Parental Sex Education
by Matthew Bassford
via Truth Magazine, 9 September 2016
A few weeks ago, my family and I were on the way home from Wednesday night Bible study when the topic of conversation turned to pregnancy. Marky was being his usual loopy two-hours-past-bedtime self and asked, “When will Mr. Josh get a baby in his belly?”
My wife answered, “Boys don’t get babies in their bellies.”
To this, Zoë replied, “But boys help with babies with their sperm cells.” Bear in mind that Zoë is five. As Lauren reached out and grabbed my arm hard, I inquired about the source of this unexpected knowledge. It turned out that Zoë had been reading her Usborne encyclopedia of the human body, and it, well, enlightened her about it. I explained to her that she was precisely correct and that it was good to talk about such things with family, but not with other people. Since then, we’ve had a couple of similar conversations, most notably about test-tube babies.
I admit I wasn’t expecting the subject to come up in 2015, but I was expecting it to. Sooner or later, nearly all children are going to get curious and ask their parents about some sex-related subject. Many Christian parents live in fear of that day, and when it arrives, their first inclination is to shut down the conversation so hard that it never comes up again.
As much as we prefer such a response, it’s simply not a godly reaction. Unbelievers will frequently accuse Christians of having all kinds of hangups about sex. We’d all be much happier, they say, if we stopped following the outmoded sexual ethics of the Bible.
The actual problem, though, is not the Bible. It’s the neo-Victorian prudery that has led countless Christians to confuse “sexual immorality is bad” with “sex is bad” and conclude, “Since sex is bad, we shouldn’t talk about it.” Instead, such Christians spend all their time outside the marriage bed pretending that the act that made all of us doesn’t exist.
This attitude toward sex would have been impossible in the rural societies of Bible times. Any child who grows up on a farm will see cattle, chickens, and horses copulating hundreds of times. In that setting, pretending that sex doesn’t exist is about like pretending that the sky doesn’t exist.
The authors of the Bible don’t even attempt such a pretense. The Scripture is never vulgar, but in the Old Testament, it is often quite explicit. Texts such as Genesis 1:28 emphasize the procreative function of sex, but other passages highlight the importance of sexual pleasure in marriage. Song of Solomon explores the sexual yearnings of both men (Song of Solomon 7:7-8) and women (Song of Solomon 5:15-16). God’s message is never that nice girls don’t. It is when the time is right, nice girls do, and do enthusiastically.
We see both halves of Biblical sexuality displayed in Proverbs 5:15-23. This passage combines the familiar Biblical condemnation of adultery with an unequivocal endorsement of sexual fulfillment in marriage. Solomon could hardly have been clearer than when he writes, “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth. As a loving hind and a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times; be exhilarated with her love” (Proverbs 5:18-19 NASB). Note that in context, Solomon is addressing his son. This is the way that God thinks parents should teach children about sex.
Throughout Scripture, in both the New and Old Testaments, sex is presented as a positive good. There are many warnings about sexual immorality, but that doesn’t make the Bible anti-sex, any more than a stop sign is anti-driving. In both cases, the goal is to protect and enhance an activity, not to prohibit it. Too often, though, the message that Christian parents send to their children is “Not this,” rather than the Scriptural “This!” Any discussion of the issue beyond “Don’t” doesn’t happen.
This poses a serious problem for those children. Whether we want to believe it or not, the vast majority of our children are one day going to become sexual beings. They will have sexual curiosity. They will have sexual impulses. If we don’t satisfy that curiosity and teach our children how to channel those impulses, we are doing nothing less than surrendering the initiative to the devil. We might not have a plan for how we want to handle our children’s sexuality, but Satan certainly does! He will gladly use TV, the Internet, and peers to teach our children a corrupt, ungodly view of sex, and this process begins much earlier than we would prefer to believe. If you find yourself wondering if this includes your children, the answer is almost certainly “Yes.”
Sometimes, the devil’s handiwork reveals itself in children rebelling against parental teaching. In a society as sexually saturated as ours is (funny how nobody seems satisfied with it, though!), appeals to lust and sexual immorality are never far away. Many children of godly parents succumb to them.
More subtly, the devil is capable of working his will in children (usually young women) who internalize their parents’ negative message about sex. It’s not hard to imagine a girl who grows up hearing that sex is dirty and evil, accepts that, and does a wonderful job of avoiding sexual sin until she gets married. What’s going to happen, though, when she says her vows and discovers that something she believes is dirty and evil is now part of her divinely ordained obligations to her husband? That’s the kind of thing that can mar a marriage for decades.
As the saying goes, failure to plan is planning to fail. We’re responsible for bringing up our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. If we neglect to declare the whole counsel of God to our children in an area as important as their sexuality, we’re actually neglecting our responsibility to God.
Rather than surrendering the initiative to the devil, we need to seize it and hold on to it. We should adopt God’s goals for our children’s sexuality and work to achieve those goals through the presentation of Scripture and the application of Scriptural principles. This is certainly a private, delicate matter, and we should handle it privately and delicately, but we should never allow our desire for privacy to become an excuse for fear.
I don’t enjoy talking about test-tube babies with my five-year-old daughter, exactly. I don’t exactly look forward to the considerably more explicit conversations I imagine I’ll have with my son. However, I want to have those conversations because I want to be the source that teaches them about sex. They’re going to learn from somebody, and I’d rather have that somebody be me than anybody else.
