“Shhhh! Don’t talk about it!”
Plenty of loud voices are shouting explicit lies at our kids.
Where are the voices telling the explicit truth?
A few months ago I met a young teen mom who became pregnant during her first year in college, was kicked out of her house, and was forced to have the baby on her own.
She was one of the pastor’s daughters.
Everyone in the church knew. Huge ordeal!
Pregnant and with no place to stay, she went to live at a friend of a friend’s house. This guy was an alcoholic and let her sleep on the sofa. Needless to say, it was a scary eight months.
After the baby was born, she eventually restored the relationship with her parents and moved back home. She began attending church again, this time with a little baby in her arms.
I met her when her daughter was a toddler. She approached me after my parent workshop and shared her story, giving me just a peek at the day-to-day struggles of a single twenty-year-old mom. As she was reflecting back and telling me about her mistakes, I asked her, “What will you do differently as a parent to help your own kids not make the same mistakes?”
Without hesitation she responded, “I will actually talk about sex! And not just once—all the time!”
She glanced over her shoulder, took a step closer, and spoke quietly: “My parents never talked about it. My dad wouldn’t talk about it. He sent my mom into my room once to have ‘the talk.’ It wasn’t enough.
“I had questions, struggles, and desires, and it was painfully obvious that they didn’t want to talk about it. So I didn’t ask them. I found out on my own.” She held her baby up as she said that last sentence.
I wish I could tell you this girl’s story was an isolated incident. But . . . I hear this perspective all the time.
Three weeks ago I met a college kid with a two-year-old son. He was twenty-one years old, working full time, going to school full time . . . and a single dad.
After hearing him share his heart, I asked him the same question: “What would you do to equip your son for these kinds of life decisions?”
He didn’t even blink. “I’m going to talk about sex with my son a lot!”
Déjà vu?
He continued, “My dad talked with me about it once. Youth group talked about it once a year, but they never answered my questions.”
He gave me specifics. “When I went to college, I would go into my girlfriend’s dorm room. I just thought, This is so cool! This is what happens in every movie! I didn’t think through anything. No one had told me specifically, ‘If you get alone with a girl who initiates sex, it will be impossible to stop!’”
He leaned forward in his chair. “I want my kid to know the truth. I’m going to prepare him for that day so he doesn’t have to figure it out on his own.”
In 2013 Anne Marie Miller penned the article “3 Things You Don’t Know About Your Children and Sex.” In her article, this pastor’s daughter confessed about her own porn addiction that began when she was a teenager. She had experienced abuse from someone she trusted and didn’t know if what he was doing was good or bad. Confused and looking for answers, she turned to the Internet for education. This search quickly led to porn. She writes:
I was too afraid to ask.
What started as an innocent pursuit of knowledge quickly escalated into a coping mechanism.
When I looked at pornography, I felt a feeling of love and safety—at least for a brief moment. But those brief moments of relief disappeared and I was left even more ashamed and confused than when I started. Pornography provided me both an emotional and a sexual release.
For five years I carried this secret. I was twenty-one when I finally opened up to a friend only because she opened up to me first about her struggle with sexual sin.1
She had questions but was too afraid to ask.
Are you noticing a pattern here?
Stop Thinking They Aren’t Thinking About It
Last year I was speaking at a camp in rural Wisconsin and I brought up the subject of sex to my middle school audience of about five hundred kids. I shared the truth about sex: “It isn’t naughty; it isn’t bad; it’s an amazing gift God gave us to enjoy in marriage someday.” I even had them turn to some Scripture on the subject.
Two moms approached me after my talk and pointed at me angrily. “Why are you talking about sex with this age group?!” One mom even said, “These kids aren’t even thinking about this yet!”
I tried my best not to drop to the ground in hysterics. Do kids not have TV, Internet, or smartphones in Wisconsin? What did they think guys talked about during PE every day . . . the Packers? (Actually, they might. . . . But they also talk about sex.)
I realize it’s hard for parents to hear about the content coming from the loud voices I exposed in the previous chapter. It’s no fun reading that 83 percent of boys and 57 percent of girls have seen group sex online.2 Even if our younger kids haven’t thought much about sex yet, they most likely have stumbled upon sexual images or overheard other kids talking about it.
The sad fact is, I’ve seen examples of these overprotective moms who assert their kids’ purity, avoid the conversation, and, too many times to count, their kids end up completely rebelling, getting pregnant, becoming addicted to porn . . . the ending to that story is rarely “happily ever after.” Interestingly enough, most of the research on porn reveals that it is actually more prevalent in rural areas, where most moms think their kids aren’t affected by it. A cruel irony.
Stop thinking they aren’t thinking about it. Chances are, they’ve thought about it a few times—or a few times per day—and they have questions.
I had a similar incident in my hometown. I shared the truth about sex at a large conference with about a thousand teens—youth groups from about seventy churches. I opened up Proverbs 5, an amazing passage showing God’s design for sex and how enjoyable it can be. The passage uses the word breasts.
After sharing the verse, I watched a youth leader gather up his entire youth group and walk out.
Really?
Did they want me to edit the Bible?
I befriended the youth pastor years later in my seminary class and asked him, “So why did you walk out when I read that passage?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. My other leaders just looked at me like I should do something, so we left. It just didn’t seem right talking about sex so openly.”
Let’s face it. It’s one of those topics that we don’t talk about very often. It just feels . . . naughty.
This guy isn’t alone. Many people have been raised with a warped sense of puritanical values and mistake silence for purity. “We don’t talk about these things in our house.”
Really? Too bad. The Bible does . . . explicitly. Try reading the book of Genesis with your ten-year-old. You’ll blush more times than you can count.
We need to speak the truth to our kids, and we shouldn’t wait until they get their driver’s license to engage them in this conversation.
Mark Oestreicher, author of Understanding Your Young Teen, argues that middle school is the perfect time to talk with teens about sex. He went as far to say, “It’s pure irresponsibility as a youth worker to avoid this subject.”3
Mark knows sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students are all over the road developmentally. Some think about sex often while others barely fathom it. But honest communication is necessary as they hear about it all around them and questions arise. “In general, most middle schoolers need conversations about what sex will be more than they need conversations about what it already is.”4
Ignoring it won’t make it go away.
Is this silence a national problem?
It just might be international!
As I was doing some of this research, my dad was on a mission trip to Uganda, teaching and equipping African pastors to preach God’s Word. One of the African ministers traveling with him, Andrew, is a pastor who visits different villages talking about sex and the AIDS pandemic, educating young people with the truth. Sadly, in African cultures, they rarely talk about sex. (Wow, Uganda is just like Wisconsin!) Andrew has built trust with several of the schools and has been teaching “True Love Waits” rallies, presenting the truth and then interacting with kids afterward, answering the many questions they have.
My dad sent me the following email from his phone while in Uganda:
Had another good night’s sleep. We are at a Catholic retreat center and it is pretty primitive, but the team is all so positive. We don’t have showers or hot water. Learning to wash my hair at a faucet. Cold shaves.
Our team that taught the “True Love Waits” to 200 middle school kids was pretty moving yesterday. After Andrew made the AIDS presentation, they handed out cards for questions. Everyone wrote questions. Schools are in English. The questions were heart-wrenching. Things like, “I’ve been raped. How do I know if I have AIDS?” Or “I have AIDS. Should I quit having sex with my boyfriend?” This from 12- and 13-year-olds!
The headmaster of the school invited them back today to talk to another 200 kids. The team is very excited to present this material that Andrew has written. He was on a Ministry of Education committee when he wrote this, and now he can present this in public schools.
The African AIDS epidemic is pretty scary. I’ve spoken to thousands of kids in Uganda for the last couple years and have seen it with my own eyes. One of the church events I spoke at provided free AIDS tests. It was the first time I spoke where my talk was followed up with an announcement to remember to pick up your HIV test results.
Those of us in the U.S. would like to think that we have an entire ocean separating us from this problem, but sadly, this isn’t just an African problem. Remember, it was only a few years ago that Americans woke up to the headline, “One in Four Teen Girls Has an STD.”5
Perhaps American parents need to have more conversations about sex.
The Void of Truth
Silence only breeds ignorance. U.S. News recently wrote about a study revealing that 24 percent of teenage girls who took the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine mistakenly thought their risk of getting other STDs was lowered.6 Sound crazy? I constantly encountered this kind of reasoning in my work with middle school students on campuses.
“I’ll just wear two condoms.”
“I always just shower really good after sex.”
The fact is, parents aren’t talking about sex frequently enough with their kids. One sex talk isn’t enough. This needs to be an ongoing conversation!
The journal Pediatrics published a study entitled “Beyond the ‘Big Talk,’” encouraging parents to consider having repeated discussions with their children about many aspects of sex instead of just one “big talk.” The conclusion of the study was simple: “The more parents talked with their children, the closer their relationships.” In fact, the relationship between parent and child really benefitted “when the discussions moved beyond ‘safe’ or impersonal subjects such as puberty, reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases to more private topics such as masturbation and how sex feels.”
Perhaps “explicit” isn’t so bad when it’s true.
The above report “cited earlier studies that showed children who were communicated with were more likely to delay intercourse and, if they chose to have sex, to use contraception and have fewer partners.”7 I don’t know about you, but to me, these conversations sound worth the effort.
I talk about sex to young people frequently, openly, honestly, and explicitly, but I’m never graphic for the sake of being graphic. TV and movies feature sexual content frequently, but they often use sex as a lure for viewers. They get graphic because people want to see graphic. Most of us are familiar with the term “sex sells.”
But often, TV doesn’t tell the whole story. That’s where parents can make a difference. If our kids are exposed to these messages, we can finish the story.
Last year I spoke to a group of parents about how to respond to our teenagers if we discover they have been watching or listening to raunchy entertainment media. At the time, Nicki Minaj had a song in the top 100 titled “High School.” The music video was readily clickable in the top ten of iTunes and Spotify on most teenagers’ phones, and the song was getting airplay everywhere. (I actually heard it on the radio when I was in Kampala, Uganda.) To parents’ surprise, I had just heard a teenager playing the song in youth group, so I used it as an example of how to respond to our teenagers.
In this song, Nicki talks about sex explicitly, as she does in many songs. In one part of the song she mentions not having sex (using the f-word) with “beginners” but instead letting them touch her genitals. (Feel free to Google “Nicki Minaj ‘High School’ lyrics” if you’d like to see exactly how she words it.) Nicki describes explicit sexual acts often in her songs. In 2014 she did it again with her chart-topping hits “Anaconda” and “Bang Bang.”
Parents are, of course, horrified when they hear these raunchy lyrics. When they heard that one of these songs was played by one of their own kids, they became distressed.
At this point in my parent workshop, I shared some Scripture with them. As I had with the Mennonites in Lancaster County, I shared the story in Acts 17, where the apostle Paul wanted to reach out to the people of Athens. In this passage we see him walk around the city and look at their idols. When he saw their idols, he “was distressed to see that the city was full of idols” (Acts 17:16 NIV). I encouraged these parents: “It’s okay to feel distressed when we take a peek at the culture our kids are living in.” “It’s okay to feel distressed when you hear Nicki’s lyrics.” But then I asked the parents an important question: “When we feel distressed, how should we respond?”
Turning back to the Scripture, we see Paul initiate discussion with the people about what he saw. In fact, he uses what he noticed about the idols as a springboard to talk about the Gospel. He basically says, “You guys are really religious. You worship a lot of gods. In fact, you even worship an idol you label as ‘an unknown god.’ Funny . . . I know who that is. Let me tell you about Him!” (see vv. 22–23). Then Paul introduced them to the real God. He even quoted some of their pagan poets’ “lyrics” in his description of God.
Imagine if parents were so shrewd. Instead of overreacting when we hear our kids listening to foul lyrics like this, what if we addressed those lyrics with some questions that made our kids think?
“So why is it that Nicki is saying she lets guys touch her like this in this song?”
“Is it okay for a guy to touch his girlfriend like this? Why or why not?”
“What does the Bible say about this?”
Yes, we might need to set some realistic boundaries so our thirteen-year-olds learn that lyrics like that are unhealthy and don’t belong on their phones. But we also shouldn’t be afraid to talk candidly about the subject, sharing the truth on the matter. We won’t even get this opportunity if we overreact.
But if we turn our overreaction into interaction, then we can share the explicit truth. The Bible isn’t afraid to talk about sex in lurid detail. We shouldn’t be afraid to either.
So why is it that the church always squirms when we talk about sex? We’re so afraid of being “inappropriate” that we avoid talking about the elephant in the room. Meanwhile, Hollywood isn’t holding anything back while slinging lies.
Explicit Bible Passages
Perhaps we should start talking about sex the way God designed it . . . as something good!
Sex isn’t naughty, it’s not inappropriate, and it’s not shameful. Sex is an amazing gift that God gives to a man and woman in marriage.
The Bible opens with the story of a naked man in a garden who wants a partner. God sees this and doesn’t want Adam to be alone. So what does God do?
Poof. A naked woman!
Then what does God tell Adam? “Go forth and multiply!” How’s that for a sexual green light?
God is so awesome!
Why isn’t the Bible scared to talk about the subject of sex? The Bible isn’t afraid to talk about sex because it’s revealed as a gift for us to enjoy in marriage. The Bible tells us the unedited truth throughout its pages. Take Proverbs 5:18–19, for example:
Let your wife be a fountain of blessing for you.
Rejoice in the wife of your youth.
She is a loving deer, a graceful doe.
Let her breasts satisfy you always.
May you always be captivated by her love.
I love using this passage to talk with young people about sex for several reasons. First, it’s always good to drive students to Scripture, and for some reason, young people always like passages like this one.
Second, this passage is a voice not often heard in the world today—mainly because it’s pro-marriage. It talks about marriage not only in a positive light, but also about the passion and intoxication that this kind of relationship brings.
Very romantic.
Third, it doesn’t hold back on the specifics; it brings up the fact that a man can enjoy his wife’s breasts (and it’s not naughty to do so). How often do you hear this in the church? Not often (because people might walk out). But we hear these kinds of details everywhere else in our sexualized world.
Finally, I like using this passage because here the Bible is realistic about the consequences of a husband engaging in sexual activity with other women. The rest of this Proverb goes into more detail about the results of this kind of folly.
This is an amazing passage to go through with young people. It paints a pretty graphic picture of how wonderful it is for a man to enjoy his wife sexually. The passage isn’t even afraid to talk about her breasts!
Yes, I realize that passages like this can be a little embarrassing to talk about with our kids. When I read a passage like this, my youngest daughter always interrupts me and says, “Dad, ewwww!”
Let’s face it. Sex is an intimate act between a man and woman, so it’s okay to feel a little bit awkward when we talk about it. But don’t let awkwardness silence you. The Bible isn’t silent, so we shouldn’t be either. We should discuss it maturely and sensitively.
Sadly, many parents are afraid that having conversations about sex will give their kids ideas and get them thinking about it. These parents are scared of saying too much.
Too Much or Too Little?
Think about this for a minute. Are you really afraid of telling your kids too much? Do you really think our kids live in a shoebox? Do you think they’ve never heard the word breasts before?
When it comes to talking about sex with our kids, we can err on the side of giving them too much information, or too little information. Which side would you prefer to err on?
I’ve met a lot of parents who, in fear, would rather err on the side of telling them too little. I’d love to ask these folks a question. What happens if you actually tell your kids a little more unedited truth than they were already exposed to? Is it dangerous to tell them that sex is an amazing gift from God that they can enjoy when they are married?
Do you think if you show a teen or tween this Proverbs Scripture he or she is going to start downloading porn? Do you think that if you use the word breasts they are suddenly going to start thinking about breasts all day?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we should throw discernment and wisdom out the window. We don’t want to introduce our kids to temptations they’ve never thought about. That’s why it’s good to become familiar with media messages our kids are actually listening to. Then if we hear lyrics about oral sex, we can address oral sex, knowing we aren’t introducing something new.
And let me just emphasize something: I’ve never met a parent who tried to tell the truth to their kids about sex and ended up introducing their kids to a temptation instead. It just doesn’t happen today. The majority of parents think There’s no way my kid knows about oral sex, when in actuality, their kids have heard other kids talking about it at school, they’ve heard songs about it, they’ve seen it inferred in a movie. . . . Parents rarely introduce their kids to temptation while trying to tell them the truth.
So why are many of us so afraid to share too much that we settle for sharing too little?
What if we do share too little? What if our kids would really like to know about sex but are too scared to ask? What if they have questions that aren’t being answered because we’re tiptoeing around the issue? They probably won’t raise their hand in youth group or walk into your room before bedtime and say, “Mom, I’m masturbating every night. I can’t stop. It started with the JCPenney catalog and now it’s Internet porn. Help!”
We need to start talking openly and honestly about sex. I’m not trying to give license to flippant use of coarse slang. Far from it! Personally, when I’m talking about sex in a youth group setting or with my own kids, I like to use the word that is the least offensive or “creepy.” This can change from crowd to crowd. Some people will tell you to always use the scientific words. Just make sure you know your audience. Some kids will cringe if you use words like intercourse or coitus.
But definitely don’t hesitate to share Scripture like Proverbs 5. Believe it or not, you’re going to encounter people who say that it’s simply inappropriate to talk about the subject of women’s breasts at all. (I hope they never open up their Bible to Song of Songs.) This sort of logic is just bad discernment with no biblical backing. If this were true, then why does the Bible talk about sex in detail time and time again?
The Bible isn’t afraid to talk about body parts and sexuality in lurid detail. If you think the Proverbs passage is explicit, then read Genesis 38:8–10 or Ezekiel 23:19–21. You may need to sit down first, though.
Not Ashamed
The fact is plain and simple. The Bible isn’t ashamed to talk about good sex the way it was intended, and it’s not afraid to denounce sexual immorality just the same (or in the case of the Ezekiel passage above, even use explicit sexual immorality as an analogy to awaken God’s people to the kind of adultery they were committing against him). This Proverbs passage talks about how husbands should enjoy their wives’ breasts. The key is, these body parts are not something bad. Sex is not naughty. God created this whole process. It’s not bad or dirty or shameful.
So often, Christian adults are afraid to talk about “the naughty thing.” Satan loves this! The church has unintentionally propagated this lie for years. Our kids have learned that sex is naughty and we don’t talk about it!
The result?
Our kids sneak around to find answers elsewhere . . . from the people who are talking about it: their friends at school, and in movies, songs, and TV shows . . .
Don’t be afraid to tell your kids the truth. Sex is amazing, a gift from God. It’s something they’ll eventually get to experience when they find the right person and commit to them in marriage.
This isn’t naughty . . . it’s just good teaching.
Talking with our kids about this holistic biblical picture of sex isn’t usually accomplished in one conversation. In fact, most experts agree we need to stop thinking of these conversations as “the sex talk.” Today’s kids don’t need one talk. They need continual conversations.
Let’s look at how we can create a comfortable climate for these continual conversations in our homes.