Full Transcript
We live in a culture that’s rapidly changing and a lot of parents are wondering, how do I explain unbiblical sexual choices other people are making to my young children? And the first thing I would say is sometimes we don’t need to explain it. I don’t know if you’ve had the experience of watching a movie now as an adult that you watched as a child and you’re like, wow, all that went over my head when I was a kid. I didn’t get all that sexual innuendo. Like none of it made sense to me. And we as adults can be very sensitive to something like seeing two men walk down a sidewalk holding hands, but it may go right over your children’s head. And so I think sometimes, particularly with young kids, we try to explain more than even what they notice or what they’re able to understand.
The second thing I would encourage you to do is consistently make a distinction between the way your family does things and the way other families or other people do things. And this is not just true when it comes to sexual choices. This can be true in like where you go on vacation or this can be true on, making sure that you eat healthy or there’s all kinds of distinctions when you say, well, not everybody does this, or not everybody believes this, but this is what we do in our family. Now, when you do that, what you’re doing is you’re, you’re teaching your kids and drawing some distinction and identity. You know, identity really drives behavior. And one of the things that shapes your children is the fact that they belong to you. They belong to your family. And your family has a certain culture, it has certain values, and so you make different decisions than other people might make. Now, as your kids get older, you’re able to transfer that to the fact that we belong to God’s family. And so we have a different identity than people who do not belong to God’s family. And we make different choices. We see the world differently. And so that’s a really good way of making distinctions between right and wrong behavior without setting up your kids for a framework of saying things that might be judgmental and inappropriate, but understanding that there is a distinction of being God’s child. We see the world differently, we make different choices, and we also love differently.
