Talking to Older Kids About Sex

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Today's podcast question says, "When talking to parents of older kids who have not yet talked to their kids about God's good design for sex, what advice would you give them?"

Transcript

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

Hello, friends. Today's podcast question says, when talking to parents of older kids who have not yet talked to their kids about God's good design for sex, what advice would you give them? Now, I'm sure that this questioner knows that at Foundation Worldview, we recommend that the first conversation about sex be had between a parent and a child at either the age of three or four. You can go check out a host of other podcasts that we have on this topic that explain why we recommend that age, but we're going to talk today about what happens if you have not yet talked to your child about God's good design for sex when they're older than the ages of three and four. So that's what we're going to dive deep into today.

My name is Elizabeth Urbanowicz. I'm the host of 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. If you have a question that you would like me to answer on a future podcast, you can submit that by going to FoundationWorldview.com/podcast.

Now, I just wanted to add a little caveat. I do not know the age of the children of this questioner. When I am answering this question about how to talk to kids who are older, I am going to be talking about how to talk to kids who are around the ages of eight, nine, or ten. If you have teens and you're thinking about how to talk to your teens about sex for the first time, I am not the right person for you. That is outside of my wheelhouse. My area of expertise is children really ages 12 and younger. So you'll have to go to someone else to find out how to talk to teens about sex.

But this actually brings up an important point. What we do here at Foundation Worldview is a preventative ministry. We focus on the very early stages of development, mainly for children ages ten and under, but we do go up to the age of twelve. We're trying to help parents establish a firm biblical worldview and give their kids the skills they need to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and hold it up against the lens of Scripture. Many times, in these younger years, parents are just so physically tired and busy with things they don't even think about investing seriously in their children's critical thinking skills or in their biblical literacy simply because when kids are ten and under, they pretty much believe everything their parents believe. It's once they get into those teen years that it's revealed that these children actually don't believe or understand the biblical worldview, and parents tend to seek answers.

And what we're saying here at Foundation Worldview is if you actually establish a firm biblical worldview in the formative years and give kids the critical thinking skills they need and a firm understanding of biblical literacy and how to soundly read, interpret, and apply Scripture, many of the problems that are typical in the teenage years may not arise. But the issue we find at Foundation Worldview is most people don't see the need for this type of instruction in the younger years. So if you are a parent of an older child who's listening to this, I highly encourage you to pass along Foundation Worldview content to parents with younger children because it's never too late. It's never too late to begin discipling our children or to continue discipling our children. It's just much more difficult to be reformative in nature than to be formative in nature. So if we can start all of these things around the age of four, we're going to be building on a firm foundation. That's actually why we named the company Foundation Worldview because we're trying to build the basic building blocks of a biblical worldview. So anyway, that was just a little bit of a caveat, but I think most of the time, people don't realize these problems exist even from the younger ages. They don't come to the surface until the teen years. But if we can address them in the early years, many of those issues we encounter in the teen years will not be there. So if you're a parent of an older child listening to this, please pass along the Foundation Worldview content to someone you know who has younger children so that those parents can begin instructing their children in the formative years.

So now, thinking about parents who have children aged eight, nine, or ten, potentially even up to eleven or twelve, what would my recommendation be if you have not yet talked about God's good design for sex and sexuality? I have several recommendations. The first recommendation that I have is to start talking about it soon. The longer you wait, the more difficult it will be and the more likely it is that your child has received misinformation. So if your child is eight, nine, ten, eleven, or twelve, start talking about it soon. Don't wait any longer. Don't think that you have to have the perfect conversation mapped out. Don't think that you have to have it all perfectly planned. Start talking about it soon. The longer you wait, the more difficult it's going to be, and the more likely it will be that your child has already received misinformation about sex.

The second thing I recommend is do not make this first sex talk a big, intimidating, sit-down moment. Don't make it like, "Okay, tomorrow night I want to talk to you about something really important," and make it where you're going to sit down and say, "Okay, now there's something that you don't know about that's really important," and you're kind of wringing your hands and acting all nervous. Don't make it a big sit-down moment because that's going to cause your child to be nervous. You're going to be even more nervous, and it's just going to be an awkward conversation. It will be really hard for you to have more of these conversations with your child, and it will be really awkward for your child to ever ask you a question about sex. So my recommendation would be to have more of a casual conversation at a time when you're alone with your child. It could be a time when you're cooking something together, driving in the car together, or after you've just read a book together, but approach it in a way that's very non-intimidating and very positive. I would recommend that you say, "There's a part of God's good design for us that I'm really excited to talk with you about." Now, you may be thinking, "Elizabeth, there is no part of me that is excited to talk to my child about sex." That's okay, but we want to make sure that we present it in a positive way because sex is a positive thing. It is a good gift from God. Now, our world has horribly twisted and perverted sex in pretty much every possible way, and we just live in a sex-obsessed culture. But when we look at sex through the lens of the biblical worldview and how God has designed it, sex is a very good gift. So again, don't make it a big, intimidating sit-down moment. Just approach it as, "Hey, there's a part of God's good design for us that I'm really excited to talk to you about," and open up the conversation.

If your child is above the age of eight, it's really important to find out what they already know because it's more than likely that your child will have already heard the word "sex." Your child will have already heard things, even if it's just from other children in your church. They've probably heard the word "sex" and something about sex, and many of the things they will have heard will be misinformation. In my own story, I went to a public school growing up, and I'm sure it wasn't like this in all public schools, but starting in kindergarten, the children in my class were talking about sex regularly, and that just continued up through the grade levels. Now, I had the blessing of my mom first talking to me about sex when I was two, right before my brother was born, so she had already built up for me the positive biblical theology of God's good design for sex. But if she hadn't, I would've found out about sex from kindergartners who definitely are not a great source of information. So it's important that when we sit down and have the first talk with them, we say, "We're going to talk just a little bit about sex. Have you ever heard that word before?" Find out if they've ever heard the word before. If they say no, great, you can move on to an explanation. If they say yes, say, "Okay, where have you heard that word? What have you heard about it?" You want to gather information. What do they know? What do they not know? What do they think they know but don't actually know?

The next step I would recommend is to thank them for sharing. You don't want to jump into "That's wrong" because if you do that when you hear misinformation, they've heard, you're again going to be just driving home a negative view of God's design for sex. So if they present something that's just completely off base or completely inaccurate, you say, "Thanks for sharing. I'm so grateful that you shared with me the things that you have already heard." Then you will want to present the basics of God's good design for sex. Again, it's really important to stay calm and be positive. This is a situation where I would say normally I don't say this, but this is a situation where I think you could fake it till you make it. You might feel like you're dying on the inside. You might want to wring your hands. You might have knots in your stomach. Try to stay as calm as possible. Even beforehand, before you're with your child, you can practice a calm look in the mirror. Just pray that God would help you to stay calm because we want their view of sex to be positive because that's what God's view of sex is. Yes, we as fallen humans have twisted and perverted that good gift, but God is the one who designed sex. Once they're at the age of eight, because they probably did not first hear about sex from you, you may have an eight-year-old who's been pretty sheltered and has not heard about sex yet, but most eight-year-olds will have already heard about it. Because they probably didn't find out about sex from you, their view is most likely that sex is dirty or something shameful or hush-hush, and we want to change that.

We want them to know that sex is a really good thing. It's a good gift from God. So we need to present sex as a good gift that God has given to husbands and wives. God has given us sex for the purpose of procreation. God gave humans the command to be fruitful and multiply, and the way that humans primarily are fruitful and multiply is through the sexual union of a husband and wife bearing more children. Scripture is also clear that one of the purposes of sex is for husbands and wives to get to know one another, that when they become one flesh, they're getting to know one another in a way that no one else should know them. The Hebrew word used to describe the sexual relationship between a husband and wife in the Old Testament is the word yada, which means "to know." That's even the word that's used in Psalm 139 when the psalmist says, "O Lord, you have searched me, and you know me." That word yada is used there, meaning that God has this intimate knowledge of us, and that's the goal for a husband and wife, that they have this intimate knowledge of one another. Scripture is clear that marriage is a picture of Christ and the church, so the sexual union is also a way for a husband to love his wife as Christ loves the church.

During these conversations, as we lay out the basics of sex, we should present it as God's good gift to husbands and wives for the purpose of procreation, spouses getting to know one another, and being a picture of Christ and the church. We can then gently correct the misinformation they've heard and say, "You told me that you heard from so-and-so this; that's actually not true." Don't shame them or make them feel bad about it, but gently correct the misinformation they've heard.

My final recommendation would be to think of this as an ongoing conversation. For so long, parents have viewed the sex talk as a one-time discussion where you sit down, talk with the kids about it once, and then can't wait until it's done. But we as parents need to have open lines of communication with our children. We need to circle back to this conversation. "Hey, last month we talked about God's good design for sex. Do you have any questions about that? As you've thought more about that, have you heard any more from your friends?" Then we can gradually include more information. If you haven't checked out the Birds and the Bees course, that's a course we're consistently recommending here at Foundation Worldview. They also have great social media channels with helpful information about how to have these conversations with kids. So I highly recommend you check out the Birds and the Bees course. It's also important that we circle back with our children about why God gave us sex specifically within the confines of marriage. In their book, Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality, the Mama Bears give a great analogy, and they talk about sex being like a fire—something that's really powerful and really good within its proper confines. When a fire is within a fireplace or a fire pit, it's so good. It gives off light, warmth, and heat. It can warm us up, provide light for the room, and be used to cook food. When we're outside having a bonfire, it can even have a nice, pleasing aroma. But when you take a fire outside of that context—when you put a fire in the middle of a living room or in the middle of a forest—what happens is mass destruction, and that's what happens when we take sex outside of the good confines that God has given us. We have heartbreak because those bonding chemicals released during sexual intercourse bond us with another person, and if we're not married to that person, that bond is broken. As we increase the number of sexual partners we have, we increase the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, which is something that never goes away and we'll deal with for the rest of our lives. Sex can also lead to the creation of children, which should be a joyous thing, but living in a one-parent home is one of the primary indicators of whether a child is going to grow up in poverty or not. Sex outside the confines of marriage is incredibly dangerous and destructive, so we want to continue circling back with our kids so that they understand why God's design is so good.

I mentioned the Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality earlier—I highly recommend you check out that book, especially for parents of kids eight and up. It's incredibly helpful. If you have an eight-year-old, they're still within the age range of our God's Good Design curriculum, which is designed for kids four and up. I highly recommend you check that out. I think it will help you with some of these uncomfortable conversations.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode. But as always, as we leave this time together, my prayer for you is that no matter the situation in which you and the children God has placed in your care find yourselves, 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.