You’ve finished reading a novel that you throughly enjoyed. What happens next? You put in on the shelf and find the next to read. May I suggest that it doesn’t end there or at least shouldn’t. In the review for Redeeming Rhubarb, Reading with Your Kids had the following to say.

Why We Love It

At Reading With Your Kids, we believe the very best books help families do more than simply finish another story.

They create conversations.

Redeeming Rhubarb is exactly that kind of book.

It opens the door to discussions about kindness, fairness, forgiveness, judging others, courage, family relationships, and choosing compassion over fear. It reminds us that every person has a story we cannot see, and that hearts can change when love is given room to work.

Children will enjoy the adventure.

Parents will appreciate the depth.

Families will remember the conversations long after the final chapter.

Intentional Conversations: The Heart Behind Everything I Write

At Reading With Your Kids, we believe the very best books help families do more than simply finish another story. They create conversations.

That line stopped me. Not because it was flattering — though it was — but because it was more precise than anything I’d managed to say about my own goals for the book, or for this site. I wrote Redeeming Rhubarb hoping it would open doors to conversations about kindness, fairness, forgiveness, judging others, courage, family relationships, and choosing compassion over fear. I didn’t write it to teach a lesson so much as to start a question. The review understood that better than I’d articulated it myself.

That’s the goal for the book. It’s also the goal for this whole site — whether the conversation starts with my book, someone else’s book, a TV show, or a movie. Let it begin something intentional.

What “Intentional” Actually Means

I use that word often on this site, so let me be precise about it, because it’s often mistaken for just a synonym for “careful” or “thoughtful.” It’s neither.

Intentional means you predecided. Before the moment arrives — before the book is opened, before the remote is picked up, before your child asks a hard question at dinner — you’ve already decided this matters, and you’re going to act on it. You didn’t wait to feel like it. You didn’t wait for the perfect opening. You built the decision in advance, so that when the moment shows up, you’re not deciding whether to engage. You’re only deciding how.

The opposite isn’t laziness, exactly. It’s drift. It’s letting life happen to you instead of directing it. Most families aren’t neglectful; they’re just unintentional. They mean well. They’d say yes if you asked them whether family conversations about character and faith matter. But meaning well and predeciding are two different postures. One is passive and hopes something good will happen eventually. The other is active and makes room for it now.

Every value I want my daughters to carry — courage, forgiveness, compassion over fear — has to survive contact with a culture that’s also being intentional, just aimed somewhere else. Advertisers predecide. Algorithms predecide. If I don’t predecide too, I’m not neutral — I’ve just handed the job to whoever else showed up with a plan.

What “Conversation” Actually Means

The second word doing a lot of work in that review is conversation, and it deserves the same precision.

Conversation is not lecture. A lecture is me deciding what I want you to hear and delivering it, whether or not you were asking. It’s efficient, and it’s also one-directional — I talk, you receive. Somewhere inside every parent is the temptation to lecture, because it’s faster and it feels like progress. You said the true thing. Job done. I’ve fallen into that trap. The result? My kids argue with me. They argue because they want to be heard and understood. Having a conversation opens the door for them to be heard. When they are heard and understood, it softens their heart to listen. Covey put it this way, “Seek First to Understand, Then Be Understood.”

A lecture rarely changes a heart. It mostly trains a child to nod at the right moment if you’re stern, or, worse, to argue with you when they disagree. Conversation is slower and less certain, because it requires an actual exchange: I ask something real, I wait for the answer, and then I have to respond to what they actually said — not what I assumed they’d say. That means sometimes their answer surprises me. Sometimes it’s wrong, and I have to decide whether to correct it now or let it sit. Sometimes it’s better than what I would have said, and I have to admit that.

A few things that separate real conversation from a lecture wearing a question mark:

• The silence after the question is yours to protect, not fill. If you ask something real and then answer it yourself ten seconds later because the pause felt uncomfortable, you’ve just given a lecture with extra steps.
• You have to be willing to lose the exchange. If every conversation ends with you restating your original point in different words until your child agrees, it was never actually open.
• Not every conversation needs to resolve. Some of the best ones in our house end with “I don’t know, let’s keep thinking about that” — which is a very different message than “here’s the answer.”
• It opens the door to questions. I find my daughters ask me questions. They are learning from my pattern. Sometimes I have an answer, and sometimes I don’t. That’s ok. When I don’t, it gives me a chance to find the answer if there is one. Sometimes there is no good answer, and that is okay too.

Why This Is the Thread Through Everything Here

If you’ve read very much of this site, you’ll notice the same shape shows up whether the subject is a Sunday afternoon movie, a novel, or a hard topic like prejudice or addiction. That’s not an accident, and it’s not because I’ve run out of new ideas. It’s because I only really have one idea, applied in many different rooms of the house: don’t let the story — or the culture, or the moment — pass by unexamined. Predecide that it matters. Then have the actual conversation, not the lecture.

That’s what I hoped Redeeming Rhubarb would do for other families, the way the review described it. And honestly, it’s what I hope this entire site does too — not that you’d walk away agreeing with every position I hold, but that you’d walk away having had a few more real conversations at your own table than you would have otherwise.

If something here — a book, a show, a hard topic — gives you a reason to sit down and actually talk with your kids instead of at them, it did exactly what I built it to do.

A Comprehensive Guide to Start the Discussion

Reading With Your Kids put it well:

The book tackles racism, stereotypes, addiction, grief, courage, family loyalty, forgiveness, sacrifice, and faith without becoming preachy. Instead, these themes naturally emerge through the lives of memorable animal characters. Parents will likely find themselves pausing throughout the story for meaningful conversations with their children.

That’s the whole idea — not a lesson handed down, but a pause that invites you in. To make those pauses easier to find, I put together a free Teaching Companion with a potential discussion starter for every chapter.

Let the conversation begin.