Children today are the most connected, socially aware, advertised-to and sexualised generation that ever walked planet earth.
Do any of the following real-life scenarios sound familiar to you?
- ‘My six-year-old son keeps touching his genitals.’
- ‘My ten-year-old daughter was shown an emoji of oral sex in school.’
- ‘Boys in the school bus showed my nine-year-old son pornographic videos. He came home crying.’
- ‘My little girl came home from school terrified. Her teacher had told her that she can be a boy or a girl. She wants me to take her to the doctor to find out if she is a girl. She is six years old.’
- ‘My 13-year-old daughter showed me a text from a girlfriend where she asked my daughter if she had ever been kissed and invited her to try it with her.’
- ‘My six-year-old daughter was told by her 13-year-old cousin that her parents had sex. I don’t think either of them have any idea what sex is!’
- ‘My 15-year-old daughter has decided that she is transgender and wants to be a boy.’
Children today are the most connected, socially aware, advertised-to and sexualised generation that ever walked planet earth. Many of the parents I speak to are struggling to know how best to communicate with their children and keep up with the challenges they are facing, particularly in the areas of sexuality and the cyberworld. You may be one of these. But the conversation has to happen. Avoiding it will make your children seek information elsewhere. Ignorance is not an option. This is why I have written Talking Sex by the Book.
The book combines secular research with biblical guidelines to answer all these questions, and gives advice for different age levels from toddlers to teens and beyond on topics such as body development and image, sex and relationships, pornography and gender. There are also activities to help parents to work through their own hesitations and concerns.
It’s Your Job
Having a new baby in your life is joyous and exciting. They’re your perfect little bundle of joy. Then, all too soon, we have toddlers and preschoolers with their endless curiosity and boundless energy. They have questions about their body and wonder where they came from and why daddy or mummy, brother or sister look different to them.
We realise that our children are sexual beings. In all their created goodness as boy or girl, their bodies are designed for sexual relations and their minds wired to appreciate the one-flesh, naked-and-no-shame relationship of sexual intimacy (Genesis 2:21–25).
Childhood curiosity about their own body, and other people’s bodies, and sexuality in general, is good and natural. It is definitely not something to be discouraged or prohibited. Rather, it is an opportunity for parents to commence their journey as the primary sex educators of their children.
Childhood curiosity about their own body, and other people’s bodies, and sexuality in general, is good and natural.
Today’s children are internet-savvy, technologically literate children of the cyber-generation. As teens and preteens, their communications, relationships, identity and sexuality all seem to be generated and determined by their smartphones. And, while technology buffers and brokers their relationships, it also feeds their loneliness and the toxic comparison that hollows meaning from their lives.
If they haven’t already, your children will soon discover YouTube, Netflix, television, music videos and a plethora of social media apps. Some may even stumble across pornography. It is time for you to start the conversation.
It’s Good News
As your child grows, the methods and language you use to communicate with them will change, but the message of God’s good plan and purpose for their lives, including their body, identity and sexuality, will remain the same.
God created humanity male and female. It’s good for us to know ourselves as either a man or a woman, a boy or a girl. As either a boy or a girl, it’s good for us to ‘love’ other people—to care about them, want to be with them, and want them to be happy. Most of the time, and with the vast majority of people, this ‘love’ is not sexual. Sexual love, and the romantic and erotic feelings and actions associated with sexual love, is good—in fact, very good. But precisely because it’s so good, it is both powerful and fragile. That’s why God created a particular relational context for sexual love—the marriage of one man to one woman, for life.
Nowadays, this idea that there is a healthy pattern to our sexuality is not popular. Sin—our rejection of God—fractures God’s pattern for sexuality in various ways. And our children are in danger of being drawn into a secular world view without realising it.
This book will support you as you help your children see that there are two ways to think about everything: the world’s way and God’s way. You can give them a glorious biblical vision of what God intends for sex, gender, intimacy and marriage.
There are two ways to think about everything: the world’s way and God’s way.
The Bible consistently presents heterosexual monogamous marriage as the place where sexual intimacy is expressed in a way that is relevant to any cultural background, and every age and stage of life. It’s good for everyone because it’s a pattern from creation (Genesis 1:26–28; 2:18–25), as Jesus himself recognised and affirmed (Matthew 19:4–6; Mark 10:6–9).
The created ‘law’ of marriage is not the major reason we believe in heterosexual monogamous marriage. We believe it’s good because of its connection to the gospel. God uses heterosexual monogamous marriage as an image of the relationship between Jesus Christ and his people, the church—his bride, for whom he, the heavenly bridegroom, shed his blood (Matthew 9:15; 2 Corinthians 11:2–3; Ephesians 5:21–33; Revelation 19:7; 21:2. For the Old Testament background, see Psalm 45; Jeremiah 31:32; Ezekiel 16; Hosea 1–3). We trust Jesus with our sexuality first of all because he died and rose to bring us back to God. Or to put it another way, ‘we love because he first loved us’ (1 John 4:19).
This is the context for our parenting.
Talking Sex by the Book by Patricia Weerakoon was shortlisted for the 2021 Australian Christian Book of the Year Award and is available from Youthworks Media.
