Every toddler parent I know is anxious about screen time. We dread our own device addictions being passed down to our children, so we fear iPads and smartphones and YouTube Kids as fervently as our parents feared their little ones’ exposure to kidnappers and cigarettes. I try to leave the room when I have to send a text so my son doesn’t see me illumined by the screen’s glow, slack-jawed and vacant-eyed.
Now my son is almost two, and according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, he can watch television. (My own mother recently sent me a picture of my two-year birthday party. My cake was shaped like Elmo. My aunt wore a Cookie Monster costume. Apparently I had been tuning in prior to 24 months, and I think I turned out okay.)
But TV is different now, with algorithms and without commercials. I’m as uptight as all those other parents, so I’ve pretty much listened to the pediatric establishment. On November 18, we’ll be all clear for TV. Great. But what kind? For Christian parents, the decision is informed by what will help our kids learn not just their letters (Sesame Street is still going strong) but also the tenets of their fledgling faith.
When it comes to Christian kids’ TV, though, I feel at a loss. I didn’t grow up watching VeggieTales on VHS or listening to Adventures in Odyssey on the radio. I’m more comfortable reciting Bible stories than vetting religious programming for preschoolers. The balances—silly yet serious, playful yet pious—are hard to get right.
At least I’ve got one option. Someday I’ll let my son watch The Chosen Adventures, the children’s animated spinoff of the well-known adult show about Jesus’ life.
Season 1 is out now on Amazon Prime, 14 episodes of around 11 minutes each. (At the end of this month, it will appear on the Christian kids content platform Minno.) Adventures was developed by one of the writers of the adult Chosen, and it features the voices of many Chosen cast members, including Jonathan Roumie as Jesus. It expands an early story line from the original show—a little girl who keeps asking Jesus questions—as its premise.
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In Adventures, main character Abby runs errands for her mother at the Capernaum market, plays alongside the son of a Roman official, fantasizes about exacting revenge on a bully, and gets swept adrift on the Sea of Galilee. She keeps asking Jesus questions, exuberant that she can access education aside from the boys-only synagogue classes her friend Joshua gets to attend. The man from Nazareth is always around, but he doesn’t appear in every episode. In the season finale, a “part 1” that leaves its audience hanging, Jesus is about to encounter a paralyzed man who’s been lowered through a roof.
So far, so biblical. But Adventures is for kids, so enter a talking sheep and a talking pigeon and some slapstick humor and potty jokes, plus a few clever quips for the adults. (“That one’s called sheepshank,” says the pigeon as she watches a fisherman tie a knot. “I know,” the sheep grumbles. “I learned that in prison.”) The animation style is round and colorful, nothing particularly sophisticated, but sufficient. The show is pretty funny. (A vendor hawks, “Fruit so good it’s worth getting kicked out of Eden.” The lost sheep estimates his former flock had 99 other members, give or take.)
That’s not to say Adventures gets everything right. It’s most legible if you’ve already seen The Chosen—which presumably much of its young target audience has not. Right away, we’re in the richly detailed world of Roman authority and Shabbat regulations and Torah scrolls. All of the Jewish characters are speaking English in Israeli accents, some harder to understand than others, which makes it easier to miss important contextual asides. Some of Jesus’ disciples wander through the frame, but we don’t yet know anything about them. I imagine this is hard for a child to follow, even a fairly Sunday-school-literate nine-year-old. Clunky as the addition might have been, a voice-over narrator may have helped.
Instead, parents stand in that narrator role, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but will require some preparation. I can anticipate the questions my own child might ask. Why couldn’t they just cook dinner after the sun went down? Why do the girls go to different synagogue services? And why do they go to synagogue, not church? What’s an auger? Why are tax collectors so bad—isn’t that kind of what my grampa and uncle do for their jobs? If Jesus was Jewish, why aren’t we?
Questions like these, important as they are, aren’t what I’ve imagined talking my son through early on as he steps into his childhood faith. The ones I have anticipated—Why do bad things happen to me sometimes? What do I do when someone at preschool is mean to me? Why do I have to listen to you, Mommy? Why do we have to go to church if it’s boring?—are indeed answered by Adventures, in the light-touch lessons that conclude each episode. They’re lovely. When nobody is around to play, God is still with you. When you think nobody cares, God is still with you. Revenge, as Jesus himself advises, “doesn’t make the hurt go away.” When church is boring, he encourages Abby to “daydream in the Scriptures.”
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Not all of the lessons are so straightforward. The season’s theodicy episode concludes that Abby’s bad day could have been even worse. After all, God protected her from getting struck by a cart or mocked by a soldier. “Thank you for the good things I don’t even see,” she says in her end-of-day prayer.
Of course, God’s ways are more mysterious than I dropped the pie my mom wanted me to pick up, and then a hungry beggar got to eat it instead, and all’s well that ends well. Some of Adventures’ takeaways are necessarily simplified for its medium and demographic. “With faith, we all receive the miracles we need,” says Jesus. True in the largest sense, but so often we’re waiting. The miracles come so much later than we’d like or differently than we envisioned, invisible but also inscrutable.
Even the best program is just one tool in the box, one aspect of formation. No matter how good a Christian kids’ show is, children will always need parents and pastors. Even when our kids come to us, our answers won’t always suffice. Praise God that, like all of us, my son can go directly to the source.
Kate Lucky is the senior features editor at Christianity Today.
