How to Talk to Kids About Family Members Living Together Before Marriage

Also Available on:

How do you explain to your children why living together before marriage is not okay, especially when a family member is doing so? In this episode, Elizabeth Urbanowicz provides a clear, biblical framework to guide this conversation with your kids. Learn how to:
1. Build a positive biblical theology of sexuality.
2. Introduce the concept of sin.
3. Prepare children to love others while holding to biblical truth.

Practical, compassionate, and gospel-centered advice to equip your children for real-world situations.

Transcript

Note: The following is an auto-transcript of the podcast recording.

Hello friends. Today's question says, "how do I explain why a family member living with a boyfriend or girlfriend before marriage is not okay?" This is an important question for us to think through because I know that there are just so many situations nowadays where people live together before they're married. In fact, in many places it's just expected that that would happen. And sadly, sometimes even within the church, some churches don't really hold their members accountable to living a life that aligns with Scripture. And there are even some people in the church that live together before marriage. And so we want to think through how do we explain to our children why this is not biblical? So that's the question we're going to explore today on the Foundation Worldview Podcast, where we seek to answer your questions so that you can equip the children that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview. I'm your host, Elizabeth Urbanowicz, and I'm thrilled you've joined me for this episode today.

Now, as we go through my response to this questioner's question, I hope that those of you who are faithful listeners to the Foundation Worldview Podcast, will already be formulating an answer in your mind because one of the goals of this podcast is I don't want to just be like a Dear Abby, where people write in questions and they seek my wisdom. One, because my wisdom is faulty. If my wisdom is not rooted in Scripture, it's just human wisdom. But second, I don't want to develop a group of people who are dependent on me to answer questions. One of my goals in this podcast is to model how to think biblically through a question and to model that over and over and over and over and over again so that as you continue to listen to these episodes, that you start to think in the same way. You start to think biblically about these things.

So as we think through, how can we explain to a child why a family member living with their boyfriend or girlfriend before marriage is not okay? I think there are several steps we need to take, and these are steps that I have mentioned before in other podcasts regarding similar topics of sexual sin that the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure we build up a positive biblical theology. Sorry, I'll say that again. Build up a positive biblical theology about sexuality. Then we need to introduce the concept of sin, and then we need to prepare them to love others. So these three things I've gone through many times before on the Foundation Worldview podcast. We need to build a positive biblical theology for sexuality. Then we need to introduce the concept of sin. Then we need to prepare our children to love others well. So we're going to go through those three different steps.

So first, building up a positive biblical theology for sexuality is we need to explain to our children that sex is a good gift from God, that God has designed for marriage. And then we need to talk about how God is the designer and designers understand their design best. And God as the designer has given us these boundaries for sex. He has told us that sex is solely for the marriage covenant, and so we need to trust that his design is good. If you would like more information on actually explaining to our kids why sex is solely for marriage, we have an entire podcast just on that topic. So highly recommend that you check out that podcast for more details because that's the first thing we need to do, build this positive biblical theology of sexuality, that God designed sex as a good gift between husband and a wife. God is the designer. He knows and understands the design best, and therefore we are to trust and to obey and to follow his commands for the gift of sex.

Then we can introduce the concept of sin and say we don't always follow God's good design, that sometimes we choose to reject or ignore that good design. And when we reject or ignore it, we are sinning and this sin separates us from God. When we sin against God, that sin causes a separation between us and God. We see that right in the first chapters of Genesis. In Genesis chapter three, what did Adam and Eve do immediately after they rebelled against God? Well, they hid from one another because they realized they were naked, so they hid from one another. Then they hid from God. God came walking in the garden and they hid from him, and then they hid from themselves when God questioned them on what happened, rather than being honest and confessing and repenting of their sin, they pointed the finger and shifted the blame. And so sin is a separator. It separates us from God. It separates us from one another. It separates us even from a true understanding of ourselves. Okay? So we're building this positive biblical theology of sex, being solely for marriage, introducing the concept of sin, and then saying, you know what? In our world, we are going to see a lot of sin in the area of sex. And if you have older kids, you can talk about how God designed marriage to be a picture of Christ and the church and how sex is that act that really glues them together. And so there is a huge battle that Satan is trying so hard to destroy marriage because that's a picture of Jesus and the church, and he's trying to distort sex to take it outside of the context of marriage, again, to distort that picture of the gospel, that picture of Jesus and the church. And we can say we're going to find so much sin. We're going to see people who are living together before they're married that are choosing to have sex before they're married. We're going to see people who are choosing to enter into what they believe is a marriage between two men or two women when marriage is just one man and one woman becoming one flesh for life. We're going to see people confused about whether they are male or female. We're going to see people who are choosing to have sex outside of marriage when they are married, that there is so much sin in our worlds. And then we also need to connect it to ourselves that sin isn't just out there in the world, sin resides in every human heart. So we are going to be tempted from within to sin sexually. Okay? So those are the first two steps, building up the positive biblical theology and then introducing the concept of sin.

Then as we think through the specific situation that we are in in our family, we want to prepare them to love others. And one thing we do in our God's Good Design curriculum here at Foundation Worldview is we tell children that as a child, it is not their job to go around pointing out other people's sin. We say that for us as adults, sometimes it is our job to lovingly point out another person's sin so that they will repent of that sin and turn to Jesus. But we say as a child, it's not your job to go around pointing out other people's sin, but it is your job to love others, to be kind to others. And then we also have to let them know that being kind is not lying to others. So we're not going to celebrate what God calls sin. This is a hard concept sometimes even for us as adults to understand and also for our children to understand. But we want to help them know we're not going to lie to someone. We're not going to say that we're so excited if somebody moves in with their boyfriend or girlfriend or we're not going to congratulate someone if they marry someone who is the same sex as them, or we're not going to celebrate when somebody transitions to another gender. But we want to be kind to that person. We want to pray for that person. We want to love them as Jesus would love them. And then specifically as it regards to this situation where a family member is moving in with a boyfriend or a girlfriend, we're going to want to sit down with them and explain to them what's going on and then how we're going to interact with that person. Now, if your child is four or five or six and they don't even understand the concept of living together, this might be a conversation that you just choose not to have until they ask you about it. Some four, five, and six year olds, I know that a family member living with a boyfriend or girlfriend, it would completely go over their heads where I know other children that age that are very astute and very on top of things and would recognize that something was going on there. I think about my oldest nephew, he is incredibly observant and very, very intelligent, and he would notice if it came up that someone was living with someone and they weren't married. He's six years old, but I know that he would ask a question about it because he's very, very observant. So it really just requires some wisdom, whether you're going to talk to a young child about this or whether you're going to wait until your child is seven and older. But really recommend that you be honest with your children who are seven and older about this person's sin, that when we go and we visit your aunt and your uncle, your cousin has moved in with his girlfriend, and then talk them through how did God design sex? Should a man and a woman be living together before they are married?

I know in my own family that this type of conversation had to happen that when I was growing up, I think I was in first grade or second grade, probably second grade, one of my grandparents had died two years earlier, and the spouse of that grandparent was living with their significant other at the time. And I remember my mom sitting down and having a conversation with me about how I was going to be interacting with that grandparent and with that grandparent's significant other, and we were actually going to their house. And so my mom explained that this grandparent was living with their significant other. And then my mom asked me some questions. She said, I already told you, I already taught you from God's word that sex is a gift for what or for who. It's a gift for a husband and a wife who are married, and when people are living together, they're most likely having sex together. And this is something that is a sin against God, and we're still going to love this grandparent. We're going to be kind to this grandparent's significant other, but we're going to recognize that this is not something that is okay. And so I distinctly remember my mom having that conversation with me because we were going to Thanksgiving or Christmas or something at this grandparent's house, and it was going to be very obvious that this grandparent was living with someone who was not their spouse. And so we can be honest with our child about why this is sin.

And then we can talk through what should we want for this person in our family who's living with their boyfriend or their girlfriend. We should want what's best for them. And what is best for them is that they would turn from this sin that they would trust in Jesus, that they would be reconciled in their relationship to him. And so right then you can stop and as you have this conversation, pray with your child for this family member that they would see their sin as sin, that they would turn to Jesus. Now, I don't know if this is the case with the questioner or with others who are listening, but I'm sure that there are some family situations where the person even who is living with their boyfriend or girlfriend is claiming to be a Christian. And they might use very spiritual language about this, but this is where we can take our children right to Scripture. There are multiple times in Scripture where Jesus says, "if you love me, you will obey my commands." And we can say, if we are truly loving Jesus, we are going to obey his commands. And maybe your cousin or your aunt or your grandma or whoever claims to know Jesus and claims to love Jesus, but they're living in sin in this area of their life. So we're going to pray that they would turn from that sin, that they would repent of that and they would come back to Jesus. Or if they've never truly known Jesus, they just thought they did, we're going to pray that they would for the first time truly repent of their sin and trust in Jesus.

So I hope that these steps, first, building the positive biblical theology, introducing the concept of sin, and then preparing them to love this person in this specific situation, I hope that this is a helpful formula because there is going to be, there's going to be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of different situations you could encounter depending on your family structure and so many other details. So I can't provide the ins and outs for every family situation that you're going to find yourself in, but I think if you take this general framework and help train your kids in this way, it's going to make things so much smoother when you interact with this family member and also will help ground your children in the truth of understanding why this is sin. And also through these conversations and through you modeling this, that they'll understand how to love someone who is living in sin.

Now, just as a reminder, we can do everything intentionally. We can do everything biblically and things can still not go well. We're fallen humans and everyone that we interact with is a fallen human. So there might be something that we say that is not the most beneficial thing to say, or our child might say something that's uncomfortable or puts us in an uncomfortable position, or we might do and say everything correctly and this family member just has an issue with how we've handled things. So we need to go into these conversations and these family situations, not with the goal that everything is going to go smoothly, but with the goal that we're going to be obedient to what God has called us to. We're going to be relying on His Holy Spirit to give us wisdom in moment by moment situations, and that we're going to trust that even if things blow up in our face, even if it seems like everything in this situation has gone wrong, that we're going to cling to the promise that God is working all things together for our good by using all things to conform us more into the image of His Son. And we have no idea the situations that we encounter today that seem like a mess, how God is going to use those to train us for different situations that we're going to face in the future.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode. But if you have a question you would like for me to answer on a future Foundation Worldview podcast, you can submit that question by going to FoundationWorldview.com/podcast. Also ask that you would take the few seconds or sometimes even a half a second that it takes to rate, review, like or subscribe to this podcast. And as we leave our time together, I'm going to close, as I always do with the two verses that I just roughly quoted before, that my prayer for you is that no matter the situation in which you and the children God has placed in your care, find yourselves that you would trust that God is working all things together for your good by using all things to conform you more into the image of His Son. I'll see you next time.