• The Delusion by Laura Gallier
• How and When to Tell Your Kids about Sex: A Lifelong Approach to Shaping Your Child’s Sexual Character by Stan and Brenna Jones  
• Before I Was Born (God’s Design for Sex) by Carolyn Nystrom  
• The Busy Homeschool Mom’s Guide to Romance by Heidi St. John
• Heidi St. John Store
• Come out and join me at the Answers for Women conference – Sacred: Embracing God’s Design for Sexuality

Scripture Mentioned

• Romans 2:1-16

More like this from The Busy Mom

• Talking to Your Kids About Sex
  • God designed sex as a really good thing, and the world has perverted it.  It’s really important that we talk to our kids about God’s design for sex, so they learn from us rather than the world.  Someone will teach them!  In this podcast, I’m talking through several practical tips for how to talk to your kids about sex. I promise, you can survive it.
• Sex, Lies, and Motherhood
  • A child’s first lessons about their bodies—everything from their appearance to what God says about human sexuality—come from their parents.  The messages we give them early in life have a deep, long-lasting impact on how they will see themselves as adults.  God has spoken life over each one of us when He created us, male and female, in His image. It’s powerful when we speak this as truth into the lives of our children.So where do we start? How do we pass on a godly perspective of sexuality and beauty to our kids? As in every other area of life, we start at the starting place: the Bible. We dare not trust human wisdom where these tender topics are concerned.  Listen in to this podcast and you’ll find encouragement for parents who are shepherding children in today’s changing culture.

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TRANSCRIBED PODCAST BELOW

Good morning everybody. This is Heidi St. John, welcome to the podcast.

I’m glad you are here today. Today is Mailbox Monday, and it’s the 21st of January – episode 717.

I’m going to tackle a topic today that I get asked about a lot and that is this:

How do we talk to our kids about sex ?

How do we talk to them about it? When do we talk to them about it? If you’re wondering how you should handle this topic, and I know a lot of you are – stick around, I think you’re going to be encouraged.

We just came back from a wonderful weekend at the conference in Abilene, Texas. Thank you to everybody who came out. It always encourages us when we see a generation of women in particular, stand up and say – we want to embrace what God says is important. We want to embrace God’s Word, God’s ways.

It’s amazing to me just what’s happening in the culture right now. I just want to encourage you, the way that we have been trying to encourage women around the country, to say: God’s commandments have been given to us for our protection. What’s happening in the culture right now. It is an identity crisis. We are having an identity crisis and the enemy is always after our identity – and he is certainly after this generation of children.

We want to start talking about sex early. We want to talk about it often. We want to talk about it in the context of God’s Word and of His ways. We want to talk about it as a good thing. And this is a difficult thing.

So if that’s you today,  and I’m going to address a question specifically from a sweet listener named Tiffany. Tiffany is a mom to three kids and her youngest is six months old. Her oldest is seven. She’s got a seven year old who’s starting to ask her questions. I’m impressed, Tiffany. If your 7 year old is just now starting to wonder how are babies made, how did that happen, and she’s just now starting to ask you – this is a great time for you to engage in that conversation.

A couple of things before I get started. If you are not joining us at MomStrong International we would like to to join us! We are very concerned. I’m not going to camp on this topic for very long but we are very concerned that it’s not going to be very long before the platform that we have over at Facebook, and other places on social media, will no longer be available to us. We are watching a tremendous amount of censorship continue to happen over there. The tide is turning.

So, I want to just encourage you – if you want to stay up with what I’m doing – Facebook is probably not the place to do it. We really want you to come over to the forums that MomStrongInternational.com.

It’s also a fantastic time for you to come and join the Bible Study there. It’s two dollars a week and a great way for you to support what we’re doing. It also encourages us as we continue to write every week about the very real things that are happening the culture. The reason why we started the whole thing in the first place, was to address in real-time what’s happening in the culture, and the culture is changing so quickly, in many ways.

We find ourselves going – man, this is a lot harder than we thought it was going to be – but we can stay up with it if we follow the Word of God and we’re continuing to talk about what’s happening.

There’s so much happening in the world today, which is why I had my friend Laura Gallagher on the show with me last Friday. She was talking about her book The Delusion and her fight to really encourage parents to teach their children that there is a spiritual war that’s happening – that the attack against this generation is spiritual in nature.

The same thing is happening with the transgender movement. This progressive social push to make parents swallow this bitter pill that we know is a lie from the enemy. Parents, I just want to encourage you talk to your children about what is happening.

I’m going to be in Coos Bay, Oregon coming up in just a couple of days. If you’re anywhere in the vicinity of Coos Bay, Oregon – come out! I’m telling you, it’s a weekend that will change your life. It’s a one day event. I’ll be there this coming Saturday with my people and we’re going to just encourage you. We’re going to talk about what’s going on the culture and we’re going to turn your eyes toward heaven, toward Jesus, who is the author and the finisher of our faith.

Also I’ve been talking about this. I am going to be all over the country this year in 2019, but something I’m really particularly excited about is coming to the Answers for Women Conference, Sacred: Embracing God’s Design for Sexuality. That’s April 5th and 6th in Williamstown, Kentucky. That’s at the Creation Museum at The Answer Center, which is their brand new center for conferences.

I’m telling you what, if the Lord has been pricking your heart over these issues – you are going to walk away with confidence and encouragement. We’re going to teach you how to stand on the foundation that God has given us in His Word, and help others to do the same. You’re going to get information that’s going to be invaluable in your effort to continue to speak the truth in love to a generation of young people who are very broken and very concerned about what’s happening around them. We’re going to give you compassionate answers for a fallen world. Come out and join me at the Answers for Women conference, Sacred, on April 5th and 6th in Williamstown Kentucky. This is a great opportunity for you, women, to bring a friend and join us there. I’m telling you what – it’s going to be a weekend that will change your life and encourage and empower you.

All right. Let’s get right to Tiffany’s question. Sweet Tiffany, first of all – thank you for writing to me. I love to get your letters. If you’re listening and you’ve been wondering about sending a question to us here at the podcast we love to hear from you. E-mail us anytime at podcast@thebusymom.com and we will try very hard to get your question on the air. I decided only to answer this one question today because it is such a multifaceted question. I hope that you leave with just a sense of bold encouragement that you can teach your children about sex. Not only can you, but you need to.

So here’s what Tiffany said:

Dear Heidi, I love being a mom. I’m a mom to three kids, ages 6 months to 7 years old, and so far parenting has been challenging but nothing that has made me step outside my comfort zone too far. Recently, my 7 year old child was exposed to talks about sex and human sexuality in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. And now she’s asking questions and I didn’t want to interrupt her childhood by answering these questions. I didn’t want to traumatize her or talk about sex, so we basically avoided it. And now I feel like it’s at my doorstep and I don’t know what to do. Can you help?

All right. Tiffany, here’s the thing. Yes I can help you, but I want you to know that the help I’m going to give to you today comes from God’s Word. It comes from the Word of God. There are lots of ways, and obviously nowhere in the Bible does it say – here’s how you talk to your kids about sex. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that. This is not a moral issue. I don’t want you guys to freak out. This isn’t a moral issue.

The timing of telling our kids about sex, about intercourse – is a strategic decision. It’s not a moral one. What we want to be doing is saying – Lord, help us to be in touch with our children so that we can be listening to them and listening to their heart. I’m going to be quoting from a couple of books today, I’ll just list them for you right off the front.

One of my favorite books on this topic is by Stan and Brenna Jones. They are probably one of the foremost speakers on this topic and this one’s called How and When to Tell Your Kids about Sex: A Lifelong Approach to Shaping Your Child’s Sexual Character. And I love that the heart for this book. I love that they’ve written in the first place. This book is really for parents. It’s going to give you an overview of how to talk to your kids.

Then, there’s a series of books that you can go through with your children. The first one that I’m going to mention is called Before I Was Born (God’s Design for Sex).This one is really written for children ages 5 to 8. Carolyn Nystrom is the author of that book. It’s illustrated, although not inappropriately. It’s a great book for you just to sit down and explain, in age-appropriate language, the basic nature of sexual intercourse between a husband and a wife. To talk about conception, fetal development, childbirth, breastfeeding, all these things. These are things that sometimes parents have a hard time talking about with their kids – because why in the world would you as a parent explain sexual intercourse to young children before they get near puberty? I’ve heard parents say – well that’s pushing it on your kids. It’s forced them to grow up too fast. It could traumatize them . Maybe they don’t actually need to know. So, we’re kind of on a need-to-know basis.

In our family, over these 27 years of raising seven children, each one of my kids has approached this differently. After about three times around the bend – this is not my favorite conversation. I didn’t really look forward to it with my kids. I started listening for, and watching, for them to exhibit signs that they were ready.

A sign that they’re ready might be that they’re just asking questions.  Remember I told you a minute ago – there’s not a divine revelation about this in the Word of God. So really, this is you watching for your child and answering their questions as it comes up, and not being afraid to do it. I think one of the ways that we do that is we educate ourselves. I want to just encourage you, I’ll link back to it in the show notes, to get How and When to Tell Your Kids about Sex by Stan and Brenna Jones.

This is one of my favorite books on this topic. I think it’s very well thought-through and also very direct – which is something we have tried to be with our children. Stan writes in this book that: whether children be traumatized by hearing about sexual intercourse depends entirely on how they’re told. Lurid, sensationalized, or overly graphic descriptions are not healthy for children – especially young children – which can lead a child to be preoccupied with sex.

This is increasingly a risk for today’s children because of our media-driven culture. There are teachers that are reporting that it’s a rule, rather than an exception, that 9 and 10-year-old students regularly watch R rated movies at home. Not in my house.

I think this is happening more and more, and the kids who don’t see these movies themselves are regaled on the playground with vivid descriptions of what these children are seeing.

So one of the best reasons for you, mom and dad, to be the first ones to tell your children about the sexual union that happens in marriage that God has designed for marriage – is to prevent them from getting an initial impression about sex that’s either distorted or destructive.

Some of my friends have told their children about sex at very very young ages. They just talk about it you know when they’re when their babies are born and they’re giving them baths or whatever. It’s a very natural conversation, an ongoing conversation, that parents are having with their children.

In our family, we are a little bit more reserved than that. We wait to see that our kids are asking questions, that they’re ready to hear those answers. But, I have to tell you guys – the more the culture spirals into this moral abyss that we are going into, I am encouraging parents now to get on this topic earlier rather than later because we don’t want our kids to get to get a view of sex that’s distorted or destructive.

All right, so this is just another application of one of the messages in the Jones’s book. And they say – you tell them early and you tell them explicitly. So they say the first messages are the most potent. It’s far more powerful to form a child’s view of sexuality from scratch than it is to correct the distortions that your children pick up from the world.

So trying to build a godly view of sexual intercourse and sexuality after children are exposed to the destructive messages and distortions of the world – is kind of like trying to teach your kids good nutrition after having allowed them to be raised for years on junk food. This is a great reason that we are going to urge you to tell your children about sexual intercourse between the ages of 5 and 7 –  between kindergarten and the second-grade years.

Now, ten years ago I said – oh wait till they’re in fourth or fifth grade. And honestly you guys, I can’t sound the alarm enough. You have got to tell them early. You have got to tell them early. I think too, the more accurate you are – not lewd, but accurate, the best.

Alright. So this is principle number six -taken from How and When to Tell Your Kids about Sex. I just picked this out of the middle the book because it’s one of my earmarked pages in my own book. It says:  

Principal Number Six: Accurate and explicit messages are best. Err on the side of providing too much information and being too explicit. By explicit we mean detailed, clear, and direct. We don’t mean indiscreet or lewd.

So you want to avoid using language that’s figurative, too technical, or obscure. Typically, little damage is done by giving too much information if the information is true, sensitively described, and offered in a positive spirit. Children absorb the information they are interested in and can understand and they seem to simply ignore or file away what they cannot grasp or are uninterested in.

What you want to do is strike a balance. If we bore the kids by drowning them with details that they don’t want, then we discourage them from coming to us for information. But asking about sexuality is hard for children. And if we make them feel like they’re pulling teeth to get information from us – then they will get the information when they want it, when it’s where it’s easier to get – which is nine times out of ten from children on the playground, children at church, or unfortunately the Internet. So we want to give our kids simple, direct, and explicit responses to their questions and give them about 20 percent more of the information than they seem to ask for.

I have done this with our children, and it has been remarkably effective. So when my child asks me, especially when she asked me three days in a row, then I’m going to look for a little bit of time to sit down with her. In fact, I just had this conversation with my seven year old. I’m going to look for I’m going to look for an opportunity, I’m going to get out my book. I like to go through and want to make sure I didn’t miss anything – because wouldn’t it be a bummer if I got nervous and I missed something that I really wanted to say. That’s why I love talking to my kids using books. That’s why I love Before I Was Born. I love that series.

I don’t know that I went past, I think book two, because at that point I’m really talking to my teenagers and really enjoying having those conversations with them. I quit as soon as my kids seem uninterested. I’ll talk to my daughter until she goes – okay, that’s enough – you can tell when they’ve had enough because they just kind of fidget, or they won’t look at you anymore, and that’s good.

Stan Jones says that he thinks elementary school kids are interested in sexuality but parents sometimes don’t know it because the kids tend to talk more to their peers and less to adults about the topic – especially if their parents are nervous about these conversations.  The question often comes up  – why is it so hard to talk to our kids about intercourse?

Well, we’re not used to talking about it – which is funny because it’s everywhere in the culture, but we don’t talk about it in a healthy way. It’s jokes, or we talk about what’s wrong in the culture – but we’re really not talking about sex in a healthy way. Also, there’s kind of a natural privacy around our sexual lives that’s difficult to deal with. This is another thing that Stan and Brenna say in their book they say that – when we begin to talk with our kids about sex we have a sense of invasion of that privacy. You know  – the little people in the bedroom next door – now they know what you’re doing! Right?

I remember my kids at one point, one of my older kids, were at breakfast one day – and I think Jay and I had gone to bed early. We’ve actually made a point of really protecting this part of our relationship because I have seen over the years, many times, in marriages and friends of mine and other places where I minister around the country – that this is one of the main areas where the enemy will attack a marriage. It’s by a lack of sexual intimacy between a husband and a wife. And this part of the relationship erodes and pretty soon you’ve got all manner of other problems. So we have tried very hard to protect that in our own marriage. I remember sitting at the breakfast table one day and one of the kids was saying – Hey Mom, I knocked on your bedroom door last night. Jay kind of looked up from his cereal and gave me this like, you know – don’t you love it when they bang on your door like?! for the love! leave us alone. 😉

One of the other kids was like like – Oh you do not want to know what’s going on in there. I think I blew my tea out my nose. It was so funny because then the little one was like – yes I do, yes I want to know.  This is family life, right? It’s family life.

I think parents sometimes feel conflicted about their own sexuality and so they avoid it. They avoid talking about it. You have to push past that fear and that angst with talking to your kids. We want our kids to believe what God says is true – and that is that sex is a wonderfully good thing. So our teaching as parents has got to be one of the first messages our kids ever get about sex. So be explicit, be direct, and make sure that you give them a positive message about sex. I remember the look in several of my kids eyes as we had different conversations with them throughout the years.

One of my kids in particular, who shall go unnamed, just looked me right in the eyes and said – that just sounds awful. Then I said – it’s actually awesome! But, it’s good that you think it’s awful right now because it’s not supposed to be awesome. You’re not married.

We want to teach our kids from the Word of God, positive things. Romans 2:1-16 teaches us that God’s law has been written for our protection and it’s written on the hearts of all people.

We trust, on this basis, that in their hearts – our children will be able to recognize the truth when it’s presented to them. The truth of the Christian view of sex is good. It’s healthy and it’s positive. Sex is a marvelous gift from God, and we want our children to see that good is more powerful than evil.

We want our kids to have a message about human sexuality, about intercourse between a husband and wife, that is positive and good and not frightening or scary. So Carolyn Nystrom’s wonderful book, which is what I was just talking to you about a minute ago Before I Was Born, is book 2 in the God’s Designed for Sex series. It’s a wonderful introduction. If you’re wondering how to talk about this with your kids, it’s a wonderful introduction to the topic of sexual intercourse.

After describing the nature of marriage, she offers the following direct, simple, tactful explanation of intercourse. This is beautiful. She says: friends bring gifts to a wedding. God has a special gift for new husbands and wives too. It’s called sex. God’s rules say that only people who are married to each other should have sex. It is God’s way of making families strong. Because the man and the woman are married, their bodies belong to each other. They enjoy holding each other close.

She’s going to go on, but I’m not going read that out loud – because some of your kids are sitting with you and you want to do this without me talking to into your ear. But, I’m telling you she’s she goes on to describe sexual intercourse in a very direct, very explicit way  – and then she ends by saying this is the way that babies are made. A husband can’t make a baby by himself a wife can’t make a baby by herself. But God made their bodies so they fit together perfectly, and together they can make a baby.

It’s a wonderful way for you to talk to your children about sex and point them back to Creator God. It’s God’s design. It belongs to Him and we give Him glory for it. I wrote a book about marriage several years ago – if you haven’t picked it up yet, I’ll link back to it in the show notes today. The idea was to remind husbands and wives that God’s gift really is just that – marriage should be a respite from the rest of the world. It should be a place where we can enjoy each other emotionally, and physically, and every other way and say – thank you God that you gave us the gift of marriage. Then, talk to your children about it in a way that makes them excited about their own marriage someday, not afraid.

For those of us who grew up in homes that were less than wonderful, or some of us grew up in homes where our parents divorced and we had a very unhealthy negative view of marriage – those unhealthy negative views really do translate into our lives as young adults.

So it’s even more important than ever to build into the heart of your children an understanding of God’s heart in the area of sexual intimacy. It’s the foundation for building a complete system of sexual morality, which our kids need now more than they have ever needed before.

I’m going to link back to these books in the series, in the show and today. I hope you guys have been encouraged. I hope that you take the opportunity to talk to your children. For those of you whose kids are older than this and you haven’t had the conversation – it’s never too late to start.

Talk to your kids about what’s happening the culture. Like I said before, we’re living in incredible times right now where the truth is really being picked apart and thrown at people in a way that I have never seen happen in my lifetime. The only way that I know to combat a bold lie is with bold truth, especially in the area of human sexuality. Talk to your kids about God’s heart for them. I’m telling you what – it’ll be a blessing to your children and also a blessing for you.

If you have a question that you would love to see addressed a Mailbox Monday, don’t be bashful! Shoot me an e-mail at podcast@thebusymom.com.

Also if you have not joined MomStrong International – now is a great time to do that. You can join us and do the Scripture Writing challenge over there. We have three versions of Scripture Writing challenges that are available for purchase at the store (here).

We hope that you will join us as we dig into the Word of God. That is where the answers that we are looking for are found.

All right love you guys, thank you so much for listening. We appreciate hearing back from you. We appreciate your feedback over at iTunes. If you’ve not yet rated this podcast or left a review for the podcast, please do that at iTunes. It’s very simple to do and it really does help us get the message out. Thanks for sharing this podcast on social media. Hope you guys have a fantastic day, and I’ll see you back here on Wednesday for the study: Finding Balance and Breathe – the January study at MomStrongInternational.com.