Meet the GWN News Coach

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming next on The World and Everything in It: A new voice.

NICK EICHER, HOST: You know that here at WORLD we provide news for the entire family, that’s why in addition to WORLD Magazine—the daily Sift—and this daily news program among other products, WORLD provides news magazines for young students and teens and daily TV news called WORLD Watch.

But we were missing something.

REICHARD: Right, parents of students were saying, what about us? So we probed for some details and what parents said was we get it that our students need critical thinking, Biblical worldview, and news literacy, but candidly, we feel like we don’t know enough about news and how in particular to help our children in understanding what’s going on in the world. We need help.

EICHER: Well, good news, help is here!

Kelsey Reed, to be precise. Our “news coach” for families of students. She’s working with us now to help you.

Parents, teachers, grandparents, mentors, and ministry workers, if you’re called to engage with children, kids, and teens, Kelsey’s here to engage with you.

Kelsey, good morning and welcome to the WORLD family!

KELSEY REED, NEWS COACH: Good morning. I'm delighted to be here today.

EICHER: Our God’s World News managing editor Rebecca Cochrane wrote out a mission statement for you that I thought really captured it well. I’ll read a bit of it:

Kelsey “will be communicating foundational principles for opening a dialogue with young people about the spiritually and culturally challenging situations presented in the news today. She will help equip other adults with trustworthy factual content and context, sound biblical perspective and application, and ice-breaking and space-creating tips to engage young believers in God-honoring discussion of the news and God’s hand at work in it.”

That sounds great. Practical question: How, Kelsey, is the parent who’s listening now going to be hearing from you?

REED: Well, right now, we've begun by releasing a News Coach column every Monday in our WORLD Teen, WORLD Kids, and God's Big World newsletters that goes specifically to parents. This has content for the adults. It's exhortative, encouraging, and hopefully adding some good tools to begin using as well. On top of that, at GWNews.com, we have a teacher's lounge there. It has a number of resources in it, which include my beginning posts. So the news coach blog is what we're calling it, but it can be found in the teachers lounge tab.

REICHARD: You know Kelsey, last week on Culture Friday we talked about gender confusion and also objectification of women in corporate advertising. That seems to me an excellent example of the kind of “news coaching” you’ll give parents. How do you talk to kids about these hard things?

REED: When I'm at home, this is a big part of our discussion right now, specifically, because social media has been leveraged for identity politics and gender ideology right now. So for my teens, they're at a very just tender age for that input from social media. But in the living room, that day, we had to talk about this crazy set of categories. It just started by defining terms and a developmentally appropriate way. For my youngest who's with me in the studio today, she's gonna be seven in May. Her questions needed to be fielded differently, and with tenderness, starting from just brass tacks of what is male and female, according to the definition, we are given by our authority, the one who made us. It can be messy at times, but it's well worth being able to coach them while they're at home, and then send them out into the world.

EICHER: So that’s content, but we also said context. What does that mean, practically speaking?

REED: Context, generally, what we think of in educational theory and practice, we're talking about historical, cultural, social context. Added to that, we have another thing that's very important, the practices of being aware of the climate that we're creating at home for having these discussions. So I would say discussion of the historical context and cultural context that supplies some of our structures in a healthy environment. We're figuring out what knowledge is important for this topic area? What background do we need to know?

But we're also going to be thinking about the elements of relational support, and how to meet the challenges with a good tension between those three things. That includes thinking about where are we having these conversations? And how ready am I to have the maybe in the car? What is my relational dynamic like towards my children?

EICHER: All right, Kelsey Reed, she's the news coach, working to help bring that content and context to you so that you can come alongside your young person to help explain all of that, Kelsey, it's great to see you. It's great to have you. Thanks so much.

REED: It’s a delight to be here.

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