Teaching Kids Safe Boundaries: Navigating Relationships Between Adults and Children

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How can parents teach children about appropriate relationships with adults, especially in church or community settings? In this episode, Elizabeth Urbanowicz provides practical advice on setting boundaries, preparing children to recognize inappropriate behavior, and addressing potential concerns with wisdom and grace. Learn how to protect your children while cultivating biblical hospitality and trust.

Transcript

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

Hello, friends. Today's podcast question says, "there is a man at a weekly after church gathering we attend who enjoys interacting with the children more so than the other adults? My five-year-old daughter seems overly excited about her friendship with him. How do we talk to our daughter about appropriate relationships between children and adults?" This is a really important question for us to think through because as we open up our homes and become more involved in the local church, there is risk involved and we want to make sure that we are taking precautions to protect our children. So this is the topic we're going to dive down deep into today on the Foundation Worldview Podcast. For those of you I haven't met before, my name is Elizabeth Urbanowicz. I run Foundation Worldview Ministry, and we are primarily a curriculum creating company. We seek to create resources that will equip you as a Christian adult to get your kids carefully evaluating every idea they encounter so they can understand the truth of the biblical worldview.

Now, as we go through this podcast today, I'm going to do two separate things. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to address some general safety guidelines that we should have for our children, and then I'm going to address the specific situation that this questioner asked about. So I think that no matter the situation our children are in, whether it's that we're opening up our home to practice hospitality, whether they're in a church kids ministry setting, whether they're in an after church gathering, I think there are several guidelines that we can have to help make sure that we are protecting our kids from any potentially dangerous situations.

The first thing I think we should teach our children is that they should never be alone with someone unless we as the parent have directed them to be. So we should just tell them, you know what? You're not going to go off into a room alone with somebody. I'm not going to have you drive in the car alone with somebody. You're not going to be alone with somebody unless I have specifically told you to do that, because I need to make sure that it's a safe situation. A dear friend of mine at a certain season in her life was a single mom and she had to have different people pick her kids up from school while she was working, and she just had this system where her children knew that they were not to get in the car with someone or to be alone with someone unless they had a specific password that the mom had given them. So the mom made up just a very odd password that her children knew and she would give to anyone that she wanted to pick up her children or to take them somewhere else. And so this was just a way that she could keep them safe, that she knew that people weren't just coming and picking her children up without her knowledge that they had to have this special passcode. So that's the first thing really just we want to drill it into our kids that they should never really be alone with somebody else outside of the family unless you as the parent have directed them to do so.

Then at church sometimes we just think, oh, church is just a safe setting. Everybody at church loves Jesus, and ideally, would everybody at church love Jesus and would there never be abuse situations that yes, ideally in an ideal world, but we don't live in an ideal world, we'd live in a fallen world, and so therefore we need to prepare our children for how they can be protected as they are at church. I would just say to just train them at church, you are always going to be in the same room where mom and dad are, or if you want to go to a different room, you just have to ask permission. Sometimes I know kids at my church, they like to go outside and run around, and as far as I know, it's always a safe situation, but it should just be one where they have to ask parents permission so that you always know where they are. Okay? So just say, you're always going to be in the same room as me at church unless you ask for permission to go somewhere else.

Then a third guideline when you are at home, when you're opening up your home to practice hospitality is just don't ever allow anyone in the bedrooms. Just say, Nope, the bedrooms are off limits when we have people over our home. This is just a really safe practice to keep your kids in public areas, to keep others in public areas so that you're making sure that there's not things that are going on that should not be going on. Those of you who have followed the Foundation Worldview ministry for a while, you know that several times now, I've had Rosaria Butterfield on as a guest, and one of the times that I had her on as a guest on a webinar, she talked about raising kids in a home that practices biblical hospitality and in her home, her home is a ranch home and one side, one wing of the house is the bedrooms, and it's just a general rule that when people are over, nobody goes down that wing, okay? That wing is just off limits that nobody is in the bedrooms, and I think that's just a really smart idea.

I know in my own small group at my church that for a while we meet together entirely as families, and so anyone who is usually about 10 on up, they participate in the small group discussion that we have after dinner, but usually the kids that are younger than 10, they're allowed to go and play. And for a while, our small group only had boys in it and there was only four of them. So for a while, our small group leaders let the boys go off and play in a room where nobody else was, and all of the families were close. However, then we got a new family that had a few little girls and my small group leaders decided, you know what? Now that we have both boys and girls, it's probably wisest that they're always in a place where we can see them. So rather than going off and playing in another room, they now go and play in the backyard. So I just think having bedrooms closed off when you're practicing hospitality is a really good MO.

Then another thing that's really important that we go over early with our kids is the difference between good touch and bad touch and just talk with our kids about all the different types of good touch that God has given us. And then what are different types of bad touch? If you have taken your children through our God's Good Design curriculum here at Foundation Worldview, you know that we have an entire lesson on that, and the main point in that lesson is because of sin not all touch is good touch. And in that lesson we explain that good touch, there's so many different types of good touch, but bad touch is any type of good touch that someone doesn't want. For example, if someone gives you a hug and you ask them kindly not to give you a hug, that good touch has become bad touch. And so we give examples of that and then we talk about how there's a really serious type of bad touch, and that's when someone touches the special parts of your body that a bathing suit was meant to cover. And so we just want to prepare our kids for the difference between good touch and bad touch so that if they are ever touched inappropriately, they know immediately that that is not good touch and that you also prepare them with a game plan for what to do. And so in that curriculum, the game plan we give kids is three steps, stop, run, and tell. Okay? So if somebody touches you with bad touch, you need to say stop. Tell them to stop. You need to run to your mom or your dad, and you need to tell them what happened. If you have not yet checked out our God's Good Design curriculum, highly, highly, highly recommend that you check it out. It is so valuable for just laying a biblical foundation for the goodness of God's design and protecting children against corruptions of that design.

We also want our kids to know that adults outside of the family should ask permission before having physical contact with them. I know that I try to practice this for myself when I'm interacting with children at church. I just recently was, our church redistrict our small groups, and so I got sent to a new small group, and in my new small group there is a little girl there who is so sweet and she loves physical touch, and so when I first started coming to the small group, she would always run up and say, miss Elizabeth, and spread out her arms for me to pick her up. And the first few times I was at that small group, I asked one of her parents first, is it okay if I pick her up? So our kids should know that adults should have permission before they touch them. So those are just some wise things that I think we should establish with all of our children to help protect them from any potentially harmful or abusive situations.

Now, I'm going to address this specific situation. So the questioner said that there is a man at their weekly after church gathering who really enjoys interacting with the kids, the kids more so than the adults, and her five-year-old daughter is very excited about her friendship with him. How can they help establish good boundaries there? So for this situation, I think it really requires wisdom. Now, I do not know this situation. I do not know your daughter. I do not know this individual. So this man who enjoys interacting with children more than adults, it could be something that is innocent. Maybe he just doesn't interact very well with adults and he feels more comfortable with children, or it could be something where there is some mal intent there, I do not know, but what I do know is that your child is too important not to be cautious in this situation.

So one thing I would recommend that you do is even before you talk to your daughter, just try to include this gentleman in conversations with other adults. Maybe he's just gravitating towards the kids because he doesn't feel comfortable around adults, so you can try to help change that. Include him in a conversation. Before you go to this, after church gathering, brainstorm two or three questions that you can ask him. Think through, who could you introduce him to that he might not already be familiar with? Hopefully another man who's good at making conversation. Then what I recommend that you do is you give your daughter some specific guidelines that you tell her things that are okay and are not okay. I know for myself that when I was growing up, I went to a church and it was actually in a little bit more of an urban inner city area, so sometimes we would have people walking in off the streets coming to the church service, and I know that there was a man that started regularly coming to the church when I was probably around six or seven years old, and similar to this situation, he paid a lot of attention to the children, and I remember he actually paid a lot of attention to me, and there was one time I remember where after a Sunday evening service, he picked me up and he put me on his shoulders and he was riding me around the church, and I remember afterwards my mom telling me, Elizabeth, you should not be riding on his shoulders. I don't want you to do that again. If he tries to do that or if he asks you, you tell him no. My mom said no. So just give your daughter some guidelines for, it's okay if you talk to him when I'm around, but you know what? I don't want you going off and playing with him because you know what? Adults and children are not friends. Adults are supposed to help children and protect children, but you know what? We're not going to go off and we're not going to play with him by ourselves. So just give her some specific guidelines there.

Then if you get a sense that this is not a healthy situation, if you get the sense that there's something wrong here, I would encourage you to go talk to the leadership at your church who will be able to speak into this situation, will hopefully be able to have some oversight in this situation that I know in this situation that I was just sharing with you with this man that came to our church. Now, again, this might be a completely different situation than what you're experiencing, but I know in this situation it came out, I think, I don't know because I was only six or seven, but I do think that some things in his past came up. I don't know if he was a sex offender or if there were some other things, but I do know that the leaders at our church were talked to, and eventually the man was asked to leave because he just kept focusing on the kids and it was not a healthy situation. So if you get the sense that this is not a healthy situation, talk to the leaders in your church. Obviously, you don't want to get just someone kicked out of your church, but you do want to make sure that your daughter and the other children are being protected, so the leaders would hopefully go to him and say, we love having you. We're excited to have you here. In these types of situations, we want you to mainly focus on relationships with adults just because it's not appropriate for an adult to be alone by themselves with kids.

And then if there are firmer boundaries that need to be in place, talk with your child about this. Today at the Gathering, you went off and were playing tag over there where I couldn't see you and you're too precious to me to have you in a situation where you could get hurt. So you need to always stay where I can see you again with that situation in my own church, I know that my mom told me she was very honest with me, even though I was young back in the day, it was very different. At Sunday School nowadays, most churches have a kid check and a parent has to scan their barcode to prove that they're the parent of the child, and then the child is released. Well, back in the day when I was growing up, Sunday school hour was over and it was just like, okay, go find your parents, and we just went off through the church, and I remember when that man was still at the church, my mom told me, she was like, I don't want you spending time with him, Elizabeth. I want you to immediately go to this location, and she told me where I was supposed to go. So just be honest with your child if firmer boundaries are needed, where they can go, where she can go, where she can't go, because again, we want to love others. I don't know whether this is a situation where it's an innocent situation or if it's a situation where it's potentially dangerous, but you want to make sure that you are keeping your child safe.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode, but I would ask that you just invest the one to two seconds that it takes to rate and review this content. Doing so really helps us complete our mission of reaching as many Christian adults as possible with this message that we need to get our kids thinking critically and biblically. Also, if you have a question that you would like for me to answer on a Future Foundation Worldview podcast, you can do so by going to FoundationWorldview.com/podcast. As we leave our 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.