If my memory holds and my body lasts into old age, I’m pretty sure I’ll still be able to sing all the words to Led Zeppelin’s 1971 hit, “Stairway to Heaven.” My kids, on the other hand, may have the lyrics from the CDs of Rebecca St. James and Delirious? tattooed into their long-term recall.

My husband and I both grew up in non-Christian families and wanted to give our three children a different upbringing, so we home-schooled them. We watched Disney movies—which made us too liberal for some of our homeschool peers—but we listened to Christian radio and banned some secular music (like Prince), which made us too conservative for most of the non-churched parents in our neighborhood. We were parenting by the seat of our pants.

As our kids moved into early adolescence, we found ourselves debating the sexually charged videos of Britney Spears and the subversive humor of The Simpsons. At times, it felt as if we were trying to staunch a flood of sex and violence with a kitchen sponge. Although the entertainment was different back then, we faced the same perennial problem faced by parents today: How do we protect our kids from toxic stuff while not overprotecting them in a way that’s harmful in the long run?

Plenty of young adults have publically lamented the isolation and social marginalization that often comes with growing up in a cloistered environment. Sarah McCammon wrote a poignant essay for NPR’s Code Switch blog, in which she describes her sheltered evangelical upbringing and how she’s never able to fully enter into key pop culture moments shared by her age peers. The recent death of Prince was one of these moments. She writes,

After a decade-plus of adult life on my own, I've learned to blend in, to laugh off the references I don't get, to shake off the embarrassment about not really knowing much about evolution or falling silent when friends swap prom stories (no dancing at my high school). But [Prince’s death] brought back some of the old feelings of isolation that I first felt in the workplace and around peers from outside my evangelical cocoon — a sense of being out of place and maybe not quite right.

As a mother, I read these stories differently and feel sympathetic to the plight of parents who are doing the best they can. During the 1980s and early 2000s when my husband and I were raising our children, we had a relationship with pop culture that was probably similar to that of McCammon’s parents. We heard from a variety of Christian parenting experts that our guiding principle should be Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” The challenge came in sorting out the true, pure, and lovely in each age stage of our parenting journey.

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