Podcast: The Message Your Daughter Needs to Hear from You (Kristen Wetherell)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: Undoing Culture’s Beauty Lies

In this episode, Kristen Wetherell addresses the cultural issues that young girls in particular are learning from the culture around them and how parents can lead them in a biblical way. She offers encouragement, practical advice, and strategies to help parents navigate the current cultural landscape that their daughters are facing.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

• What Makes You Beautiful?
• Beautiful Truths
• An Eternal Perspective on Beauty
• Protection from Social Media
• A Devotional for Girls
• Practical Advice for Parents

00:52 - What Makes You Beautiful?

Matt Tully
Kristen Wetherell is a wife, a mother, a writer, and a speaker, and she and her husband live in Chicagoland with their three kids. She’s the author of a number of books, including a new 20-day devotional for girls called What Makes You Beautiful from Crossway. Kristen, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Kristen Wetherell
It’s great to be back. Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
I was really excited to talk with you about this topic today—the broad topic of helping our daughters in particular to view themselves the way that God views them and to find their self-worth in him and not in the many worldly standards of beauty that are all around us. It’s just such an important topic in our culture today, and I think it’s especially important for us as dads, for guys like myself with daughters, to understand and to think carefully and wisely about how to help lead our daughters in this way as well. So I’m really excited for all the girl dads listening today as well, that they can hopefully find this a helpful conversation.

Kristen Wetherell
Me too.

Matt Tully
So maybe to kick us off, I really love the title for the book, What Makes You Beautiful. I think it can be read in two different ways. It could be read as a question or maybe as a statement. And I wonder if you have any thoughts on what was behind that?

Kristen Wetherell
Yes. Well, it started, Matt, as a poem. I have two daughters, like you mentioned. I have three kids, two daughters. One is seven, one is two. So this was a couple of years back. I was just thinking about all the things that she was drawn to. Beautiful things in appearance. A lot of Disney movies and princess stories. And I just felt this pull to try and write something that would counter a bit of the messaging that we see there. And it’s not all bad messaging. I love a good Disney movie. I love Beauty and the Beast. It’s my favorite. I’ll talk to you about Belle any day. But honestly, in those movies we see a lot focused on the visual—how these princesses look, and they all kind of look the same with the same qualities.

Matt Tully
Change the color of hair.

Kristen Wetherell
Yeah, exactly. They’re dressed certain ways, and then also even just the definition of love. What does it mean to be loved? Well, in those movies, it means that you’re a lovely person. In the gospel message, it’s actually that God pursues us when we’re unlovely in our sin, and he makes us beautiful. He makes us lovely. So I had written this poem for Joanna, and the opening question of the poem is, What makes you beautiful, my dear? It’s a question because it’s a question I’ve asked my whole life that I think every female asks. What does make me beautiful? What gives me value? What gives me worth? And yet we also know it’s not just a question. God has an answer for us in his word: "This is what makes you beautiful. I am who makes you beautiful." So it’s both.

Matt Tully
I love that. The book does so beautifully, as we’ll talk about, help to unpack what it is that makes us beautiful, that makes a young girl beautiful from the Bible’s perspective. Many people have observed—both Christians and non-Christians alike—that we live in a culture today that is obsessed with female beauty. And that just comes out in so many cultural ways, and many of them are very negative, very unhealthy, very unbiblical ways. How does that focus of our broader culture shape young girls in particular, even girls growing up in Christian homes?

Kristen Wetherell
Well, I think God created woman in his image, and he created Adam to be different than Eve. So we’re made differently, and God gives us different giftings and different inclinations because we are male and female. And that’s something to celebrate. And our culture right now is confused, and we’re celebrating whoever we want to be, not who God made us to be. So I think any way that we can impress upon our sons and our daughters that they are made in God’s image, but different for distinct and different roles, and it’s a good thing that God made us this way in his design for a purpose. We’re also living in an incredibly visual culture. We are living in a technological culture, where a lot of the messages we are receiving are visual—Instagram and social media and the online world. And because of that, I think girls are very much influenced by that. I think our hearts, at the core, are asking, Who am I? Where does my value come from? And so when we see something that’s right in front of us, dictating who we are and what we are to be, it’s just really easy to buy into that. Receiving likes, for example, is really affirming. It feels good, but we need something better. We need a better voice, and we need someone’s opinion that really matters to tell us who we are and what we’re here for. And that’s what we get in God’s word.

Matt Tully
It’s so interesting that, as you said, one of the core questions for all time that humans have wrestled with is that question of identity and self-worth. Why am I here? What makes me unique? What makes me valuable? And yet living in a time when the dominant media landscape is this visual media, it makes sense that then would be perhaps one of the main ways that we are tempted to answer that question—through these visual perceptions of ourselves and how we look. And yet that can have such a distorting effect on girls in particular. How have you seen that play out in the people that you’ve worked with, the women that you’ve talked with, or maybe even your own life and how you think about things

Kristen Wetherell
Three areas come to mind. And these three areas we talk about in the book, What Makes You Beautiful, particularly physical appearance. For me, that’s been a hard one over the years is feeling confident in the way that God has made me as an individual. That he doesn’t make mistakes. The way that he made me and the way that he made you or someone else who might look different than you—he doesn’t make mistakes. And then we also have our culture telling us that potential is king. What you can achieve is king. So we’ve kind of made an idol out of this. We post our latest achievement on social media, and it’s not wrong to celebrate that, but I think we also buy into the lie that what we do gives us value and worth and makes us beautiful. And then a third area is our relationships—the way that we interact with other people. We were made for other people. God made us for one another, but when other people’s opinions become more weighty and more significant to us than God’s opinion of us, that’s where we run into an issue. So these three areas of my own heart have been tough over the years. I feel certain ways about these areas of my life, or I even believe certain lies, and I need God’s truth to cover over all of it and redirect my thoughts. And that’s why I’m so grateful for the truth of God’s word.

07:45 - Beautiful Truths

Matt Tully
Throughout the devotion, there are twenty days with twenty different devotions, and at the end we’ll get into a few of the components of each devotion. But one of the things that’s really central to each day is a beautiful truth. And you have all these twenty beautiful truths that are helping to very positively and succinctly set forth and distill down what it is that Scripture actually does teach us about these things. I wonder if you could just read some of those truths that you list in the book.

Kristen Wetherell
Each day has a beautiful truth. It’s just a way to distill that day’s devotion down into something concise that a girl can take with her. So a few of those: God made me to know and show his beauty. That’s what I’m made for. Another one: Because God is my maker, I am incredibly valuable—all of me. There is a good way for me to enjoy God’s good gifts—that’s a great truth that we need to hear. Here’s another one: Earthly beauty will fade, but God’s beauty will last forever. And we just talked about this one: God’s opinion of you matters most. So there’s a handful of them, but each day comes with one of those beautiful truths.

Matt Tully
I’m struck by how most of those are written in this first person phrasing—my, my worth, my beauty. What was behind that decision to of phrase them in that way?

Kristen Wetherell
Well, I think we want this to be personal. This isn’t a book just for other people, or God’s word isn’t just true for other people. It’s for me. When God speaks, he’s speaking to me. What a great gift that is that he’s a personal God, and he wants me to believe what he says is true, and he wants to draw near to me as an individual and to his church as a whole. It’s just a wonderful gift.

Matt Tully
What was your process like for deciding what truths to highlight? Because Scripture says so much and there’s so much that could be said, especially in response to the broader culture that we live in. So what was your process? How did you actually go about deciding, I want to make sure I hit on these truths from the Bible and not do these other ones?

Kristen Wetherell
It started with that poem that I mentioned earlier. As I was writing it, I was thinking, What are some of these overarching truths that I want to communicate to my daughters? And then getting into those three categories that I mentioned earlier: physical appearance and accomplishments and relationships. Let’s look at each of those. And then I just ended up going through my Bible and saying, What does God’s word have to say about each of these aspects? And then kind of drawing each of them out. I also had just core doctrines in my mind, because don’t want to say something like, "The only thing that matters is your heart." Because we believe that Jesus is coming back, and we believe that he’s going to raise our bodies from the dust and give us resurrection bodies. Our bodies really matter. We’re not Gnostics. We don’t disparage the body. That’s a huge part of our theology. So I kind of also combed through asking, Am I emphasizing one thing or one doctrine but maybe leaving out another? I was just really wanting to measure that accurately according to God’s word. So hopefully I did that in this book.

10:45 - An Eternal Perspective on Beauty

Matt Tully
That’s such a temptation for us. We see that throughout church history, where there’s heresies or there’s unbiblical emphases, and sometimes Christians can overreact and over-respond and then go too far in the other direction. But that does bring up one of the tensions that I think all of us as Christians can struggle with, but maybe in a unique way, women and girls can really struggle with, and Christians can struggle in this way. On the one hand, a desire to see ourselves rightly and to root our identities in God and what he says about us, but on the other hand, we don’t want to be ungrateful or not steward the physical bodies that he’s given us and the natural talents that he’s blessed us with. And we know that those are actually important too. So speak a little bit to that. How can we, as parents in particular, help our daughters to hold both of those true truths together?

Kristen Wetherell
Well, the word that I use in the book is perspective. God’s word and his truth—his kingdom values—change our perspective. It gives us proper perspective, or eternal perspective, about what matters most. Isaiah says, "The grass withers, the flowers fade, but the word of our God endures forever." And the reality is we do have a lot of beautiful things on this earth. God made it to declare his glory. "The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim his handiwork." And we know that each of us is made in God’s image, and he knit us together in our mother’s wombs, and we are made for him, to bring him glory. So like we mentioned before, we’re not Gnostics. We’re not disparaging this world or our bodies, and yet God’s word gives us proper perspective. All of this that we see will fade when we receive the kingdom that will not be shaken and that will never fade in the new heaven and the new earth. So God’s word gives us perspective. And I think as parents, it causes me to ask myself, Am I steeping my mind and heart in God’s perspective and his truth? Because if I’m not first sitting under the word of God, how can I possibly teach my children? If I’m not being changed in my own heart by the word of God, how can I possibly model these values for my children? Because people say, when we’re teaching kids, more is caught than is taught. So we can preach, preach, preach, but if we’re not practicing as parents what we’re preaching, they can see right through that. So it just causes me to be really humbled as a parent and to say, "Lord, help me to abide with Jesus and to sit under his word, Lord willing, to be changed by his word, to be increasingly made more beautiful where it really matters and where it lasts in my heart. And then help me to live as an example. Help me to value what will endure." Do my kids see me speaking poorly about my own image, about my own self-image, about other people? Where do they see me investing my time and my money and my resources? That’s a huge message that I’m sending.

Matt Tully
I wanted to ask about that in particular. What are the ways that parents, maybe moms or dads, can unintentionally communicate or reinforce worldly understandings of beauty in their kids?

Kristen Wetherell
Well, maybe just telling a story will be a good way to start. I have noticed in interactions with other women and their daughters that one of the first things that we do is comment on something we are wearing or a way that we did our hair. And there’s nothing wrong with that, so please don’t hear me say there’s anything wrong with that. Because one of the other things I would think of is that as parents we want to praise our kids for all kinds of things—for the growth that we see God doing in them—and we want to tell them, "You’re so beautiful! God made you so beautiful!" So giving compliments is not wrong in itself, but it is interesting to me. If it’s hard for me as an adult, who has a measure of discernment, to sift through what’s most important when I’m talking to people, how much harder is it for my young ones to do that? And I just wonder how things would change if, as believers, if our first comment wasn’t about the way that someone looked but was a question about how their day is going or how the week is going? And I’m not trying to make a law out of this. We’re not trying to be legalists here. I’ve just noticed that.

Matt Tully
For a young girl, if all the compliments she’s getting from the people closest to her, or even people at church who are a little bit more distant, tend to center on outward beauty rather than a character kind of thing or what have you, I could see how that could start, on an impressionable mind, it could have a certain effect on how they view themselves.

Kristen Wetherell
Another thing that I have tried to cultivate, and I don’t do this perfectly—and again, this is not a law; it’s just an idea—in our very visual culture where aging is considered bad and so we’re trying to all look younger and live forever and all this stuff, I have really made it a point to, for several days a week, to just not wear makeup. And I want my daughters to see that’s it’s good. It’s okay. This is me. Makeup is fun. We call it painting your face. It’s like art for your face, and it just kind of accentuates the features that God already put there. But what else can I do? Just little things like that. Maybe I don’t have to buy the nicest quality whatever it may be. Fill in the blank. Maybe I can be thankful and settle for something different, and in that just communicate contentment. We can just be content, or we can say no to things. Just because I can purchase something doesn’t mean I should or must. We can say no to things, and we can just be content and thankful. We live in a very wealthy place, a very wealthy country. That’s not everyone’s situation, but I think that’s a big challenge for believers in the West is just to be content to say, "I don’t need all this extra stuff." So what are some ways that we can practically live out these truths that we say that we believe? Are we spending time abiding in Christ and his word, or does the day begin and we’re just off and running and we’re not being influenced by God’s voice? We’re being influenced by the voice of the news or by the voice of such and such podcast. Do my kids know that Jesus comes first and that he’s a priority?

16:59 - Protection from Social Media

Matt Tully
I’m just struck by how it’d be so easy and so tempting, perhaps, for us to buy this new devotional you’ve written and give it to our daughters and think, Yeah, I want to help her to think of herself rightly, and yet there are so many things that we can do throughout the week that subtly—very deceptively even—can reinforce these worldly ideas in our kids’ lives. And that applies across the board for so much of what we’re trying to teach our kids. But that very intentional, practical thinking about the messages that we’re sending our kids is so important. Obviously, one of the biggest sources of those messages, both in our own lives as adults and parents but also in kids’ lives, is social media today. And we’ve talked about that a little bit, just the obsession with images and the visual medium that there is. What advice or what strategies—and I know you have young kids right now—what strategies would you suggest to parents as they think about helping their daughters in particular navigate our social media landscape, given that that’s such a dominant source of this kind of messaging?

Kristen Wetherell
I think our role is to protect them. More and more studies are showing how detrimental social media is to young people but primarily to young girls—incredibly detrimental. What a privilege it is that I get to be a primary nurturer and provider, but protector for my kids. That is one of my jobs as a parent. Not to overprotect them. We’re not trying to create some kind of a bubble, because they need to experience the world in order to understand how to navigate it. And that’s another privilege we have is to help them think through these things—bring their questions, bring their struggles, and for us to be those people. But we’re called to protect them. And so my kids are not of the age where they’re asking about these things yet, but I have plenty of friends whose kids are. And that is the best piece of wisdom that I’ve heard from other people is just protect them. Don’t assume that just because you hand them a device or allow them an account that they know how to use it, because I hardly know how to use it in a way that’s life giving and protects my soul.

Matt Tully
I think if we’re all honest, even as adults, we’d have to admit that we often don’t get this right ourselves.

Kristen Wetherell
Yes. Correct. How can we protect our kids? What we allow as parents into their eyes and their ears goes into their hearts. "Be careful little eyes what you see, and be careful little ears what you hear." It still pertains to our preteens and our teenagers. What boundaries are we setting with devices in our home?

Matt Tully
The hard thing about this, though, is that maybe there are few more difficult topics with our kids than technology use—few topics that could lead to conflict with our kids, frustration, claims that we’re not being fair, or that other kids get to do it, so why can’t I? So I am struck that if we want to be prepared to protect our kids, we need to be prepared to maybe make them upset at times.

Kristen Wetherell
Yes. Have the hard conversations. Be willing to say no. Be willing to swim upstream. We’re called strangers and aliens in Scripture. That is not the same as the world. We are in the world, but we are not of it. So I think as parents, strapping yourself in and saying, "Our family is going to look different. Not even just in the area of social media use, but in so many different areas we’re going to look different." And, like you said, being willing to upset our kids. It’s okay. It’s okay to be that authority. It’s okay to be their protectors. And then as we see them grow, as we see them mature, giving them increasingly more freedom and helping them navigate what that looks like. But I think protecting them is the biggest thing.

Matt Tully
Speak a little bit to the church context. Obviously, we live in community and we value the local church in particular as this hub of our spiritual life together with other Christians. What are some ways that the church can support young girls in particular and support families trying to do things like protect their children? What does that look like as a community project, so to speak?

Kristen Wetherell
Well, continuing to emphasize that primary spiritual formation happens at home. So we don’t come to church on Sunday and drop our kids off at youth group and hope that they’ll get their weekly dose of truth. Spiritual formation primarily happens under our roofs. And so if we can start there and say the body of Christ is a beautiful additional way for my children to receive the truth of God’s word, but it needs to be happening first and foremost at home. And then I also think about the amazing women in our lives who have come alongside my kids. There’s a wonderful single gal at our church who is like family to us, and she spends so much time at her house. She’s another voice in my children’s lives, telling them what’s true and affirming them and encouraging them and correcting them when they need to be corrected. And so I think just saying who else in the church is coming alongside? For moms of young kids, having a community of moms who are all pursuing Christ and his word together as we raise our kids, that has been an enormous blessing to me. And it’s really cool to watch. I watched it yesterday because we had friends over to watch my friend—this fellow mom—minister to my daughter. And I could minister to her kids. The body of Christ is so beautiful because we’re all coming from different stories, and the way that God works in our hearts is unique. So it’s neat to watch that happen. I think the preaching—sitting under the preaching of God’s word at church is so vital for our souls being built up in the most holy faith, and for us knowing the truth. What kind of teaching are your kids receiving at church? Is it solid? Is it biblical? Is it Christ centered? Because that will make a difference for them.

Matt Tully
Have you had the opportunity to speak with other moms in particular about this topic of beauty and unbiblical beauty standards and how to be intentional as a Christian parent with your daughters? Is that another approach, and what might that look like to actually work together in a proactive way with other Christians?

Kristen Wetherell
It’s just such a great idea. It’s so wise. I mentioned this group of moms with young kids. We’re not quite to the preteen years; we’re in the trenches of toddlerhood and other things like that. But I’ve also had the privilege of meeting with moms who are 10 years ahead of me, and there really is nothing like sitting across from someone and expressing your questions and even some of your fears about the future, the way that we see our culture going, and just saying, "Help me think through this." And then when that day comes, when you’re in the thick of it, just saying, "Okay, so this is what happened. This is what was said or what was done. Can you help me process this and help me respond in a way that’s honoring to God and that’s faithful and that will help my child?" So I think it’s incredibly useful to meet with other women who are ahead of you. Maybe find one person who you can say, "You don’t have to make an ongoing commitment, but do you want to grab a cup of coffee? I just have some questions." How are you, as a mom of pre-teens or teenagers, processing through our cultural climate, and what does it look like to help our kids navigate that?

Matt Tully
So as we talk about the church and the way that the church together can navigate some of these issues, I am struck that sometimes Christians can come to different conclusions and different decisions about what they might or might not feel comfortable allowing their kids to do. Can you speak to that a little bit and how we navigate that as parents?

Kristen Wetherell
And that’s especially hard in an internet culture and a social media culture where you’re getting, even from Christians, all these different opinions.

Matt Tully
"Make sure you always do this" or "Never let your kid do this."

Kristen Wetherell
Exactly. I think that’s why we need to be students of the word, because we have to be able to distinguish, as believers, what God says and is very clear about in his word as a command versus what is a matter of Christian conscience and a matter of Christian freedom and liberty. And we don’t want to impose a matter of Christian liberty upon someone as a command, because then we’re just not loving our neighbor well. And it is tricky when your family might decide to do A, B, or C, and this other Christian family doesn’t, how do we navigate even those conversations full of grace and truth and building one another up and not tearing each other down in a matter of conscience.

Matt Tully
And that’s where I think when it comes to our kids, it’s so important for us not to just focus on the rules or the standards that we’re imposing on them, but to really explain the heart of the issue to them. Explain what’s underlying this. And that’s, I think, what your book does so well. It helps young girls in particular get to the heart of these issues, the heart questions. You say in the introduction to circle the word heart every time you see it throughout the book, because it’s such a foundational thing that you’re digging into with these young girls.

Kristen Wetherell
God’s glory being manifested to all of creation is his goal. His glory. And his glory is our joy. It’s what we were made for. And when we talk about the word beautiful, we’re talking about glory. We’re talking about what we were made for. And what a privilege it is to get to the heart of the matter, which is the matter of the heart.

26:17 - A Devotional for Girls

Matt Tully
So let’s talk a little bit about what’s in each of these devotions. We’ve kind of hinted at this already. Each devotion has a beautiful truth, where you’re summarizing the main point. But what are some of the other components of each devotion?

Kristen Wetherell
So each day focuses on just a short portion of that poem that is at the beginning of the book.

Matt Tully
And it really is a beautiful poem. Maybe we’ll save that as something that if you get the book, you will open it up and you’ll see it first. But it really is a beautiful meditation on that fundamental question, What makes me beautiful? I don’t know how people write poetry. It’s beyond me. But it is really beautiful when someone does it well.

Kristen Wetherell
Thanks, Matt. That was a privilege to write. So each day focuses on a portion of that poem, and then there’s just a very brief reflection. It’s about two pages long. Just a little brief reflection on the poem as well as a Scripture that relates to the poem. And then after that there’s a little prayer section. It’s a one or two sentence prayer—very simple and quick. And then a little section called "Let’s Create," because I wanted the girls using this book to be able to make something beautiful within the book. So there might be some reflection questions that they can think on. There might be even a little creative prompt, something that they can draw or something that they can write, like song lyrics. Just something to get their creative juices flowing, making something beautiful in the book. Then it ends with just a reminder of that beautiful truth that they heard. And then there’s some journaling pages where they can create and reflect.

27:47 - Practical Advice for Parents

Matt Tully
It doesn’t feel intimidating. It feels very doable for a daily thing, and yet there is such robust, theologically deep meat there that you’ve managed to distill down for a young girl. It’s beautiful. Maybe as a final question, I wonder just if you could end by giving two people a little bit of advice? What would be an encouragement or something you would leave with moms on the one hand and dads on the other hand? Let’s start with moms.

Kristen Wetherell
Well, if it’s okay, I’ll actually start with one for both of them.

Matt Tully
Okay. Great.

Kristen Wetherell
And that’s to pray. Pray. I want to pray more. We do not battle against flesh and blood, Paul says. A lot of what happens is a spiritual battle, and spiritual battles of the heart are fought on the battleground of prayer. And so as moms and dads, are we praying for our kids, for ourselves as we shepherd our kids?

Matt Tully
It’s so convicting because we can just get into the nitty gritty details of parenting.

Kristen Wetherell
What can I do? Yeah. Yes. And that’s not a bad question.

Matt Tully
It’s so easy to just neglect that basic thing.

Kristen Wetherell
So are we praying? Are we on our knees? Are we in God’s word and responding to that? Are we praying over their friendships? That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, just praying over my kids’ friendships.

Matt Tully
Friends have a huge influence.

Kristen Wetherell
Huge influence. Yes. So prayer is the first thing I would say to each of them. Of course this idea of practicing what we preach also applies to both moms and dads. But I think as moms, modeling. We have a more same, same privilege of modeling for our daughters what really matters (that perspective that we were talking about) to God. And so what might that look like for us? As we get dressed in the morning and as we speak about other people, are we building them up with our words? Are we tearing them down with our words? How we even speak to our daughters really matters. Where are we investing our resources, our time, and our money? So modeling, I think, is really big. The one that comes to my mind for fathers is your voice really matters. And we think about God as our heavenly Father and how he speaks to us through his word. And God has given Dads such an enormous privilege, as spiritual leaders, to speak into the lives of their kids. So what is your daughter hearing from you? Are we telling our daughters, "You’re beautiful. Oh, you look beautiful today!" or "I see how God’s doing this thing in your heart. That’s really beautiful." In our house we call it beautiful obedience. So if one of our kids chooses to obey in the moment, we’ll just say, "That was really beautiful obedience." Because it is beautiful when we choose to follow God and trust his word. But I think dads just have a really amazing privilege of speaking over their daughters and into their lives. And moms do too, but a dad’s voice is really powerful. It meant a lot to me growing up to know what my dad thought of me. So dads, don’t be silent. Don’t be embarrassed to speak up, or whatever it might be that is holding you back. But just speak into your daughter’s life because it matters.

Matt Tully
And to speak into those spiritual realities in a way that goes beyond just the physical appearance. I think it can be easy for dads, speaking as a dad, to call attention to, "That dress looks beautiful on you, sweetie," and to maybe not think more intentionally even about the deeper things that matter more.

Kristen Wetherell
That’s right.

Matt Tully
Kristen, thank you so much for speaking with us today and encouraging anyone—moms and dads alike—and helping us to think about how to help our daughters to root their identities in Christ and understand what truly does make them beautiful.

Kristen Wetherell
It’s been an honor. Thank you.

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