Rob Dreher asks this question in a recent post, “We live in a pornified culture. So how do we raise sane, healthy children in this cesspool? What do you think?”
My initial rambling answers to Dreher’s question:
- Point people to the grace and love of Christ. Gospel, gospel, gospel.
- Pray, pray, pray.
- Be in church and be filled with the Spirit as we speak to one another with Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs(Eph 5:18-20).
- Fight spiritual battles with spiritual weapons (2 Cor 10:4). “They have divine power to demolish strongholds.”
- Hate it. Hate evil. Hate the pain it causes.
- Warn; Warn our sons; warn our churches — about how addictive and destructive pornography can be.
- Take radical action to get help if we’re struggling – – that was Jesus’ point (Matt 5:27-30). Gouge out your eye. Cut off your hand. In the words of Frederick Dale Bruner, “better to go limping into heaven then leaping into hell.” If this is your struggle, get help today.
- Warn our daughters to watch for signs of pornography in the men they meet.
- Rinse our minds with the Word often.
- Be willing to have our children think we’re too protective.
See also Vitamin Z’s insightful points on this question (click here).
Excerpts from Rob Dreher’s post which includes dialogue from James Dobson’s interview with Ted Bundy:
Recently I had dinner with a friend who teaches in a private (secular) high school. He mentioned at one point how much he worried about his students, who were heavily into watching pornography. Notice the placement of the comma in that sentence. Porn is so ubiquitous and normalized among the (well-off) kids in his school that it’s considered the usual thing to partake of it. My friend went on to say that the situation was the same at the well-known (and relatively conservative) Christian university he’d attended. Among the male students, he said, “The question really wasn’t, ‘Do you use porn?’ but rather ‘Do you feel guilty about the porn you use?'”
He said he worked in a counselor’s role there as well, and routinely dealt with students who were seriously messed up by their porn habits. For example, he said, he believed that many of the guys he worked with had no idea how to relate to women in a healthy way; the power of pornography, working consciously and subconsciously, caused the men to have badly distorted views of women, views that stunted and even paralyzed the men emotionally. . .
You probably heard about serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy’s jailhouse confession to Dr. James Dobson (who is a psychologist — many people don’t know that) about the role pornography had in shaping the monster he became. Excerpt:
JCD: For the record, you are guilty of killing many women and girls.
Ted: Yes, that’s true.
JCD: How did it happen? Take me back. What are the antecedents of the behavior that we’ve seen? You were raised in what you consider to be a healthy home. You were not physically, sexually or emotionally abused.
Ted: No. And that’s part of the tragedy of this whole situation. I grew up in a wonderful home with two dedicated and loving parents, as one of 5 brothers and sisters. We, as children, were the focus of my parent’s lives. We regularly attended church. My parents did not drink or smoke or gamble. There was no physical abuse or fighting in the home. I’m not saying it was “Leave it to Beaver”, but it was a fine, solid Christian home. I hope no one will try to take the easy way out of this and accuse my family of contributing to this. I know, and I’m trying to tell you as honestly as I know how, what happened.
As a young boy of 12 or 13, I encountered, outside the home, in the local grocery and drug stores, softcore pornography. Young boys explore the sideways and byways of their neighborhoods, and in our neighborhood, people would dump the garbage. From time to time, we would come across books of a harder nature – more graphic. This also included detective magazines, etc., and I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography – and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience – is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces – as I know only too well – brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.
Read the whole thing here.
This is an area of vital interest to me, Chris. As you know, our youngest child (11 years old at the time) was the victim of a convicted pedophile in our neighborhood. (No one knew of this man’s past; by law, his criminal record was not published. Thank God, Pres. Bush saw to it that that law was changed.)
I would add one thing to your list, and I believe this is crucial for parents to do this: Teach your child to be rude.
I know that sounds odd, especially coming from a Christian mom, and a southerner, to boot. Although our daughter knew about “good touch and bad touch”, she did not think it was ever right to be impolite or to talk back to an adult, even one who was violating her.
Make sure your young child knows that it is 100% right for her to yell at someone who touches her inappropriately (believe me, kids know at a VERY young age when a touch is weird). Teach her it is right and good for her to shout at the abuser, slap him, kick him, run from him. Teach her (or him) that they should never keep secret that someone has violated them, even if the abuser swears your child to secrecy. Instruct your child to protect her body from unwanted touches or even when someone stands too close.
Please, don’t stick your heads in the sand about this. The man who violated our child was the pillar of the community. Because of our little girl’s courage in coming forward (eventually) and informing us, this creep was arrested, convicted, and deported. Ours is the rare case, though. The vast majority of child abuse goes un-reported or, tragically, ignored by the horrified parents when their child gets the courage to speak up. Trust your child if they ever come to you with news that she has been assaulted. In almost every instance, that child is being truthful.
Meanwhile, teach your child to be rude. It may save her life.