s helping your kids wrestle with 
life, bringing them up to speed, making them stronger, rather than 
just protecting them all the way.  
 
If you protect them all the way through their teenager years, and send 
them off to college, that’s the way to send them right through the 
cracks and really put them in a lot of distress. 
 
No, no, no. Bring them up to speed. You can do it. God can work with 
you, and the whole family will be better off for it. 
 
 
 
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