Preparing Kids for Gender Ideology in Today's World

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In today's podcast, we discuss how Christian adults can combat the pervasive gender ideology affecting our children. We'll explore strategies for preparing kids to face this ideology, which is prevalent in many aspects of our world. Join us as we provide practical insights to help guide children in understanding and upholding biblical truths about gender and sexuality.

Transcript

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

Hello friends. On today's podcast, we're going to be discussing what we can do as Christian adults to stem the tide of the gender ideology that is coming at our children from all different aspects. Now, the question specifically today says we do weekly kids club with unchurched children, ages 10 to 13. We do a Sunday school lesson with them and are looking for guidance regarding concerns about gender ideology taught in the public school system and really appreciate some guidance. So what I'm going to do as we look at this question is I'm going to answer it in two parts. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to respond specifically to the questioner's situation in regards to this afterschool discipleship with unchurched kids, and then I'm going to look at the concept of preparing our kids to face gender ideology that is just prevalent in most aspects of our world. So first, I'm going to respond directly to the questioner. Then I'm going to answer this just in general because even if this is not your exact situation, the children that God has placed in your care are going to be indoctrinated by the world and the world's just anti reality view of gender and sexuality. So that's what we're going to do today.

I'm Elizabeth Urbanowicz. I'm the host of the Foundation Worldview podcast, and this podcast is designed with the goal of answering 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.

So now first, as I'm responding to this question or specific situation, the first thing I want to say is just thank you for what you do. Thank you for investing in the lives of the youth in your city, recognizing that they're unchurched, that they are not going to be hearing the gospel on a weekly basis and for investing in their life in this way. That's so important.

Second thing I want to say is make sure that you're having realistic expectations, that you want to work really hard at this ministry that God has called you to, but also understanding what you're up against. So I would just encourage you, be faithful with the time that you have with them, that if you have them for an hour a week or two hours a week, be faithful with that time that God has given you. That it's so important in these situations where you're working with unchurched kids, that you develop loving relationships with them because that's going to be the grounding of everything else that you teach them, that you don't want to just come in and just shove the truth down their throats, but you want to make sure that it's done within the context of relationship because that's what's modeled biblically, that Jesus consistently built relationships with the people that he was ministering to with the people that he was preaching truth to.

We also know that the gospel is all about relationship. It's all about God reconciling his relationship with us, bringing us back to Him, and God is all about relationship because God in and of himself is relational because God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, have been in perfect loving relationship with one another from eternity past. So make sure that you're developing these loving relationships.

Then as you're developing these relationships, it's always a good idea to ask questions before you're speaking the truth, to ask good questions, to get kids thinking. This is what we see consistently modeled in Jesus's ministry as well. Jesus asked people questions to get them thinking and to reveal what was going on in their hearts. So I think these are some really important foundations.

Then as far as having these realistic expectations, just to know that your time with these children, whether it's one hours, two hours, three hours a week, that these one to three hours of instruction in the truth cannot undo 40 plus hours of weekly indoctrination. That it's just unrealistic to think that what we're doing with children for one to three hours a week is somehow going to be able to combat 40 plus hours of weekly indoctrination. And in fact, the people who were really behind the public education system in the United States centuries ago, they understood this. In his book, it was published in the 1930s, Humanism, a New Religion, Charles F. Potter wrote, "What can a Theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanist teaching?" And so when children are in 40 hours a week and then they come from unchurched homes, so multiply that times two, they're going, they're spending so much of their time being indoctrinated by the world. So we need to have realistic expectations that we can't expect that every child that's going to come through this program is going to have a biblical reality-based view of gender and sexuality. When we just think about what's going on in the classroom, everything in the classroom from using preferred pronouns to bathrooms and locker rooms being for whoever feels like they're a certain gender from math examples that are used in the classroom and in the textbook and in the homework to the books that are chosen in the library to the focus of historical figures, to the textbooks that are used. All of these things are brainwashing kids into the anti-reality idea that there is no such thing as distinctly maleness or distinctly femaleness. That our bodies do not reveal the truth about us. So outside of a miraculous intervention, which is not beyond the God that we serve, outside of a miraculous intervention, one to three hours a week in instruction is not going to undo this. So we need to have realistic expectations in situations like this.

And we also need to recognize that our labors are not in vain. God can still use them. God is the God who took five loaves and two fishes and multiplied them to feed 5,000. So God can do the miraculous. We just have to make sure that have realistic expectations that we're not going in with the goal that every kid in this program is going to understand and live out a biblical understanding of gender and sexuality that we're going to go in, we're going to build relationships with them. We're going to love them like Jesus loves them. We're going to teach them the truth and we're going to teach them some things and ask them some questions that are going to get them thinking, but just having realistic expectations. So I hope I haven't sound like a Debbie Downer in this because work like this person is doing with the kids club is valuable work. My own parents, they lead a good news club in a public school system one day a week after school, and they are having a tremendous impact on the lives of these kids. They are, but we have to have realistic expectations and know that we can't expect that we're going to help every single child undo in one to three hours a week the indoctrination that's being done for 40 plus hours a week. So have those realistic expectations.

Next, what I'm going to cover is I'm going to cover something that the person who wrote in this question and then anybody else listening who wants to think through how can we ground our children in a biblical understanding of gender and sexuality and prepare them for the indoctrination that's coming their way. That's going to be the second part that we're going to go into.

Now, before we do that, would just ask that you would invest the two seconds that it takes to rate this content. When you rate this content. What that does is that helps more people discover it, and it helps us at Foundation Worldview accomplish our goal of equipping as many Christian adults as possible with the skills that they need to get their kids to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter.

Okay. So for the second part, how do we just prepare our children, whether they're our own biological children or their children we're working with at church or at school or in an afterschool program, how do we prepare them for this gender ideology that they're going to face in most aspects of life? I'm going to walk you through now what we do, part of what we do in our latest curriculum, our God's Good Design curriculum, which is designed to ground kids in the truth of what God has revealed about gender and sexuality and marriage and family.

So the first thing that we need to do and that we do in this curriculum is teach the concept of design and how we recognize design. Because the mistake that we often make when we're trying to prepare our children to faithfully live out what the Bible says is we bypass this step of understanding that there is actually design to this. That yes, once we're Christians, we wholeheartedly believe that Scripture is the word of God and whatever it tells us to do, whether we understand it and it makes logical sense to us or not, we follow that because we have submitted ourselves to the word of God. But especially when we're working with our children who are not at that stage yet, we need to help them see that our bodies and our minds show design. And anytime we see design, that design comes from a designer. So what we do in our God's Good Design curriculum is we take kids through some amazing facts about their body, some amazing things that their bodies do without them even knowing it or thinking about it or ever being aware about it and telling them that this is a design, this is a purpose. This is the purpose to your circulatory system or your respiratory system. This is the purpose, like when your brain is transmitting messages through your neurons to your nerves, down to different parts of your body and your muscles are taking in that information and just showing them that there's incredible design to our bodies and to our minds and that design points directly to a designer, then we give kids the example and show them how designers always understand their design best. And because of that, it's important to follow the designer's design, and we give them examples in real life, what happens if we use a glass not according to the designer's design? What happens if we use a kite not according to the designer's design? And they see how that object, that thing that was designed, miss out on its purpose and then others get hurt in the process. So we have to ground this in the concept of design, and so we want our kids, our own kids and our family, and then unchurched kids, any kids we're working with, to understand that design always comes from a designer. Designers understand their design best and knowing and following the designer's design is important and then relate that to our bodies and our minds.

After we've directly taught this concept of design, we then need to ground them in the truth of Scripture, that God designed us in his image as male or female. And so we need to directly reveal, okay, what does it mean? How do we know whether we are male or female? And in that God's good design curriculum, we give parents a warning ahead of time that there's going to be anatomically correct language used, but we teach that you were born with a special part of your body that revealed the truth of whether God designed you as a girl or a boy. If you were born with a penis, God designed you as a boy. If you were born with a vagina, God designed you as a girl. And so it's important that we use this language with our children and that they know that those body parts reveal the truth of God's good design.

Then another thing we want to let them understand is that no matter what you like or what you don't like, what you're good at or what you're not good at, you are a boy because God designed you as a boy or you are a girl because God designed you as a girl. So in that curriculum, we give examples of different children and things that they like and things that they're good at, and then we ask, is this child a boy or a girl? Well, how do we know by the truth revealed in his or her body.

The next step that we want to do after we've directly taught them this concept of design, we've grounded them in the truth of Scripture, that God designed them as male or female image bearers. We then need to show them how sin corrupts God's good design. That sin corrupts or ruins God's good design. Now, specifically when we're talking about gender and the way that sin has corrupted God's good design, our gender, is way we explain it in this curriculum is that because of sin, feelings can trick us. Because of sin, feelings can trick us. That our bodies might reveal the truth that we are a girl, but our feelings might trick us into believing that we are a boy or our bodies might reveal the truth that we are a boy and our feelings might trick us into believing that we are a girl.

Now, something that we do in this curriculum that I think is really important, and for those of you who are familiar with Rosaria Butterfield's teaching, this is how she explains it, that transgenderism is rooted in the sin of envy. It's wanting what God has not given us. So if we are a boy and we feel like we're a girl, we are wanting a body that God has not given us, or if we are a girl and we feel like a boy, we are wanting a body that God has not given us. So the way we explain this in our God's good design curriculum is we talk about feelings of jealousy tricking someone, feelings of jealousy, tricking someone. Okay? So once we have directly taught the concept of design, we've grounded our kids in the truth of Scripture, that God designed us in his image as male or female. We want to help them see that sin corrupts God's good design and because of sin, feelings can trick us, but we can't end things there. We need to help them see the truth that this is not the end of the story.

This is not the end of the story. Sin corrupting God's good design is not the end of the story. The way that we explained it in our God's good design curriculum is when Jesus returns, God's good design for us will last forever, that Jesus has defeated sin and those who turn from that sin and trust in him, when Jesus returns, they will be brought with Jesus to the new heaven and new earth and God's good design will last forever. And so this is something. Now, we don't cover this in our God's good design curriculum because it's for kids four and up. But if you're working with kids 10, 12 years old and they actually know people, or maybe they're even contemplating if this is a secular setting, maybe they're even contemplating some kind of alteration to their body because they feel like a different gender. This is where the truth of Scripture really speaks in that those who have mutilated their bodies and regretted yes for the rest of this life on earth, they are going to be dealing the consequences of that mutilation. But you know what? When Jesus returns and he fully redeems us through our resurrected body, their bodies will be restored that the mutilations that have happened through hormone therapy or through surgeries, those are not going to be permanent. For those who love God and have turned from their sins and trusted in Him that they will be raised to new life on the new heaven and new earth where God's good design for us will last forever.

Then when we're thinking about how do we equip our kids to navigate all this in the world, we don't want them to just blurt out anytime they see someone who is presenting themselves as the opposite gender, like sin corrupts God's good design. Sin corrupts God's good design. That's not the appropriate way to interact with others. So what we train kids in the God's good design curriculum is three things. We train them that when they recognize, when they see a corruption of God's good design, first thing they need to do is recognize this is not God's good design. Second thing is they need to remind themselves of the truth.And third, they need to be kind. So we give them examples and we say, you ask your friend where her dad is after ballet class and she points to a man who is wearing a dress and has makeup on. Okay, what are you going to do? Well, first you recognize that this is not God's good design. Second, you remind yourself of the truth in your mind. You say, God designed us as male or female. God's design is so good, and then you be kind. You be kind to your friend, okay? You smile at her. You're kind to her dad. Okay? So we want to train our kids in these three things to recognize this is not God's good design in your mind, remind yourself of the truth. And three, be kind.

Well, I hope that this is just a really helpful framework for anyone who is wanting to ground their kids in the truth of God's good design. As I mentioned before, highly recommend that you check out our God's Good Design curriculum. The goal here is that we have done all the work for you in presenting these truths in a way that's easy to understand for little ones that's systematic, that's explicit, and that's going to start these everyday conversations for your kids to be able to live out the truth of God's good design and engage with others in love and grace.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode, but as always, my prayer for you as we leave our time together 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 the Son. I'll see you next time.