Talking to Kids About Sex Part I

I married a girl who grew up in the city… with no guns in the house.  Naturally, she was concerned about us having guns in our house, especially when we began to have children.

So, I called my father and asked him about it.

I remembered that I had never really been even tempted to get into the guns without dad – but I didn’t know why.  Sure, I feared the
consequences of getting caught… I knew it would be really bad… but that certainly wasn’t enough.  The guns were stored in a gun cabinet right in the hallway outside my room, and though it was locked, I knew where the key was.

He told me that I had no reason to ever sneak to the guns… I knew perfectly well that all I had to do was ask.  There was never any reason to go without permission, because there was even more freedom in involving my dad.

Plus, I was taught to understand guns as what they are – a tool, not a toy… from a very early age.

Though I saw them as special, meaningful and powerful, I did not see guns as a taboo topic with my father and there was no value or purpose to trying to make them something to sneak on my own.

I want that same attitude for my kids for guns too… that they respect and understand certain things without fearing them.

This touches on one of my basic rules for parenting that I have:

I want my kids to think of me as someone who brings freedoms and new experiences to them, rather than someone they have to wrest truth or freedom from.  I never want to be a barrier to them getting what they need, while being a strong barrier against the things that would damage them.

Man, these are two tough concepts to integrate, am I right?  However, I was sure that I wanted to apply it to this topic…

I want that for other topics as well… Movies, food, tools, money, and Sex.

I heard about a man whose talk with dad about sex was “be careful where you park your car.”  That was it.

Another one was asked “Has your gun ever gone off before?”

Apparently we need some help talking about sex.  Our kids need to know the truth and we want to be that voice.

So, we have tried to create, from very early, the impression that we are comfortable talking about sex.

Further, a few times, we decided to intentionally engage in conversations about sex.   We were seeking to be responsible to initiate the conversation.

Very few parents seem to do this part… initiate… even if they are willing to have some kind of talk.

Unlike the “talks” I hear about… that seem more like a mythical legend given how many people know it is supposed to happen versus how many seemed to have ever experienced anything healthy, we wanted actually to have age-appropriate, normalized, sober and honest freeing conversations with them about these subjects.

Since I have had many people ask about this, I thought that I would report on the process I went through with my oldest son.   I know that each parent has to decided before God what is the best way for them to go about this, but this will be a report on our conversations.

First, I would like to take a stand against the conversations about sex that are essentially child abuse… ridiculous attempts at giving one’s own children a magazine published for men still stuck in adolescence… the whole point of us as men teaching our children about sex is so that we can be the main voice in their lives about the truths of sexuality.

My good friend Matt Lantz referenced that God was the only and most powerful voice for Adam and Eve about good and evil until they ate from the tree of such… then the truth became muddled by other voices.  I desire to be main voice in my children’s lives about this kind of important matter!

As almost all of us know, the pornographic world will be happy to be their main voice, and it certainly will be if we aren’t.  Why on Earth would we introduce that world to be their voice?!?  It is vital that we keep all those voices as far from our children as we can… that is why we cannot have them in our houses… and any access points (televisions, computers, the mail, etc) need to be filtered.

This isn’t about fear – it is about making sure my children learn God’s perspectives on sex and knowing it well before the world’s excrement gets a shot at them…

The men I know who struggle least with issues of pornography in its various forms are those who were given the most time to mature before they had to face its addictive power.

Now, on to the format that I decided to use with my first born son, Mark.

First of all, I wanted to find a good Father/Son event that would create ample opportunities to talk alone and to debrief if he wanted to.   Further, I wanted to create at least 2 or 3 distinct chances to talk spread over a few years.

There is a Buffalo River trip that some guys go on each year in Tyler – Mark wanted to go on that one, so it seemed perfect.  So, at some point on the trip for the last 3 years, I have initiated the conversation.  Over the years,

Year One:  God’s purposes for sex
Year Two:  The biology of sex
Year Three:  The broken aspects of sex

Next week I will go into more detail on each of these… Part II here.