As you can tell from the last week’s blog post (LINK) Superheroes are a big part of my parenting world.
We really didn’t enter into the superhero world until my oldest went to a Superhero birthday party when he was three. Since then, he’s been hooked.
As we entered this world of superheroes, there were a lot of things about superheroes that I didn’t like.
Violence being number one, then there are the defiant attitudes, and intense internal struggles that a lot of the ‘good guys’ have. Now don’t get me wrong. I love superhero movies like I said last week. And most of the superhero stories are modeled after classical and even ancient mythology.
But the subtleties of character development and inner struggle is lost on young kids.
Their young brains don’t process the internal struggles of Superheroes and only see the battle between good and evil, and the actions taken by the heroes to save the day.
There have been many attempts to create Christian Superheroes, but the fruits of the spirit just don’t seem to compare to laser vision, flying, and super strength.
So how do we make a shift toward Biblical truth, when the cultural norm focuses so heavily on superheroes?
We could say no to superheroes like many families do with Santa and the Easter Bunny, or we can use these examples.
Liz Millay over at Simple Life Messy Life, put together an amazing preschool Character quality Superhero Challenge.
This has been an amazing resource for my superhero loving kiddos. Liz put together great biblical truths paired with well-known superheroes, including activities and Bible verses. She even introduced me to this gem of a video. Jesus is my superhero video I think my kids like it more because it’s Lego stop motion, but still a fun song that gets stuck inside your head. Now I have that Lego Movie 2 song stuck in mine.
Other than trying to reclaim and redirect our kids, we can also be introducing them to Heroes of our Faith. While movies and shows about these Faith Heroes can often be to mature for young eyes.
Books and Focus on the Family’s Adventure in Odyssey are a great tool to introduce not only Heroes of our Faith but Biblical Character too.
Here are some of our Favorite Hero of Faith Books for kids.