7 Principles for Raising Kids in a Pornified World

Introduction
I’m a pastor, and my primary job is to shepherd the people God has entrusted to my care. This means teaching them and feeding them with the Word of God as well as guarding them and protecting them. Christ gives specific instructions for receiving children and protecting them, not causing them to stumble. And here we are living in a pornified world, where immodesty is everywhere, innocence is increasingly rare, and debauchery is invading every space. How do we raise our children to be both innocent as doves and wise as serpents? How do we warn them about real dangers without leading them into temptation or stealing their childhoods? I can’t pretend to cover exhaustive answers to these questions in one simple post, but I do want to sketch a number of principles to encourage further discussion and hopefully give some tools to parents for the task.  

• Approach the task of parenting and this particular task of guarding and teaching your children about sexual sin and dangers in faith. Fearful parenting is not faithful parenting, and while God’s grace covers many of our sins, including fear, we cannot expect God’s blessing on our efforts when we are going about our days terrified. Yes, there is plenty to tempt us to fear, but the godly woman does not fear anything that is terrifying (1 Pet. 3:6) (and neither should a godly man). Related to this: the joy of the Lord is your strength. The central element in Christian joy is the forgiveness of sins. So check your own heart first: are your sins forgiven? Are you in full fellowship with God, with your spouse, with your parents? As far as it depends on you, are you at peace with everyone around you? That is the central source of Christian joy, and the joy of the Lord is your strength, including the strength of your parenting. Fear can feel vigilant, but Christian joy is actually more perceptive. Christian joy can see what fearful anxiety cannot. And we most certainly need to see clearly in these days. And that means that we must be entirely committed to keeping short accounts, no bitterness, no resentment, no personal backlogs of sin, and lots of forgiveness. A family that confesses sin and forgives from the heart is a family where Jesus is present, and His joy is guarding and protecting everyone. 

• Pray regularly. It is of course far too common to read about praying, talk about praying, think about praying, and do everything but actually pray. Pray with and for your children. Pray for their safety. Pray for their purity. Pray for their future marriages and children (and grandchildren). Bless your children. When my children were young, I blessed by sons every night with my hand on their head saying, “May the Lord bless you and keep and make you a mighty man, and may you kill dragons and giants and sin, all the days of your life, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.” And on my daughters I would say, “May the Lord bless you and keep you and make you wise and beautiful, and may your children and grandchildren rise up and call you blessed, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.” I suppose I pronounced that blessing on their heads a few thousand times before they grew to ages when they stayed up later than me. We regularly pray for my children’s future spouses and children and families in our family prayers. And my wife and I have prayed for our children’s purity, protection, wisdom, and courage for years. Ask the Lord specifically to show you anything you need to know in order to shepherd your children well. Ask the Lord not to let any sins fester or go hidden or unaddressed in your family. Ask the Lord to do whatever it takes to get at anything that needs to be addressed. Does our God send angels to protect our children? Does He not hear the prayers of His people, especially for their children?

• Teach the glory of sexual difference from the youngest ages. Little boys must be taught to honor their mothers as women and ladies. Holding doors and chairs, waiting for mom to sit down to dinner, honoring and protect sisters in word and deed. Little girls must be taught to respect their brothers, to honor them, and to be modest around them. This includes many practical things like giving space for modesty, separate bedrooms for boys and girls, no bawdy games or teasing. I taught my boys from a very young age to look away from immodest women, whether in person, on a screen, or at the swimming pool or beach. I explained to them that God made women beautiful, but their bodies are not for us. I told them that one day God would give them a wife, and her body would be for them to enjoy. I told my little girls that God made them beautiful, they are to adorn them in a way that is truly lovely, but that their bodies would one day be for their husband. We made a point to talk about dating and courtship from time to time when they were little. We told them that they would not play games about “who likes who” or who has a crush on who, no pairing off, no girlfriends/boyfriends until marriage is a real option.

• Guard your children’s friendships, even in a Christian community. Don’t assume that just because someone goes to your Christian school or attends your church that you share the same standards. We’ve always explained to our kids that they certainly may have friends, but their best friends are their siblings and family. So we frequently turned down invitations to friends’ houses just so we could have time together as a family. We don’t do sleepovers as a general rule, and we’ve preferred groups and class parties to one on one hangouts. We guarded entertainment standards closely when our kids were little, and we share the same standards now that they are nearly all in their teens. And make sure you’re not merely looking out for immodesty or sex scenes or violence or bad language, look out for toxic worldviews, bad attitudes, catty or flirtatious characters, dishonored parents, dishonorable heroes, and lies about God or His world. Sometimes we might watch a movie or show with some bits of these things, but we aimed to point it out, laugh at it, and mock it.

• Cultivate an atmosphere of gracious, joyful nosiness. Ask your kids about everything, but joyfully and graciously, not as a cross-examining prosecuting attorney. Ask about their friends, what they are watching, listening to, thinking about. Ask them about their bodies (appropriately), prepare them for puberty, both physiologically and spiritually and emotionally. What temptations will they face? What challenges will they face? Tell them ahead of time. Check in with them. But do it as their friends, as their counselors, as their coaches. And don’t bluster or blowup if they tell you something concerning. Remember, the first point in this list. Talk to your children with faith, and if something comes out that needs to be addressed, first thank the Lord for it. What an answer to prayer to be told about a sin or a struggle. Make sure you remain joyful and gracious even if you have to have hard conversations, even if there needs to be confession, repentance, restitution, and consequences. Remember what Pastor Doug says, there’s no situation that is so bad that you can’t make it worse. Your anger, your blustering, your emotional spasms don’t make your children more likely to tell you more. If there has been sin, walk through biblical confession and repentance, forgiveness, new obedience, and accountability. We rightly mock college campus “safe spaces,” but a family really should be a safe space for children. It should be a place where you gently and cheerfully probe, and they feel completely at ease telling you what they are thinking about, what they are going through. And they should have complete confidence that if they stumble into sin, you will walk with them through it gladly. Related to this is that you want your family to be plugged into a faithful, Bible-believing church where you respect and trust the elders and pastors. And you want your children to know that. You want them to know that you ask your pastors for counsel and advice, and if anything significant ever came up that required pastoral counseling or accountability, you (and they) would trust the pastors and elders to handle things well. 

• Have family policies and safeguards for internet and technology. Generally keep all screens out where everyone can see them. No taking iPads off to the back bedroom alone. Family computers or televisions should be out where they are visible to the whole family. Filters, accountability software, time limits can also be very helpful. Apart from basic privacy for changing and bathing, we’ve generally had our boys have open door policies, especially while they were younger. But sometimes you might just take the doors off your boys’ rooms. Boys don’t need doors on their bedrooms. And boys should stay out of their sisters’ rooms, and generally, vice versa. Generally lean against “alone time” – it’s not good for man to be alone, and that wasn’t just talking about bachelors. 

• Stay busy with good things. Boys especially need to be kept busy with good work, hard work, sports, competition, and physically exhausting activities. While parents should hover closely over their daughters in traditional schooling situations, they should hover over their sons in homeschooling setups. Of course, we should hover in all scenarios, but all things being equal, give special attention in these directions. There’s a certain homeschool romanticism that goes around from time to time, imagining that children will naturally walk through meadows, plucking flowers, and spontaneously compose beautiful poetry. It imagines that children need free time, play time, and decries the regimentation of traditional school days and school years as squashing the free-learning spirits of children. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think you should have family vacations and Sabbaths and holidays, but I do think that there’s a certain form of that romanticism that is a set up for boys (especially) to stumble into sin, especially sexual sin. Children are not depositories of wisdom and brilliance and creativity. They are depositories of sin. Left to themselves, they will come up with folly, sin, and rebellion. “The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame” (Prov. 29:15). It’s hard work raising children well, and that in part means long, busy days. Parents must not resent the hard work it takes to keep children busy with good things: carpooling, pickup, drop off, school, musical instruments, sports, 4H, understood rightly, are opportunities to stay busy with good things. I certainly grant that this can look different in different contexts, but children should be kept busy and they need a lot of monitoring, accountability, feedback, and correction. There should be a certain sunny cynicism in your parenting, such that when everything is quiet in the house, you should wonder who’s getting into trouble. If you haven’t heard from one of them in fifteen minutes, where are they and what sin is it? And then one day, you’ll look up with that instinctive curiosity, and then you’ll remember that they’ve all left and started their own families, full of joy and laughter and faithfulness and purity. 

Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash