Who is Teaching Your Child About Sex?
How are your children learning about sex and sexual identity? They will inevitably be educated by their peers, social media influencers, shows, books, and teachers. Are those the voices you trust to teach your kids about one of the most powerful, pleasurable, and life altering facets of their body and their relationships? Hopefully, some of those sources of influence are trustworthy. But most of them will blare a worldly message that may not support and align with your family’s beliefs and standards.
As Christians, my husband and I hope that our children will see their sex/gender as God-given and God-designed. We encourage them to work to accept their gender as it is. We are teaching them that God asks us to reserve sexual activity for marriage to an opposite sex spouse. We also acknowledge that at times we have fallen short in living up to those standards ourselves. It is the life-long work of all of us to strive for God’s requirements of us, trusting that He created us and knows what is best for us even when that is difficult to believe, see, and understand. God’s expectations don’t often feel right. They go against our broken nature. But we believe that working to live within His guardrails will give us the best chance to build a fulfilling, healthy, contented life.
Not many channels of influence agree with our Christian stance. So, we have chosen to share our beliefs with our children from a young age, younger than was necessary in past generations. We decided to do so as soon as they started interacting with people outside of our family in person and onscreen without our supervision. Our children are currently 11, 9, and 6 years old.
We believe that it is good and necessary to teach our children that our sexual standards are not the norm in our culture and people present and engage in sexuality differently than we do. We want our children to be kind and loving no matter what gender, identity, or sexuality a person lives out. We will also love our children no matter what they end up doing with their lives and bodies. We may not agree, but we will choose to love them. We choose to limit our children’s exposure to sources that promote, celebrate, and glorify forms of sexuality that are contrary to God’s standard for us. We have found that to do so we have to scour the online sites, shows, and books they engage with because seemingly innocent and supposedly age appropriate material often includes subtle and not so subtle references to the invitation to experiment with sexuality and identity in a way contrary to God’s will. We have witnessed this in a variety of Disney cartoons. and graphic novels at our library aimed at preschool and elemntary children as well as from other sources.
We all must manage the tension of how to love those who differ with us, while still teaching our children about the way God has asked us to live. This topic is immensely complex and multi-layered. In the coming weeks I plan to unpack other aspects to help equip us parents to love with truth and grace in a world that seems to say parental love must only include full endorsement and must exclude opposing truth.
Lord, this task can feel impossible at times. Please help us to balance grace and truth. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
