Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This is the first episode I think we've ever done where I received a mandate from my wife saying, you must talk about this. People are not doing enough and they're not aware of the pervasiveness of these influences.
Run your home and your dough like a biblical boss. Just yesterday I learned that dear Ozzie, Beau Sajour, God bless him, he was on a, he's a 12 year old friend of ours, he is on a hockey team.
The whole hockey team was doing a sleepover. We're going to be talking about sleepovers later.
And the parents thought, you know, it's the whole team. It's not like it's with one kid and they can squirrel off into a corner and get into mayhem. It's going to be the whole team. I'm sure they're going to stay up late, but surely it's going to be safe. Well, sweet Ozzy called his parents at 1:30 in the morning saying, you need to come pick me up. The whole team is, is scrolling around Netflix trying to find some naked people, trying to find some pornography. That's clearly what they're trying to do. They're not listening to me. I need to get out of here.
God bless him.
I mean, I guess that's a success story, but it also illustrates the fact that this is so common, it is so accepted in our culture. And I don't get the feeling that Christian dads are alert enough and are worried enough about the fact that your kids can get access and be permanently damaged. That that's the thing, they can be permanently damaged by what they see. And before we even get into it, I just know that, I know that we're going to have so many people listening who have bad stories around this. And maybe you've already felt tempted to turn this off because maybe your children have failed already or you have a history of sexual failure and you think, well, we've lost it on that one, et cetera. I just, my concern is always, even if I'm doing premarital counseling with people who have had terrible past, my interest is that we would be thinking of God's standard. What is God's wisdom for people in our day?
And I would just encourage you not to jump out of this conversation if you think, well, we failed.
Wherever you are today, you, you could start today and have a family of purity from this point forward. And that should be your goal. If you're listening, as a 70 year old grandfather, you should be thinking, well, I can protect my grandchildren. We could have these conversations anyways.
It's a big deal. It's a big deal. Mark, before. I mean, that was all introductory.
Where does this topic hit your world? It hits me everywhere right now.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I.
I agree with you. I think it's interesting that we're having this conversation today, which we just kind of talked about for the first time. This is something we need to cover. Let's. Let's talk about it. And it happens to be that my wife is speaking to next week, I think to 10th grade girls and was given zero guidelines and was just told, give them a talk about sexuality.
[00:03:37] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: And so she's like, well, with the fifth graders, I cover the basic mechanics and the birds and the bees, and we get into the biblical design for all this. However, with the 10th graders, like, they are in a very different place. So we were talking about, like, what are people missing?
And I even sat down with my 10th grader and I said, what do you think people don't get in their diet in a average American Christian home. Right. And, you know, that's a.
I wish I could tell you. She just sat me down and she said, well, dad, here are the five biblical principles I think she kind of gave me. I don't know.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: We don't talk about this stuff, but I think that there are things that you kind of mentioned that set my alarm bells off about the experience at the hockey sleepover, which is one.
You know, Ozzy knew enough to know what. What was going down. He wasn't just completely blind to the fact that this stuff was out there and that it would be at some point. I mean, we talk about all of the pitfalls of kind of unhealthy sexuality with our kids from the time they're really little.
And we say, these things will jump out of the bushes and try to grab you. It's not. If we can keep you sheltered enough, then you won't experience this. We just know that's insanity. And so Ozzy was prepared for that. And, you know, even with my daughter, I have. I went to a private Christian school, like she's going to. And I had a very similar reaction when we were like, are people having sex in your class?
She's like, not that I know of. And we go, well, that's how I felt. I. I've learned as an adult, oh, my gosh. I heard that these two people actually had this pregnancy, and we never even knew about it or things like that.
But. But at the time, I was mostly hanging out with a group of people who I think were doing some level of effort to, to abide by a biblical standard with sexuality. I think that the, the trap that most of our listeners might fall into on this stuff is way more on the can we just wall off this area of life so much that they get to some maybe marriage, hopefully finish line without making the big mistakes? And yeah, and that was the Christian culture of the 90s, the true love waits stuff. And I think that gets unfairly knocked off all the time by like deconstructing exvangelical types. However, they do have some points that like when it's all negative, it's kind of like we talk about budgeting. I'm like, if your budget is only there to tell you no, no, no, don't do that, you'll grow to hate it. If your budget is a document that says here is the beautiful things that you have intended to spend your money on, then every time you open it you'll go, heck yeah, we're building towards that. That's how I think we're trying to shift the, the world's sexual ethic. That's like this is about you and taking and enjoying and shift it back into God's design so that our kids aren't just like, well it's a fun thing and you're not allowed to touch it until this time when you get married. Like that's not untrue. And yet there's so much more to it. So that's really where we focus. And I think everything you said, it's technology that's going to try to be one of those places, especially for boys, but not only for boys, it's who even from a very young age, I mean, gosh, our kids go to summer camp in Texas, Steve. And there has been a lot of news about summer camps, specifically in Texas and other places in the south where these wonderful Christian camps from the outside were systematically sexually abusing children for years. And the very tip top of leadership was covering it up. And so that means I sit my third grader down and I go, here are some types of things that could happen to you. And here is our plan. If the friggin leadership was to try and tell you you can't call your parents, here's how you're going to get, get away and get in touch with us. It's crazy, but the alternative is to keep them at home in the basement and never let them out. And that's not a very beautiful vision for life either. So we must be diligent about this the same way as if we lived on the frontier and there were, you know, Comanches prowling around so that if our kids went out and played, they had to worry about getting snatched. We wouldn't just be like, well, I guess we'll just send them out there anyways. No, those people had extreme precautions and they still pressed out towards the west and settled America. So that's how we feel about this. We're going to not be afraid and yet we have to take so much more precautions. Like you said and like your wife. Yes. And I think most people are taking.
Yes.
[00:08:50] Speaker C: I,
[00:08:53] Speaker A: the first little point I want to make to dads is that this battle is real and your children are in the crosshairs. One of the most concerning things to me in the recent months has been the naivete of Christian fathers who just think, that's not something I'm really comfortable kind of dealing with.
I, I'll, I can have a sex talk with my son when he's 19 and maybe when he's going to get married, I, I could talk to him, but it's so weird and uncomfortable to say talk to my 9, 10 year old girl. I never done that before. And that's kind of weird.
And the, what I want to communicate to these dads is that the culture is coming for your children so specifically, so pointedly that if we were to leave them without tools for navigating the world around them, they're goners, that they don't have a hope and God has a plan for them and it's you, you're the plan for protecting them. I, I just heard this recently.
It's so comical that I have to share it.
This is a Christian family in my city, a respected Christian family.
And a boy at age 13 was having a conversation with a friend saying, my family was on a, we were on a, like a trip with relatives and I slept in the same bed as my female cousin overnight.
And guys, I've heard that if you sleep with a girl, she comes up pregnant. So do you think that my cousin's going to be pregnant because we slept in the same camper bed or whatever?
And that's kind of, I guess, cute or something, but it's so disturbing to me that a Christian dad wouldn't be having frank conversations with his son in 2026.
That can't happen. That, that, that can't happen, guys. That, that, that mustn't happen on your watch.
73% of 15 year old teens have watched the pornography.
And as Mark says, you can, you could put your kid in a test tube somewhere so they have no friends.
And their chances of being normal at that point are going to decrease dramatically. We've seen those kids too.
We're homeschoolers. Go to the, go to your local homeschool convention. Just, just check, just check out the folks there.
I want you to understand that the outcomes of kids who are just taken by the culture and they believe the kind of messages that you would get by just turning on your television and just eating whatever is served up there, the outcomes are depression, anxiety, a distorted view of sex and relationships to the point of those being unworkable.
[00:12:24] Speaker C: The.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: The theme of the USA Today story was that boys exposed to pornography are reporting we cannot have normal sexual relationships in adulthood because now These kids are 25, 30 years old and saying, I. I don't even know how to have sex with my wife.
[00:12:44] Speaker C: It doesn't work.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: There, there is, there's some. There's something that's called a medical thing called pornography induced sexual dysfunction so that guys can't have sex with their wives. And they go, I've. I've never had sex with my wife in a way that felt like intimate loving care and the joy of experiencing that because of what happened to me from age 10 to 15 and on. And addictions were set up, et cetera.
Other outcomes, earlier sexual debut that would seem obvious, increased risky and perverted behavior and yes, higher suicide ideation. Whether that gets completed or not. The idea of suicide.
Guys, can you. Are you listening here? The idea of your child wanting to kill themselves will increase dramatically if they're exposed to sexual content too early in their lives.
So it's a huge deal.
Smartphones and social media turbocharged this.
So frequent and addictive use of phones is linked to two to three times higher suicidal thoughts and behaviors. And girls are hit especially hard. As Mark said. If you don't know this, guys, just.
This is just a rule of thumb.
You must know this, that pornography is going to affect boys more than girls.
It's out to find little boys.
And social media, which is the comparison and the performative aspect of social media that's out to get girls.
So there's a lot fewer boys that I. We just came back from Florida.
I saw zero, actually, I saw zero boys pulling out phones with their friends and doing dances in front of a camera. I saw that many times with girls. So that's the social media thing that's targeted at girls. Pornography is targeted at boys. So you should just know which, which camp you're in based on the sex of your child what the threats are going to be to them.
I also have to throw it as a pivot to my next point. That stats show that fatherless homes are far worse. They fare worse long term regarding poverty and all sorts of behavioral issues and a faith dropout. Just every horrible thing that could happen to a child. The stats get much worse in a fatherless family.
And so my next point is, dad, your job is to shepherd your flock. That's on you. We're not hoping that you can get good Christian teachers around your child. That'd be great. That sounds great to me. It's better than the alternative.
My hope isn't that they would find a good youth group and that, and maybe those cool 20 year olds will influence my child. That sounds great too. I'm all for that. Great, let's get your kids around.
Attractive, neat, charismatic 20 year olds. That's good. Also, the number one thing your kids need is you. They need you to engage with them. They need you to start walking through this story that they're living out, which is fraught with threats on every side. The people around them, the circumstances they're in, and definitely the what they're exposed to. Whether it's, whether it's a movie that all the kids are going to. And you go, I don't know anything about that movie. Y' all go ahead and go have a good time. Don't do that, dad.
Don't just offer up your child to whatever the culture is serving up. The culture hates you and your children.
It wants to kill and destroy them.
So don't have a laissez faire attitude about phone access, Internet access, or even again, the movies that they go see. These things really matter. They help create a worldview for your child. The things that are normal on a sitcom right now would have been absolutely scandalous in 1965 to put on in a rated R movie for people to be sleeping around carelessly.
[00:17:21] Speaker C: 40.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: What? No, we can't let our children be exposed to that. It's totally normal now because there is always going to be a race to the bottom culturally with regards to sexual norms and values. So, dad, your job is to be the shepherd first. Peter 5 is a little passage that I love which describes, you have to be the shepherd to the flock that is under your care.
Which means I, I don't have to influence everybody's kids.
I want to do that in bits and pieces. You know, if I see a teen of a brother of mine, I want to give that kid some encouragement. But they're not Primarily my responsibility. The sheep that are under my care has to start with my wife and kids.
They're under my care. So as a shepherd, I have to lead them to green pastures. That is where can they be healthy and get built into. I, I have to make them rest, lie down in safety, and I have to pick up a club in my hand and start knocking predators between the eyes.
Any wolves around my sheep, they have to deal with me.
[00:18:28] Speaker C: Me.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: I'm about to have an uncomfortable conversation with the principal of the Christian school that my children go to because of what I'm hearing happening inside the classroom.
Now, whose job is it to deal with that stuff?
Should I hire a counselor to have many conversations with my kids? No, it's my job.
My job is to know the sheep that are under my care and then do something about it.
So for instance, one of the things that has happened repeatedly is I spend time around my children's friends.
I get a whiff of the values of this child, this child's exposure to phones. You know, when I'm doing carpooling and I've got a 12 year old in the backseat who's on the phone the entire time, speaks to me and grunts.
And I ask my kids, what was little Susie doing back there? She was scrolling. She has Instagram.
Okay, good. Tell me when you see Susie in your life. Oh, we spend two hours a week together.
Susie off the list. I don't want you spending time with Susie. But she's my friend. I'm not telling you to be rude to her. I'm telling you, stop spending optional time with Susie. I'm telling you that as dad, for your protection, maybe, maybe you can't do that when they're 23.
I can do it now at the age of my children. And I. It's my job. That's my point, is that it's my job.
Deuteronomy 6 says that we're supposed to talk about God's ways. I'm putting that in brackets, I'm inserting that phrase, talk about God's ways. When you sit in the house, when you walk, by the way, it's to be an ongoing conversation, says Deuteronomy 6. This is how fathers are to act with their families.
Not one, one big awkward conversation. I think I got through the Birds of the Beast with my, with my 11 year old. I think that checks that box.
That's better than nothing. Dads, a lot of kids have nothing.
But that's not what it's supposed to be like. It's Supposed to be as you're going, when you're walking in the way with your children, there's to be this ongoing conversation about what's happening. And I'll say again, dads, this is your job.
The purity of your children cannot be regained.
God gives them to you pure.
He hands them to you and goes, I want you to create a worldview for this child so that they can know me and walk in my ways.
When that thing is broken, it's not like there's no such thing as redemption. There's no turning back. But the memories can't be erased.
We're supposed to be able to hand. I described handing your child off to their spouse at the altar. That's one of the images in my mind that I want to be one of my goals. But what I'm really doing is handing my child off to the Lord and saying, lord, on my watch, I did everything I could to protect this child. I was trying to be responsible with their heart and their mind.
That's what we have to take on board.
Maybe today's episode is just for you going, you know what? I have kind of thought, I'll hope for the best with my kid. And I just want to start taking responsibility and saying, my child's formation, which includes their sexual worldview, is my job.
I think that would be a huge win for our families. Again, based on the naivete and the passivity that I see from Christian dads, I want to go into practical steps. But, Mark, I've talked a long time.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: You have. And so I'm going to chime in on two things, I think, because this, to me is all you said. If the culture portrayed things in 1965 that are normal on broadcast TV or Netflix today, it would be an outrage. And I think you're being very generous there. I remember as a kid this big hullabaloo about a show called Murphy Brown that was a sitcom in 1992, and they put a single mother on TV.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: And the vice president got on television and said, this is a Making a mockery of fatherhood and glamorizing single motherhood. And today, Steve, if you walk into Mega Church on the corner, they're going to say, one of the greatest things that could happen is single motherhood. We want to support single mothers, and we're not going to talk about that today. What I will say, though, is that that might seem like, well, yeah, we. We're pro family, and we're also pro purity. Those aren't separate at all.
Meaning I when. And this isn't a conversation you have with your five year old, but two things happened to me yesterday. We had this conversation about what would the 10th grade girls want to hear that would actually feel a little different than maybe the eye roller youth group sex talk.
And I also drove a big car full of high school girls to a soccer game. And Steve, it was a lot like what you just mentioned.
There was. I know all these girls pretty well. They're all like, well, Mr. Parrot, some of them are chirpy and want to talk to me.
All of them, if I don't continue to engage them by name, zip back down to their phones and I look over at my daughter who's sitting in the passenger seat of the car and she's the only one not phoning away in moments of quiet. And so there's that and there's this, hey, what do we say to kids about sex that wouldn't just feel like more finger wagging? And I think that the answer when I was talking to my daughter about what do people need to hear? I said, what I don't think we've ever told you is that the choices you make today, you mentioned it just now, they're going with you into your marriage.
And you know, you and I, praise God, we both were able to make it into marriage without making big mistakes. But we didn't make zero mistakes. We would go back and go, huh, I think you've told me and I've told you there's both situations where we go that was unwise. Like I think that if you make big mistakes, you're going to have those big things in your mind or your, if your spouse, those are going to be a part of your sexuality forever. And it's going to, it's so, so much easier as a husband to go, wow, my wife, praise God, came into our marriage without things in her brain from other past mistakes and stuff like that. That's a huge blessing. And the result is there's actually more connection between us because I'm not going. I wonder how I stack up when, when we are together. I don't have that concern.
And to your point about social media, it's the same tactic. So the tactic is how can we get in and break connection? Well, I saw it in the car. Girls that 20 years ago would have just been chit chatting with each other. We're all staring at a phone, not talking to each other. Inside a family, connection is broken by a choice made 20 years earlier.
You know, with a high school boyfriend. So Connection is what's under attack from the enemy. And if you can get a boy to have a secret life built around pornography, if you can get a girl to think that, like, I am out there projecting a false image of who I am so that people will like me, you have now broken off real connections with real people and you've broken future connections that aren't going to happen for 10 years. So that's why this stuff is so important. And that's where I think, you know, when we talk to kids about sex, we're not just saying, like, keep it in your pants until you get married. And if you can get across that finish line, you get an extra high five from Jesus in heaven.
No, like, we want deep, flourishing family connection for you for the rest of your life. And this is really important to it. So that's my diatribe. And now we'll go on to specifics.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: Dude, that was great. I hope our editor clips that makes a YouTube short out of that. That's a great point. Boy, that's so good.
Okay, here's what I want to. Here's what I want to get to their dad's listening that have 1 year olds, 5 year olds, 10 year olds.
And honestly, there's so much failure and passivity.
I always think of Justin Wolfenberg, the great sin of passivity and just going like, I just hope it works out for my family that I think that Mark and I can serve you by just telling you what we've got. Teenagers. And so far, so good.
So I want to share with you the things that we've done that I think are helpful. So this is what any dad can do. Starting right now. The very first thing that came to mind for me, Mark, I thought, I can give dad seven tactics. These won't be the most original creative ideas in the world. Many of them. You're going to go, oh, well, of course, yeah, right. But then you got to do them.
And the first would be pray for your children. Pray specifically for your children's sexual purity. Pray for the holiness of their bodies and pray for their future spouses.
The odds are poor. Mark, we talked about this recently.
The odds are poor that your.
If you have daughters or sons, the odds are poor that the spouse of your child is going to also be delivered up to them with no defects, that is no problems in their sexual exposure.
Well, I'm praying for the. I mean, I've got daughters. I'm praying for these boys wherever they are. And I would love it if somehow they could be in my Life right Now at age 14, 13, I would love to be influencing these boys as soon as possible. And I just pray for their purity.
So pray, pray, do this as a family even.
Let's pray for sexual purity in our home and for the future spouses of our children. That's my first one. Mark, any thoughts on praying?
[00:29:20] Speaker B: No, I, I mean, those are really unique, sweet times when you are looking down into a crib with a little baby in it and I don't know, as a dad, I definitely remember clearly being kind of foggy brained and thinking simultaneously, I want to pray for the spouse of this little baby and all the things the Lord's going to do. And I also want to shake it to make it stop crying. And that all kind of happens at once.
As they grow, that prayer becomes so much more specific because you start to know, oh man, I see this in my daughter. You know, I want, Lord, bring a man that brings the, the quiet, humble daughter and brings some new things out of her. And like, I didn't know when she was 4 months old that she was gonna, this one was gonna be quiet and this one was gonna want to jump into a room and jump on a stage. But now I know that. And so those prayers become more specific and I, I like it. It's like I'm not just praying for them, I'm praying for their future.
And, you know, even coming back to the Shabbat, we do different things, different weeks, but one thing we don't ever skip is we're blessing our daughters.
I just have, I also just have daughters at the moment.
But we're blessing them to be mothers and wives and we pray for, we bless their husbands and that's been normal for them since they were tiny kids is to hear that, oh, my parents are blessing my future husband. So, yeah, I, I tend to be more of an optimist. My wife tends to be more of a pessimist. Maybe it's like her background in medicine where she's like, oh, everybody's just making terrible choices all the time and we're gonna have to disciple some dude. And I'm like, well, I don't know. The data said that none of people our age were gonna make good choices with purity, and we both did. So I don't think it's impossible. But yeah, I think that that's something. Find your ways to not just pray for the tiny baby, but also to start incorporating those prayers as a family. Like you said, from the time they're little until they're, you know, Walking down the aisle and you're going this is what I've been praying for kiddo.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: Right, well I, let's go to the second one. I definitely want to hear your input on this Mark. And that is my number 2 point guys be first to market on the birds and the bees.
So I, I've said that this isn't, we're not just want to have one huge conversation but there also should be one really momentous conversation where you're age appropriate. I don't know where that is for your family. For us it was around 10, 10, 11 I think it was probably 10 for my kids.
And you should have an age appropriate light hearted that is that you're not mopping your brow because this is such a big deal to you. You're trying to play it off as well. This is, yeah, this is a part of life and you know, let's talk about it and being honest with your kids but also serious with them. Yeah, this really matters, this really important.
And you're talking to them about give them a geography map of boys bodies and girls bodies. Talk to them how sex works.
Here's the thing about that. If you don't do this, if you don't have this conversation and you talk about it with your children before they get data elsewhere. Hopefully if you don't do that they will conclude that dad either can't talk about this for some reason or he doesn't want want to talk about this.
So a child will find a source of information about sexuality at some age and wherever they find that source that then becomes the authority for them and they'll go back to that again and again.
So if you're first to market, what you do is open the door and you say our family actually.
[00:33:36] Speaker C: Oh, we have very clear values and
[00:33:39] Speaker A: God tells us what to think, think about this stuff. And you can see you're saying this in so many words. You can see in dad's tone that I'm interested in this.
[00:33:48] Speaker C: For you, this matters.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: I'm not scared of this topic. We can talk about anything. I remember my dad having this talk
[00:33:54] Speaker C: with me and he just said you're
[00:33:56] Speaker A: going to come across all sorts of stuff that I can't even anticipate. And when you do you come talk to your dad. I know about all this stuff and I can help you through it.
And that was a great open door. And I thought okay, well now we're, now we got something going. And I really felt honored.
I don't know how old I was but I felt like I've got some kind of secret information. I've got a secret weapon that when this happens in my life, oh yeah, me and dad, we've got this worked out. And I knew that a lot of my friends didn't know, didn't know about sex, but I knew because of my dad and I felt like, wow, I've got some, I've got some insider information.
So we, my wife also have to throw in that my wife does something called passport to purity with girls when they're around 12 or 13 and talks about what, what having healthy sexuality into marriage looks like.
I've already mentioned that in Deuteronomy 6. These are supposed to be informal comings and goings conversation. Once you've opened that door, I think it's important. I'll just give this a little bit of coaching to tell them what is good as well as what is evil. We mustn't communicate to our children that sex is somehow dirty or evil. What we must say is that, oh, it is so precious. It is so special.
What me and your mother have together is so holy. It's so precious. I want that for you guys too, because it's so good and there's everything that's not that that protected sexual experience in marriage is bad. God doesn't want it for you. And I want, you know, I'm trying to steer you clear that. So anyways, I'll defer you now, Mark.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: No, I think I echo all of that. I think it's interesting because if you think about the culture we grew up in, Southern Baptist, kind of like I said, what gets called purity culture now. And people have different opinions on that.
In Utah, where I live at the moment, it's like, turn that up to 10. And it's almost, it's a joke, it's a meme that you see on the Internet, people interviewing Mormons, that it's like this is the specific definition of sex and you can't do that until you're married.
But here's 50 other things you can do to get the same result.
And it's, it's because again, this, maybe if you come from a Catholic background, you'd go, oh, that kind of resonates with me that there's like rules that I have to follow and as long as I follow those rules, I'll be okay.
I think that pervades all sorts of corners of Christendom. But in the, in the LDS culture, it's such a rules based workspace system that you get to, well, if I just follow the rules then, like, let's find some loopholes. Why not?
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Right?
[00:36:51] Speaker B: And right. There's zero of that. Painting a picture of the good that comes in that. And like, that's why, you know, I definitely got blushing kids when I said this to, to the girls the other night when we were talking about the 10th grade talk. But I was like, it's not just that it's good because I'm not going to lie to you. I mean, I would imagine if I pulled out a rubber band and shot my vein up with heroin right now, it would probably feel good. I bet it would feel good.
And I'm not going to lie to you and say that if you go out and find some guy to mess around with that you couldn't figure out how to have real pleasant physical feelings in the moment.
But what you would be killing is again, the freedom that comes with a just, protected marriage.
You would, you would always have this baggage. And man, it's tough. And I would. The statistics say that of the Jesus loving people that are listening to this, most of them have some level, some of them lots and some of them a little. But some level of that baggage is just like riding around with them. Whether it's just choices you've made with sexuality that maybe had nothing to do with other people or was pornography or whatever, or you're like, no, I didn't know Jesus at all. And I have wreckage from my choices in the past. You know for sure that, like, a, of course you're totally forgiven through Christ for all that. And B, there's real world consequences to that. So we try to talk about both of those things without ever going, now don't do sex because that's dirty and that's bad, because that can mess kids up just as much as telling them, well, I guess go learn about it from. From Netflix.
[00:38:42] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:38:43] Speaker C: Yep.
All right, back to our list. We said pray specifically be first to market.
And I'm going to say number three is to share your own story at the right time.
So maybe that's around age 15.
I think you should be honest about your past sin. If there's been sexual failure, just describe your remorse about it, the negative impact on your marriage, and then. And then also just kind of say, you know what? I just trust that God is redeeming our family story. And I don't want you to make the same mistakes I did. So I want you to know about those and we have a chance for you to move forward in purity in a way that I didn't.
Also praise God for what he protected you from. When you're telling your story to your child and say, you know, what never happened was I wasn't abused as a child, or I wasn't exposed to X, Y and Z, whatever, I think it's important to praise God for the good and for things he protected you from as well. And again, there's an opportunity to loudly celebrate that sex is a gift inside marriage.
So that's number three. Number four thing that you can do is to comment regularly on what happens around you.
Comment on the. On the sexual culture that's coming at your family.
So whether that is drama that happens among the friends, let's say they're getting into high school years, they're going to have kids at their school that are going to be sexually active. Ask them, are kids at your school having sex?
Do you know what's. What's happening? What are, what are some of the kids saying?
We've got kids at our children's Christian school who are telling their friends, I'm bi, I'm a lesbian, et cetera. I don't know what that's based on, but I want my children to be able to feel that kind of talk and know what to do with it mentally, how to categorize that in everybody's extended family, there's going to be some degree of unhealth.
Those things, they come. They just happen in life. These stories come into our world through friends, through people, you know, guys you're spending time with, again, the children's friends, extended family. We have to comment on those.
And there can be eye rolls on this. I just can't state this too often, that the family wanting to hear from you is completely irrelevant.
You might get, oh, dad, we already know what you think about when you hear the word lesbian.
Yeah, that's fine.
I don't need everybody's joyful invitation for
[00:41:55] Speaker A: me to speak because it's my family
[00:41:57] Speaker C: and I am curating the culture of this family. So I'm going to continue to repeat God's wisdom and God's truth about all kinds of things. Anything that comes into my children's worldview sexually, they're going to get my commentary on it. I have to throw in on this comment regularly that we want to cheerlead the good. So I've mentioned this before, that my family really likes the show All Creatures Great and Small.
One of the things we love about this show is that it shows marriage as a refuge, as like a joyful refuge.
And the insinuation or the understanding is that Everybody, it would be good for everybody's life if everybody ended up in a marriage.
I just love that. I just think that's great. So we watch this show together. I might comment on that and say, see how, see how much he loves his wife. Oh, they gave each other a wink and a smile and they're heading upstairs. I bet they're going to go have sex.
[00:43:02] Speaker A: And yes, that's the kind of, that's
[00:43:04] Speaker C: the kind of comment that we would want made in our families where I want my children to think that that's great. That's, that's something a husband and wife would enjoy together. That's great.
So comment regularly. Number five, Watch like a hawk.
And so when I say watch like a hawk, I, I mean watch the, your children's lives. And so a major thing I'm going to put in there is sleepovers. We have as a rule, our, our rule of thumb is no sleepovers for our kids. Now there have been exceptions to this.
My, my daughter has a good friend who's, whose father is a pastor. We spend time with their family. It's a family of five girls.
If she needs to have a sleepover with Ruthie, we're, we're good with that because we know, we kind of know this family as well as we know our own family.
But as a rule, sleepovers are not going to happen because I don't. There's too many unknowns and there is so much molestation and abuse and exposure to sexual content that happens on sleepovers. I'm just not going to open that gate that the enemy could walk through. Now, is every sleepover worst thing in the world? No, no, no, not necessarily.
But as a rule, the, the gains aren't worth the risk. That's our general rule on sleepovers. I, I have to throw that out because, because this is, this falls under watching like a hawk.
I mentioned friends keeping an eye on the friends of your kids.
I know who had phones in my daughter's social circles. When, who had phones, when.
And then I've been able to observe those kids on those phones and see how they interact with other kids on the phone.
If the number one thing that a child has to offer your children is come here and let's look at my phone together, I mean, that happens overtly often.
That's a non starter for me. I, I don't want that culture at all. I mean, even if they were looking at nonsense on the phone, I don't want the culture of. The center of our relationship is looking at a screen Together. So that's a non starter and I don't trust those kids to put it bluntly.
Ask. Ask direct questions. Are there. Do you see any inappropriate videos at school?
My daughters would watch YouTube videos on a. On a family iPad.
There's a little crafting area for my kids in the basement. They get a sewing machine and their paints are down there and they would watch YouTube videos of here's how to make a macrame. I don't know what.
[00:46:01] Speaker B: I don't know what they're doing.
[00:46:02] Speaker C: Craft something.
And so you. I would ask my kids. Okay, when you are looking at crafting videos, do any bad pictures come up on YouTube of things that are being offered to you? Oh, no, Danny.
[00:46:15] Speaker B: Okay, great.
[00:46:16] Speaker C: Just asking because it will come up sometimes that will happen. Oh, I'll be done.
If you think that any of this is helicopter parenting. Oh. Oh. Can't let anyone say that we're helicopter parenting. Oh goodness. I would never want the culture. Oh. To demean me as being helicopter. I would say I'm shepherding.
I'm going to be active and engaged as a shepherd to the degree to which I feel comfortable that I can stand before God and say I did my best here.
So watch like a hawk.
My sixth point. Remember there's only seven where I'm almost letting you free here. My sixth point is be late to the tech game.
Be late to the tech game. I read a book years ago. It's probably dated now, but it was called the techwise Family. I found that very helpful for me just thinking through what, what, what are my fam. What's my family's relationship with technology?
Because the. The author did. Did such a thorough, nice job of having a God honoring family and what is our relationship? Technology.
[00:47:25] Speaker A: Be.
[00:47:26] Speaker C: My. My point is be late to the tech game. Mark mentioned that his daughter was the only one in her circle that wasn't glued to a phone.
I.
It has been a stated goal of mine that I want my kids to be the last one in their groups with a phone around age 13 or 14. We did it when our girls went into high school. They got dumb phones.
So this is a flip phone that they can make a phone call to mom or they can have a couple of texts on.
We managed every contact that they had.
So I think they had maybe three contacts. And it was like grandma, mom and dad and maybe one friend that they could. That they could text with. And the idea was, as Mark said, we were trying to groom them into responsibility.
So if we saw that there was an unhealthy relationship with that thing. We, we would take it away for a week.
And I don't really care how much kicking and screaming there. I told my girls, the more that you kick and scream about this, that'll tell me that this has an oversized importance in your life. And I'm not going to let that happen.
So I'll just remove it altogether.
And I've, you know, in on the topic of praising, I've also told my girls I'm really proud of the relationship that you seem to have with your phone.
So when you're present with the family is one of our rules. When you're with the family, those things do not appear. Whether we're in the car as a family, in dinner, as a family, all of that kind of stuff. I don't want phones insinuating themselves into that time.
So we did a dumb phone around 13 or 14.
I said that social media preys on girls specifically.
You should not, your children should not have access to social. I can feel very comfortable saying this as a rule. Your children should not have access to social media.
Sixteen, at the very earliest, your child's brain is, is being built when they're 13, 14, 15, their brains are being built. You know, your brain hardware doesn't become complete until like age 25.
So we are trying to put these things off as late as possible because they will start to rewire brains.
This is why phone addiction is. It's a real thing. We deal with it as adults. And I didn't grow up with phones. Phones started happening in my college years. That's how old I am.
And still I had a comparatively pure childhood. And still, of course, there's a threat that this little machine here that's sitting beside me on my desk, It wants to kick and scream and say every moment could be an entertaining time for you.
Unfettered access to technology and to Internet and to screens is a proven gateway.
It's just a matter of time. Dads, if you let this happen, it will lead to pornography. And I want you to understand that pornography isn't the end game. The end game is what I talked about at the beginning. The end game is the anxiety, the depression, the disconnection from people and suicidal thoughts. That's the end game, is a compromised person.
So pornography and these and sexual content is just so destructive and leads to these things that we get to cut that stuff off at the knee. So that's my, that's my point is simply be late to the tech game. You've got to work that out with your spouse and your culture and your family, what are the appropriate ages, etc. I would just. I'm asking you and coaching you. Just be as late as possible. My last one is pretty obvious, which is build guardrails.
Guess what, dad? I mean, this topic isn't about dads dealing with pornography, but I know that you do. Statistically, I know that.
So you've got to. You've got to be proactive in building guardrails. So you should have WI fi filters at home. We could talk about that at another time. Or you can come join us at ER and we can give you very specific tactics for. For having, for instance, a WI fi filter set up, which I've got a guy in my life named Paul who's a genius, and he devised a WI FI protection setup that we've installed in my home. And he's happy to hand it out. Just have some family culture rules.
No devices in the bedroom. So, for instance, my girls now have phones.
They're not unlimited smartphones. We have the Apple family thing where one, we can check all their stats.
We have Windows into seeing all of their content that's coming into their phone. Their browsers don't have unlimited access to the Internet.
And with all of that, we don't have devices upstairs. They cannot bring their phones upstairs at all into their bedrooms. That's just one of the rules of our house.
You just need to have family media rules. And this is why I recommend the Techwise family is because this guy has thought through things that you haven't.
[00:53:09] Speaker B: So it's helpful.
[00:53:10] Speaker A: Any thoughts?
[00:53:11] Speaker B: Guardrails wise?
I think that the guardrails not only give you a sense, and especially around technology, not only give you a sense of.
Of like, what is my kid up to. So I have an app called Custodio. There's a ton of options out there, but we give phones to our kids when they're probably around 12.
But those phones don't. They don't do anything. They're like calling and texting.
And I'm using that as a chance as a dad to go, how do you respond to this? My. My middle daughter came home from school, instantly, jumped on her phone, and she's in the backseat of the car looking at her phone. I was like, what are you doing? Well, I'm texting with a friend.
I don't want the phone to be a place I see you going as soon as it's allowed. Meaning you got out of school. Now I can. I was like, if you do that, it gives Me information that I will use in deciding how we proceed with rolling out more technology in your life. So, like, it's a good indicator. But then I have an older daughter who. She gave a whole presentation for why an iPhone would be helpful. I don't want to give her a completely unfettered iPhone, and I don't want to go, no, no, no, no. And then you get to college and you can have everything.
So I want to kind of tier that in. But we have an app that kind of monitors behavior, and I always think it's interesting because she's. She's very comfortable with that monitoring. And I get alerts all the time. Your child has received a text message that's threatening, and usually they're hilariously not problematic.
[00:54:43] Speaker A: Right, right, right.
[00:54:44] Speaker B: I forget. I could probably pull some up and they'd be funny. But it also lets me kind of go, what's the time spent on this? What are the places that are being visited? And we have just turned that transparency around and said, mom and dad also have problems with technology.
I have recently been using an app called Shift that turns my phone into a dumb phone for most of the day, especially times when I'm with my family, and I told the kids I am susceptible to technology addiction, and I will look at my phone when I'm with you. And so I don't want that. So I'm putting a fence in place that helps me there.
So we've just made that a part of our family culture. Technology is out to get you. And I think that when we talk about sexuality, there's so many pitfalls on technology that if you're going out and saying, we're just going to do it with Bible studies and trusting our kids, I would go, don't be an idiot. Okay? Like, there's. There's good child training, and then there's foolery and. And no guardrails. I. I would call foolery potentially even for you, dad. Who's listening? Our friend Mark Douglas says, I. We've got a bunch of starving guys walking around with a Snickers bar in their pocket, and we're saying, now, don't eat it. Well, that's kind of what a phone is when it comes to all of the sexual junk available on the Internet.
[00:56:15] Speaker C: Great. So that's my seven things. Want to hear them again? Pray specifically. Be first to market.
Share your own story at the right time. Comment regularly on the culture around you. Watch like a hawk. Be late to the tech game, and build guardrails in your home. By the way, as Mark insinuated, that's not just good for your kids, that's good for you.
We all have flesh and we all have these temptations.
The hopeful outcome is that high parental monitoring cuts the odds of early sexual activity dramatically involves fathers means better emotional health for your kids. It means better academic outcomes for kids. It means lower delinquency and a higher chance that kids keep the faith multi generationally. This is God's plan.
Your family can be the countercultural testimony where purity is protected in your home. Marriages are strengthened, the kingdom is multiplied. You have to be the exception to the cultural rule.
So consider what that means. You have to set up rules in your own home. If you go into it. This was so important for the culture of my family that we said so often when the children were young, we're going to be the weird family. We're not a normal family. We say that over and over. We're not a normal family.
If you believe that, if you say that in your home, then you get the right to do it however you want. We know families that there's no TV in their house at all.
There's like, we're just not having that. Well, great.
We don't expect you to be normal anyways. You're going to pursue Jesus.
That's so wise. You could say we don't have the Internet in our home.
Whoa, that would be countercultural. That'd be brave and bold. Anyhow, here's my. Here's my closing thoughts. Dads, the battle is fierce.
But you were made for this. You were made for this battle. You were made to be a firewall between the world's influence and the purity of your home and the holiness of the hearts of your home. When fathers pray, they talk first in their home. They set boundaries and shepherd their kids. The stats flip. All of these scary stats they flip on their heads. Kids wait for sex until marriage. They make wiser choices and they carry faith into the next generation.
Yes, it's true that purity can't physically be regained. Maybe spiritually it can, but by God's grace, it can be protected.
You've got one shot, and I encourage you to start today.
Maybe the thing to do is to pray for the purity of your children this week. And you've never done that. I don't know.
Why don't you have one age appropriate conversation with your children? Just, just to let them know, dad cares.
[00:59:11] Speaker A: I'm the one that you should talk
[00:59:12] Speaker C: to about this stuff.
It's not going to be shameful or weird.
I can talk about this stuff.
Your family's multi generational legacy is worth every hard conversation and every no to the culture that you can give.
That's my blessing and wish for you.
If this episode hits home for you, share it with another dad who needs to hear it. And if you're not already in the Abraham's Ola tribe, come on and join us. We are trying to equip biblical family leaders together both financially and every other way in leading their homes like biblical bosses. You are not alone in this fight. Keep it up bros. See you next week.
