What Children Need to Become Pure, Holy Adults: Six Strategies to Live Above the Culture

Dannah Gresh: Hello moms! How are you? Wooooo!! You came to the best session because we get to talk about our kids. I mean there's Jesus, our hot husbands . . . no wait a minute. My pastor says we're not supposed to say that. We're supposed to say "what a lovely vessel in which the Holy Spirit can dwell." So there's Jesus, our lovely vessels in which the Holy Spirit dwells husbands, and then there's our kids. There's no other better topics than that. Am I right? Right. Okay, so I have a couple of announcements and then we are going to hit the ground running. We're going to start by just asking the Lord to open up our hearts with prayer after I share with you a few things.

I also need to tell you that I wrote the handout that you have in your hands about a month ago. And since then the Holy Spirit has given me some fresh stuff. So for those of you that are copious type-A note takers, you will be frustrated. I will tell you this though. The parts that I have chosen to skip are all very well documented in Six Ways to Keep the Good in Your Boy and Six Ways to Keep the Little in Your Girl. So if you're the kind of person that needs to fill in blanks or you might have a cardiac arrest, you may go get one of the books.

Anything that I have chosen to maybe develop a little less, I'm going to make sure you get to fill in your blanks. But I'm probably not going to develop it as much as I had originally intended, because what actually happened is in the last week the Lord really just planted passion in me for my last two points. And I do not want to short-change them, because I'm not exactly sure where I'm headed with it altogether. I just know that's where the passion of God's Spirit is in me right now. So I'm going to blast through some of this stuff in the beginning. So are all of my note takers fairly warned? Okay.

Father God, we are so grateful that You have gifted us with children. Lord, when I think of my three precious ones, I don't even have words. And Father, we confess to You that we don't always know how to take them through the steps of following You well in this crazy world we live in. And we need Your help. We just bow our hearts before You right now. And Lord, I just ask that You would use my tongue right now. Psalm 45 says, "My heart is stirred by a noble theme." Lord, stir our hearts on the subject of purity. And that verse also talks about You writing on our hearts. I pray that You would use my tongue to write on all of our hearts right now, Lord. And anything that would be of me You would just get it out of the way, cut it out of my notes, make me forget it. And anything that is needed and necessary for the women in this room right now that Your Holy Spirit wouldn't let me pass over it and that You would interpret it for their lives. Lord, move beyond us. I ask this in Your holy name. Amen.

So I want to start with just telling you about my first experience in talking to one of my children about sexuality. Lexi Gresh was five years old when she got off of the school bus. She put her hands on her hips, and she looked at me and she said, "Momma, you know those eggs that are in my belly?" I said, "Yes, I know about the eggs in your belly." She said, "I was thinking. How does my body know when it's married to turn those eggs into babies?"

A mom starts praying when a child asks a question like that. She starts asking the Lord for wisdom, because I was pretty sure Lexi's kindergarten class did not need a sex education lesson the following day. So I asked the Lord for wisdom, and I began very slowly. I said, "Well, sometimes when a husband and wife want to show each other that they love each other very, very much, they hold each other very tightly." And I was asking the Lord for wisdom about what I should say next when she got this kind of eureka look on her face and she said, "I knew it was something just like that." And off she went. And I stood there thinking, "I will claim my mother of the universe award now, thank you."

The next day she got off the school bus hysterical, tears streaming down her face, couldn't even talk. She was just so full of emotion for about five minutes, when finally she put her hand on the kitchen table. She took a deep breath and she said, "Mommy, Mommy, it was terrible. Uncle Derek came to visit me in school today. And he hugged me really, really tight." I'm not kidding. It took me fifteen minutes to convince my five-year-old that she wasn't pregnant.

And before you know it they're this—Robby in the middle, twenty-two-year-old, grad student at Penn State University, living for the Lord, just discipled a young man through prison and is discipling him into the world. I'm looking for a wife for him. If you have a twenty-one-year-old daughter who's godly, cute, available, we will talk. I'm not opposed to arranged marriages.

Lexi, who has figured out that tight hugs don't result in pregnancy is there on your left. If I look a little extra happy tonight, it's because Lexi is a freshman at Cedarville. I dropped her off one month ago, and tonight I'm going to see her here at True Woman for the first time in four weeks. Hallelujah.

And Autumn, who the Lord brought into our life five years ago as a fourteen-year-old little lady from China, didn't know a stick of English. The Lord is redeeming her life from a really rough past. And just to tell you a little bit about my family and how we are, Autumn's favorite pastime is to find "made in China" stickers and affix them to her forehead for the day. So that is my family. I'm really proud to say that my twenty-two, nineteen, and eighteen-year-old are choosing to live a life of set-apart holiness and purity. And I want to say this, that it is by God's grace. What I'm going to share with you will help. But it is by God's grace. The book of Titus says, "God's grace teaches us to say ‘no' to ungodliness and to live godly self-controlled lives in this upright age." And it's not anything that Bob and I have done, but by God's grace that they're choosing this lifestyle.

For many years since I wrote And the Bride Wore White in the year 2000, I've been asked to write a book on raising sexually pure kids. I have always said no, because I'm not finished yet. And I believe there is a great deal of wisdom and integrity in waiting until you've walked through a phase of life to teach how to live in that phase of life. And so until these precious ones are fully into their adult lives, I won't write that book.

But what I have written is Six Ways to Keep the Little in Your Girl and Six Ways to Keep the Good in Your Boy, which is how to plant purity and holiness in their lives between the ages of eight and twelve. If you look at your handout, you'll see that there are three phases of moral development. And this is really important for a mom to know or we can miss the most critical phase, because many times we think the most important time to have conversations about sexuality and purity and modesty and being set apart for holiness is during their teen years. And you'll be missing the boat if you wait.

The first phase is the "Copy-cat Phase." And that happens in their early childhood years. Why do you think your daughters want an ironing board for Christmas when they're three? They aren't going to want it when they're thirty. They just want to be like you. Why do your sons want the car keys and a toolbox? They want to be like dad. And so they're just copying anything that you are. That's why it's so important that they see you love your husband, kiss your husband, hold your kids, treasure your family, because you want to inform their values. That's why it's important that they have a baby doll so that they can love and nurture the way that they've seen you love and nurture.

But the most critical phase of moral development happens between the ages of eight and twelve years old. And that's what I call the "Counseling Phase." You know that question "Why?"—the one that drives you crazy and that you're almost always too busy to answer—a very important question. Because during that year they're coming to you as a counselor and they're saying, "Why can't I have ice cream before dinner? Why does my friend down the street have two daddies? Why can I not run around naked anymore?" Anybody had to have that conversation with your four-year-olds? Okay. Those questions are critical and between the ages of eight and twelve, Christian psychologists will tell you that moral foundations are established. And so it is so critical that we take those years, especially the ages of nine, ten, and eleven to have the critical conversations with them about purity.

By the time they are twelve or thirteen they're going to move into the "Coaching Phase." And I like to think of that as the years that we've built the foundation, they're going to go out, they're going to run some plays, and then they are going to come back to the bench and they're going to say, "How'd I do coach?" And you're going to get to coach them up and send them back out. You know why it's so important for us to send them out from time to time? Because if we wait until they're adults and just send them out, they're not coming back to the bench. And so they don't get coached up for when they make mistakes. And we don't get to apply the grace that Titus tells us is the greatest gift for developing moral purity because your kids are going to mess up. There are going to be mistakes. And they're going to need the same grace that God has applied in your life so that you can be sitting here today praying that your children will live a life of purity.

So let me see if today we can walk through primarily what I think is that most critical phase. We're going to focus a lot on the "Counseling Years." But I want to start by just taking a quick look at what is the moral culture that we're bringing our children up in. And I want to just blow through some cultural pinning points.

I want to start with the state of our girls. Really, the state of our girls I think today is not a good state, and it all started with a woman named Marilyn Monroe. Now what I want you to know about Marilyn Monroe is that she was nearly thirty years old when she was at the height of her sex icon status. That is ancient for a sex or beauty queen today, right? But they were marketing products like makeup and clothing to women in their twenties and thirties through her beauty. Was it the best thing? Was it really healthy for them? I don't know. I'm not here to talk to you about them. I'm here to talk to you about your kids. But it was older women that were being marketed to.

But then the purveyors of those products found that they weren't making enough money. And so by the 1980s we have Brooke Shields. No one came between her and her . . . eyebrows? Her eyebrows? Did you say eyebrows? What's the answer? No one came between her and her Calvin's. The jeans. You remember? All right. We'll talk later. She did have nice eyebrows though. Okay.

In the last five to ten years, we aren't satisfied with marketing those products to teenagers. We now have sex icon symbols like Miley Cyrus, Hannah Montana, because we want to market those products to six-year-olds. And if you think she's a fictional character, I want to introduce you to model Thylane Blondeau. She's a French model. She's considered a supermodel. She's forecasted to be something that will happen here in the United States of America. She's ten years old.

What's happening is that places like Women's Wear Daily, the global Bible of the fashion industry, is asking questions like, "Is it okay to ask a seven-year-old to look like she's seventeen?" We're having products roll out like thong underwear for little girls in size eight with the label "Eye Candy" on them. This product didn't survive because moms had something to say about it. But last year the padded bikini bra was introduced, and this one has survived because although some moms like my ministry—we have a group called The Modesty Project that you can sign at my website. And we just use that as a think-tank to speak back to marketers like this who create this product. And we contacted Abercrombie and this was a product called the "Ashley Push-up Triangle." Within twenty-four hours, we had it taken off of their website and the name of it had been changed to the "Ashley Triangle." It's only sold in their stores. It's not sold online. So we can speak back to them.

The American Psychological Association says products like this and even dolls for example. In more recent years dolls have gotten sexy and street-smart. We have the Bratz doll, who has fishnet stockings, big pouty lips, lots of eye makeup. This is a toy for a six-year-old. Barbie's also gone crazy. She's gotten fishnet on us and there's certainly, maybe you can argue, that there are some Barbies that aren't so crazy, but this particular Barbie is pretty crazy. And what some of the most left-leaning thinkers are finding is that when a girl plays with this doll, she seems to confine her play to something called "seduce the boys." That's something that you want your daughter practicing.

Today the average twelve-year-old is going to watch one of three television programs on television during prime time. She's going to watch reruns of Desperate Housewives. She's going to watch Vampire Diaries or Grey's Anatomy. Appropriate for a little girl? Juxtaposition that with the fact that in the 1980s she was watching Care Bears. We've come a long way. Social science offers us a footprint of what will happen to a little girl who feasts on these things. And many moms have this hunch that maybe it's not okay, but everybody's doing it, right? And I get emails everyday, "Is it okay to buy my daughter the padded push-up bra? She's eight."

But marketers want the 42 billion dollars that's spent every year on these products. And last year, mascara and eyeliner sales for eight to twelve-year-olds tripled. What was there to triple? There shouldn't have been anything to triple. If your daughter gets on that train, the most left-leaning thinkers, even the American Psychological Association, will say little girls who dress to look older, who become obsessed with their beauty when they're six to eight years old, when they're six to twelve years old are more likely of eating disorders, depression, and an early sexual debut as teenagers. As a result, when they're young adults, in the confines of a loving marriage relationship, they have so many sexual issues and scars on their heart and so many body image issues that they can't enjoy the gift that God's given them in their marriage bed. It's an assault against marriage. What the culture is doing to our six-year-olds is an assault against marriage.

What about the state of our boys? A recent Wall Street Journal article inquired "Where Have All the Good Men Gone?" A current Amazon bestseller seeks to answer the question Is There Anything Good About Men? Since the coining of the 2004 word "adultescent," we have something to call the twenty-year-old-boy who's so consumed with playing "Call of Duty" on his PlayStation that he has no real-life call of duty. And if our men are called to be leaders in our families, they must have a life mission. They must have a call of duty, and they must rise up to reach out for it.

Now one of the things that's also happening with the advent of gaming is that we're seeing boys become less interested and less capable in the educational field. It used to be the boys were the math king; the girls were the queens of reading. Not anymore. Girls are outscoring our boys in every category. Why? Well, you can trace the decline in the boys' ability to do math and their desire to go to college back to the early 1980s. What happened about then?

Well, in the seventies, we had the first introduction of computer games, but guess what? They were too big. So there was something called an arcade. Does anybody remember that? That you had to go to play a game. But in the early eighties—or in the seventies, rather—we had a system that introduced us to the world of "Pong" and "Asteroids." Remember? Blip. Blip. Blip. Blip-blip. That was a really fast one. Do you remember? And by the 1980s we had personal home computers that were being created for at-home gaming, and we had Nintendo introduced for the first time.

It was then that we began to see the decline in educational performance. There is a direct correlation between gaming and educational performance. Why? Is gaming all bad? No. Let's not be legalistic about it. But let's say this. The average boy spends thirty-five hours in front of one of those systems—a week. So there's no time to develop him. And you know what? Readers are leaders. Thinkers are leaders. If we want our men to be leaders then we have to raise boys who care about thinking not about winning on their television screen.

Boys are also being faced with pornography. The average age of first exposure is eleven. As a result, 50 percent of them will be sexually active before they leave high school with an average of 9.7 sexual partners before they graduate from college. This catapults our boys into a world of double-mindedness where they might be one boy at home and one boy in church and even one boy in school, and they are completely different other person when they are all alone. And they do feel all alone.

At the core of it, this is an attack against marriage. We have twenty-year-olds who are flabby and living in their parents' basements with no desire to ever get married. They just want to win the next game of PlayStation and eat their Doritos. No desire for marriage. It is an assault against marriage. Why is it an assault against marriage? Well, because the enemy hates marriage. Ephesians 5:31–32 says: "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." And then Paul says all of a sudden, "I'm really not talking about marriage. I'm talking about Christ and the church." He says, "This is a great mystery, but I'm talking about Christ and the church."

Do you know from Genesis to Revelation we can trace that it was God's intention that marriage would be a picture of His love for us? If that is true, how motivated is Satan to see that picture destroyed in your life, in your family, in your children? If we do not rise up to protect purity and to protect marriage and to protect the marriage bed, we will wake up one day to find the gospel completely marginalized. I'm not willing to let that happen. Are you? So let's muscle up, moms. Let's not only keep our children separate from the world, but let's understand what they need to do to integrate with the world so that they are successful. And let's know what social science tells us will help us in raising children who can be sexually pure.

I want to just give you six things that will be strategies for you to live above the culture. I think these are really important, but I'm going to skim over three of them, and we're going to land on three of them for a few minutes and open up the Word so that we can really dissect those because that's what I'm feeling God wants us to really do today.

The first one is enter into God's healing for you. Enter into God's healing for you. Do you know that I started praying for my daughter when I was nineteen years old? I hadn't met her father. I wasn't praying for my son. But I was burdened in prayer for my daughter. And some of you probably know why. You're shaking your heads. I did not want her to know the hurt that I had known by walking away from God's good plan for sexual purity.

You see, at the age of fifteen, I was a Christian high school student. I was a missionary for Child Evangelistic Fellowship. I loved the Lord with all of my heart. I had butterflies in my stomach at the thought of leading little children to know Christ. And at the age of fifteen—that very same summer that I had butterflies in my stomach for Jesus—I would walk down a wooded path and give away the gift that God meant for me to give to my husband on my wedding night, away to a guy who is a perfect stranger to me today. And I hurt. I hurt so, so, so badly. Some of you know that hurt. And you will never be equipped to lead your children to live lives of purity until you heal.

I began praying for that when I was nineteen. I wrote this in my prayer journal when I was nineteen. "It's so easy to fall into bad situations if you don't build up every straightforward defense. Believe me, I know. I was just very naïve and didn't have the knowledge of what was going on before it happened. I hope and pray that I'll be able to know and to guide my daughter in building up defenses so she'll have a better time of it than I for waiting. I've wasted precious years of growth with the Lord. Now I feel like I'm starting over. That's the hard way to go. I know there is no way I can decide how things will go for my daughter. But I'm praying God will give me wisdom to guide her."

Countless entries like that in my journal through my college years. Some of you have prayed the same kind of prayer. And you know, one of the things I prayed over and over again was, "God, am I forgiven? Am I forgiven?" For ten years, "Am I forgiven?" I didn't feel forgiven. Can I tell you the secret to feeling forgiven? James 5:16: "Confess your sins one to another and . . . then you will be healed."

You know what? Forgiveness comes from one source and one alone, and that is Jesus Christ. But He has given us the Body to be the agent of healing. That is why it is so critical that we are in transparent churches where we can come to a hospital for wholeness and not picture-perfect churches that create lies of legalism all around us that we can never possibly live up to. If you're still not healed, you need to tell someone today. And there is no better place to start than here in the safe environment of the True Woman event where you can go to your Christian sister, and she can wrap her arms around you.

You know when I was twenty-six years old I was driving down the highway with my brand-new baby girl, Lexi, six months old in the backseat of my car. Same hurt on my heart, and I heard the familiar voice of Dr. James Dobson asking, "What is the number one question when a teenage girl is talking to her mom about sex?" And without hesitation a woman said, "The number one question on her heart is, ‘Mom did you wait?'" I pulled to the side of the road, and I allowed ten years of grief to engulf me. I cried for the first time. I let the hardness ebb away.

And I went home that night, and it took me three hours in a dark bedroom to tell my husband who thought he'd married the driven snow that he had not. And I expected rejection. But he wrapped his big arms around me, and for the first time in ten years I felt God's forgiveness. And he said, "Baby, I don't know if you need to hear this, and I don't think I need to say it. But I forgive you." Oh, I did need to hear that. And for the first time in ten years I heard God's forgiveness. Weeks later I told my precious mom. Same thing, wrapped in forgiveness, voice of forgiveness. The Body of Christ will heal you if you will be brave enough to step into it. And if you're not brave enough to step into it for you, be brave enough to step into it for your kids. Because this is what God's Word promises in 2 Corinthians 1:3–4. "He comforts us so that we can comfort others with the same comfort that we ourselves have received from Christ."

You know what the lie was that I believed after my sexual sin was "God can't use me." I wanted to be a missionary when I was eight years old. I wanted to be a Bible study teacher. My poor family. When I was about twelve years old, I made a sign TBFF—The Barker Family Fellowship. And I made my family come to Bible study every week. I was going to disciple my mom and dad. But all that desire was crucified by my sin. And I sat on the sidelines. What a lie!

This verse says, "I will comfort you." And it doesn't say, "I will comfort you when somebody else has hurt you." It doesn't say, "I will comfort you if it wasn't your fault." It says, "I will comfort you. And the comfort I will pour into your life will be what equips you to pour into other people's lives." That's God's truth. There is nobody in here who is so disqualified that God can't heal them up and use the comfort that He can pour into their lives so that their lives can be empowered to comfort others.

Listen, this is coming from a woman who walked in shame—telling no one of her sin for ten years. And today I stand before you the leader of an international ministry that will do 140 events impacting 65,000 moms and daughters in their relationship for purity this year alone. And over one million books sold on the topic of purity. If you think that's prideful, you don't know the shame that I've lived in. But some of you do. Some of you do. And if you do, this is your homework because you cannot raise sexually pure kids until your heart is sexually whole. I want to just pause and pray for some of you right now.

Lord, we don't want to move so fast in what we're thinking and learning that we don't stop for Your Holy Spirit to speak to us. So we just pause right now, and we ask You to speak. I ask You to speak to the woman whose heart is so wounded by stories so much like mine. I ask You to stop and speak to the woman who right now is flirting with adultery. I ask You to stop and speak to the woman whose heart is wounded by abortion who can't believe she can be whole again. But God, she can be. Lord, this is the hard work of our faith—working out our salvation with fear and trembling so that we are not only eternally saved, but we live the abundant life here and now. Father, will You bring that to each mother in this room? I ask this in Your holy name. Amen.

With your eyes closed, I just want you to consider if the only reason you came to this session was for that. And if it was, I want you to consider in your heart right now who you will tell today. God loves you, mom. You're going to be so whole if you can be brave enough to walk through the healing. And the payoff in your kids' life will be so worth it.

I want to move very quickly through three, the next three points. The next one is become a connecting mom. And that's the reason I wrote The Six Ways to Keep the Good in Your Boy and The Six Ways to Keep the Little in Your Girl. Almost the first half of the book deals with the concept of becoming a connecting mom, because in the years 1996, 1998, 2000, as I began researching how God could use my life to comfort the young women in my church, I mean I didn't have any ambitions of starting a ministry. It was, "I'm going to heal this heart, God." And then it was this heart and then it was a lot of hearts and then sometimes I'm overwhelmed, and I have to say, "Jesus, help me!" Because there are so many hearts that need healed in the Body of Christ.

But I kept coming across this thing called "parent-child connectedness" in my research. And it seemed that aside from a relationship with God and a firm foundation of "this is what God's Word says," the next most powerful element in raising a sexually pure kid was parent-child connectedness. So let me just define what connectedness is. Connectedness is intentional togetherness. It's intentional togetherness. It's not getting so busy that you're not planning time to know your kids intimately.

Intentional togetherness is two things. One, it is regular activities, for example, eating dinner together three to five times a week, which is a very rare occurrence in our nation—very rare occurrence. It's something at the Gresh household we take very seriously. We will even during the busy seasons of our year write down the time that dinner is. And it might be five-thirty or it might be eight-thirty so that everybody knows, and we're going to have dinner three to five times a week.

It might be things like asking your kids highs and lows at the end of the day. What was the best thing about your day? What was the worst thing about your day? It might be tucking them into bed. Now I've never done this, but I've known some great men and women of faith that tuck their kids into bed till the night before their wedding when they send them off forever and ever amen. Great! Little weird, but I think it worked! It doesn't matter what your regular activities are, it just matters that you have them.

But the other thing is traditions. You know like one of our family's traditions is on Black Friday to cut down the Christmas tree. It's the only time my husband conquers the forest. He is not a hunter. But he does take his Christmas tree hunting very seriously. It started the year we were married, and I remember one year—it doesn't matter—snow, sleet, blizzard, we go. And I know this because one year I had a three-and-a-half year old, and I was a month away from delivering Lexi Gresh. And my husband said, "We got to go conquer the forest." I said, "There is a blizzard outside." He said, "We got to go conquer the forest. Wear your boots." And I remember him carrying that tree through the forest. And I'm carrying my three-and-a-half year old who fit out to about here over my baby bump. And I'm thinking, "I don't like my husband anymore. I'm never doing this again." But twenty-two years later, we're still doing it. We haven't missed a year. One year we were even traveling eighteen hours from my parents' home, the home where we lived at the time. My husband saw a tree, and he got out of the car and he wrapped it on the top of our roof because we had to have our tree on Black Friday.

Birthday tables was one of our traditions. Our kids knew that when they woke up on their birthday that the kitchen table would be decorated to reflect them—their interests of that year, their favorite colors. And that's what connectedness is; it's really knowing your child.

Proverbs 22:6 says, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." You know what that sounds like it's talking about teach them the way of God. And it is saying that, but it is saying so much more because the word "way" is the word derech, and that means "the way; the right way; the way of God." He has a plan. He has some things written down that are very black and white for us, and He wants us to embed those in our children. But here's the cool thing. The word "train" is the Hebrew word hanak. It was a Hebrew marksman's term and of course marksman—bow, arrow, bull's eye, right—you get the picture. It's not a bow and arrow like today where there's like buttons and gadgets and even you and I could hit the broad side of the barn, right? No, this was not like that at all.

Back in the day, that hunter would go out, and he would find a piece of wood and he would carve it and craft it and he would prepare an arrow. But because every piece of wood was different, had different moisture, different tension, different strength, different bow-ability, different bendability. He had to train himself to know the bow. Are you getting the picture here? This is parent-child connectedness. It's knowing the unique bent and strength and bendability of my child so that I can help them to hit the target of God's way. And if you don't know them individually—their favorite food, their favorite teacher, their best friend, how their prayer life is going—you know when you know your kid. You know, and they're different.

I remember spending time with Robby. He was home sick from school one day, and he said, "Mom, let's read together." I said, "Great!" So I got my book and I sat down, and thirty minutes later, no Robby. So I run up to the bedroom, and he's sitting there reading. And I said, "Robby, I thought we were going to read together." He said, "Are you reading?" I said, "Yes." He said, "I am, too. So we're reading together." He is an introvert.

Lexi, same week, we're gardening, we're planting tulips, we're three feet apart. And she's telling me all about how the grass might feel things and, "When Dad cuts the grass it might hurt. And do you think the grass can cry? Like if it feels things can it cry? And does it feel things? And Mom, I thought you said we were going to plant tulips together, and you're way over there." I was three feet away. "And I'm way over here." She is an extrovert.

And you know, you have to know that means that you are going to have to plant truth in each of those children differently. It doesn't mean you're going to plant different truth. It means that you plant it differently—parent-child connectedness. You can learn more about it in the two books.

The next thing I want to share with you is encourage creative role-playing. This is probably one of the most critical things that I've learned that impacts the eight to twelve-year-old years in terms of building the ability to have self-control to live a life of sexual purity. In the 1950s, Disney introduced something called the Thunder Burp. I don't know what it is. I just know it was a toy, and it has a weird name—the Thunder Burp. I think it was a gun. It probably made a burping sound. That is what I surmise anyway. But it was a new thing that there would be a commercial toy—something that confined play to a thing that you purchased was a brand-new phenomenon. It had never been like that before the 1950s. Before then play was about imagination and role-playing and being bored. God help us that our children should ever be bored. It turns out being bored is a really good thing to help them develop self-control.

I want to introduce you to the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex experiences two periods of very prolific growth. The first is in the first year of life. The first year of life, this part of the brain right up here grows very rapidly. And then it kind of settles down until that eight to twelve-year-old—until the stages of eight to twelve years—and then it begins to develop once again very, very rapidly. The thing about it that's so important is that the prefrontal cortex controls executive function. Executive function is what enables us to have self-control. Can you see how that would be a very critical component when your child is living a life of purity?

There are two things that impact the growth of the prefrontal cortex positively. The first one is parent-child connectedness. See point B. It seems that during that first year of life when your child is being touched and held and cuddled that that touch and that holding, the neurochemicals released by that touch actually help that part of the brain develop very prolifically. I don't tell this to you for your grandchildren or for those of you who still have babies or young children at home. Research also indicates that we tend to hold our daughters more than our sons during that first year. It's just kind of instinctive. And I think it's probably accurate, but it is no less important that we are cuddling and nurturing with our boys because it effects how their brains develop.

The next thing that develops—and it again, during the tween years this happens. And it's during the tween years that mothers and especially dads tend to be a little less tactile. But that would be a mistake because it's really important that we're tactile. And dads during those years when their daughters start to develop sometimes withhold hugs. Tell your husband, "Hug her once a day." Make it your rule until the day she's married. "I am man enough. You need no other man but me." And hugs once a day. Don't let them be afraid of those developmental years. Because the touching and the communication and the talking and the spending time together—this whole thing that our culture sells us that quality time is enough is an absolute myth. We need quantity of time.

The next thing that really impacts the prefrontal cortex growth is creative role-playing. And I think it kind of works like this. Okay, for example. A boy goes outside, and he sees a cliff that he could dive over, right, and jump into the river? All right. And moms are all, "No, no! Don't do it!" Actually it's a really good thing if he does because at the top of that cliff he has to decide, "Is this going to kill me? Or is it just going to really, really hurt a lot?" And that helps this part of the brain muscle up. Okay?

Another part for the girls, and this is perhaps true of boys, too, is that doll play is really an important thing between ages of eight and twelve—and the right kind of dolls—not the sexy Bratz dolls, but baby dolls. A line of dolls I really like is a line called Groovy Girls. They're rag dolls. They're a little expensive, but right on their website it says, "We are here to help parents have age-appropriate toys that help with the development of executive control." They know why they are creating their dolls. They're not creating them just for the mighty dollar, although it will cost you a mighty dollar to buy one of them, I will warn you. But I like them very much because when a girl gets that doll and she doesn't have a list of rules or certain things she has to do with a game, she has to decide what she will do with the game. She has to go through the process of thinking, "Am I going to play house? Am I going to play vet? Am I going to play school?" And those things muscle up prefrontal cortex.

What I'm trying to say is let your kids get bored. Stop over scheduling their lives so that from seven o'clock in the morning until eight o'clock in the night they have no time to get bored, so they have to go outside and play—create play. Don't give them too many toys. Let them get bored. Is everybody okay with this idea? They're going to drive you crazy! "Nothin' to do." I can hear it now, right? Let them get bored.

Celebrate their physical maturity. I just want to pop onto this one very quickly and say that for girls, 40 percent of women get their first period and have never heard of it from their mom or their dad. Scary. And for the rest of their lives they have a negative image of that part of their body and that experience in their body. You know why I find that to be just such a travesty? Is because really motherhood is one of the greatest gifts on the planet, is it not? And I want everything that my girls associate with motherhood to be joyful. And you know, childbirth isn't . . . you know . . . there was a moment where I was like . . . you know my body is pretty amazing. It just did a pretty amazing thing. But there were a few moments where I was like, "I am not doing this God. You find another way to make this happen." But all in all, I was able to rejoice in it, and they need to be able to rejoice in their reproductive system—not look at it as a negative thing.

I write in Six Ways to Keep the Little in Your Girl about a different way of looking at this—considering this approach—overriding the basic function of periods and just talking about what happens and talking about what they do. "God's creating your body—getting your body prepared to create life. This is awesome. This is beautiful." Show her the pictures of a baby in utero and show her how fantastic that life is. Tell her that God—this is such an exciting time because God's turning her into a woman. Celebrate it. Don't make it something to be feared.

For boys, oh moms. Okay. Buckle up. You could get hurt. I'm just telling you, I can't even say out loud to you the things that I wrote in Six Ways to Keep the Good in Your Boy, because it makes me blush still. But we make the mistake of believing that the changes in our boys' bodies are not as visible—like breast buds for example. They don't require care and teaching like taking care of your period. Or we believe that our boys are going to be less emotional, because they aren't going to bawl their heads off for no reason like our girls will when they're like between the age of twelve and thirty.

But here's what is PG and what I can say to you. The changes will be very visible. They just probably won't happen as early. One of the changes, for example, is that the neurochemicals that build muscle will be so overwhelming that even if he never lifts and he never works out, he's going to develop muscles. In fact, one time I walked into my son's room when he was about sixteen, and I blushed and ran out because there was a man in the bed. And there was—a man in the bed. But there are other very prolific visible changes that he'll notice, and he needs someone to talk him through those things.

Body care. We think they don't need body care. Wet dreams can be a very scary thing if they don't know what to do with them. You know what I think about wet dreams? I think they are a heroic symbol of his purity. I think they are a beautiful gift from God that says, "This young man is not living like the rest of the world." And so you need to have conversations with him—you and your husband—about how to care for his body and how to care for his sheets when that beautiful thing happens that is a gift from God. And that is just one area of body care.

His emotions. Oh, girls, your son, when your son turns about eleven, he's going to start body slamming you. I went to my husband and I said, "Something is wrong with Robby. He's not turning out." He said, "Why?" I said, "He keeps slamming me with his body." He said, "Oh, baby. Those are love slams." But there's so much testosterone coursing through his body that he doesn't know what to do with it but be aggressive. But you can help them with that.

Psalm 139 says, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made." If you do anything but make your children feel like their reproductive systems are fearfully and wonderfully made, you risk them not loving the idea of motherhood and fatherhood. If you need help with that, please get copies of the two books.

The two things that I really want to land on today, though, and this is where my heart is burning so be prepared. Build a vision of their spouse. So many times we spend so much time saying, "No, you can't date. No, you can't have sex. No, you can't talk to girls." When those are really negative messages, aren't they? Positive messages are far more potent than negative ones. Somebody say "amen" to that. We need to get that in our heads because it is so easy in the face of our culture to send so many negative messages.

I'd love for you to take a peek at 2 Timothy 3:1–5. It says, "Mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, . . . disobedient to their parents, . . . without love, . . . not lovers of the good, . . . lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people." This sounds a little bit like the culture we just looked at pictures of a few minutes ago, doesn't it? And the words there "without love" are actually the Greek word astorgos. And it just doesn't mean without love, it means without family love—without love of the one man and one woman unit, without love of being a mother and being a father. When Nancy Leigh DeMoss and I wrote Lies Young Women Believe, one of the biggest lies, one of the top twenty-five lies that teenage girls believe was that having a career was more fulfilling than being a wife and a mother. That is where we live. And our boys are believing that playing PlayStation and elongating their childhood is more wonderful than achieving the roles of father and husband. We are a society without family love.

We don't live in a society that embraces God's definition of family. Fifty Shades of Grey comes to mind and the women that are reading this erotica and saying, "It's enriching my marriage" are being fooled. They are being lied to, because the research indicates that when you look at erotica, when you look at pornography, that for a time it will arouse you and stimulate your sexual desire perhaps even for your spouse. But over time, because you are creating a neurochemical addiction—very different from a substance addiction. A substance addiction will make you want more. "I'm going back for more beer." I had a substance addiction. A neurochemical addiction happens in your brain. Your body can't sustain the level of satisfaction, and so it needs more of that neurochemical. And so a neurochemical doesn't make you want more, it makes you want different. Can you see how that would have a long-term harmful impact on your marriage? But we're applauding in the church and defending Fifty Shades of Grey.

I read letters from women every day. A million dollar bounty was set on Tim Tebow's virginity within the last year. Why do they hate it so much? There are adulterous matchmaking websites that are supposedly going to help us in our society have sexual pleasure without risking the loss of our marriages. Here's what I want to plant in you. And this is what I have a little bit of fire in my belly for, and I do not think that some of you are going to agree with me. So I'm going to read it just like I wrote it, because I'm scared.

How about if we start honoring marriage to the point of actually wanting, desiring, hoping for, and planning for it with your kids? It is completely behind the times. From a very little age we began telling our kids two things, "Love Jesus. Marry well. Love Jesus. Marry well. Love Jesus. Marry well. Everything else will fall into place if you get those two things right."

I mentioned my prayers for my twenty-two-year old son to find a wife soon to someone recently. And she asked me why I wanted him to get married so young. I think that my desire is very much in line with God's wonderful plan to hope that your children find their perfect match. God says that two are better are one. He says that marriage should be honored by all. Do we express that adequately to our children when we place greater emphasis on their career path than the road to marriage? For one thing, the incredible sexual pressure we place on our children in delaying sex—when a young woman's biological clock is ticking and a young man's sexual desire has peaked—makes it really difficult for them to wait. A lot of them won't and in having sex with someone before they're married, they have proven to themselves that they are fully capable of having sex with someone they are not married to. What's the difference after a ring?

Many parents cave into the myth that marrying young will increase the risk of divorce. But research conducted at the University of Texas and Penn State University reveals the age/divorce link is most prominent among teenagers—those who marry before the age of twenty. Marriages that begin at twenty, twenty-one, or twenty-two are not so likely to end in divorce as many presume. The average age of first marriage has risen from twenty-one for women to twenty-six; and twenty-three for men to twenty-eight. That's five additional long years of peak sexual interest and fertility that we're cheating our kids out of when we pressure them to wait. What I'm really asking you to do is to tell them that pursuing a family is more important than any degree that they will ever get and any job that they will ever have.

Okay, here's where this gets sticky. Become a praying mom. I was driving down the road the other day, and the Lord planted this one thought in my head. And oh, I thought, that's going to be a lot for some of us to unload. But it's this thought here. If you do not have an ongoing conversation with the Holy Spirit about raising your children to be set apart in this corrupt culture, you will become a paranoid mother whose legalism does not allow her children to face the giants God means for them to face. I have that on the back of your handout because it's important. And I'll read it again. If we do not have an ongoing conversation with the Holy Spirit about raising your children to be set apart in this corrupt culture, you will become a paranoid mother whose legalism does not allow her children to face the giants God means for them to face. You must have a moment-by-moment prayer life to know when and how to take on those giants, because there will be times when you allow your children to be exposed to things that are not holy because God has called them to an appointment in that place and time.

Lexi was twelve years old when I dropped her off at a pottery throwing class. Now I'd dropped her off there for months, but on this particular week there was a new art display out in the lobby. And the art display was an anti-God art display. It was one of the darkest most demonic things I have ever seen in my life. I can't even describe to you some of the images that I saw. At the back of this art display was a Bible with all of the words blocked out except three words to the page that was opened in the book of Revelation that said, "God is dead."

I did not want to leave my daughter there that day. But because I have a praying mother, I had become a praying mother. And I knew that my anger and my fear because the Bible says, "God does not give us a spirit of fear but of power and love and of a sound mind." My emotions took over. And so I knew to go out to the car and pray before I decided what to do. And in the car, as I sought the Lord, He said, "Leave her there, but don't leave." And so I prayer walked the building while she was in there. I prayer walked praying that my daughter wouldn't be impacted by the evil that she would be seeing that night—and there were some ugly things I didn't want my twelve-year-old to see.

When she got in the car, not knowing the battle of prayer that I had just prayed, she said, "Mom, you will not believe what happened tonight. There was a new girl. And she looked terrified. She was just sitting there and she was younger, she was probably nine years old and she looked terrified. And Mom, listen to me. She was scared, because we started talking about that art stuff out there. And my art teacher—he's, what is it when you don't believe in God?" I said, "An agnostic?" She said, "Yes! One of those! Well, and the other girl in the class, she was a . . . a . . ." No, no, no . . . atheist. Yes, I know my words. He was an atheist. Okay, let's back up. "My art teacher—he was what?" "An atheist." Yes, one of those. And she said, "The other girl in the class was agnostic. She doesn't know if God exists. And they started talking about hell, because of that art display. And I could see that this little girl was getting more and more scared. And so they started saying, "Well, it doesn't really matter because hell doesn't exist." And I said, "Are you sure about that? Because the way I see it, if you are right, it's not going to hurt me at all that I have Jesus. But if I am right, hey, I've got fire insurance and you don't." And that little girl stood up for Jesus that day because I wasn't a paranoid legalistic mom. I let her be exposed to something I was fearful of because the Spirit of God told me to.

And this past year, my sweet Lexi, God put it on her heart to go to India and minister to these kids. And they are beautiful kids who live in a village where they're sold on their twelfth birthday into sex slavery. And on that rooftop where you see those sweet faces and those coloring pictures, Lexi shared with them the idea of forgiveness from a curriculum that she wrote to be used in that village week after week by some missionaries that work there with these kids. And as she shared with them the story of Christ's death and resurrection and forgiveness and the hope of the gospel, in the door to the right of the picture stood the tribal chief that sells them. I would never choose for my daughter to be in that place. But I know this, that God has not called me to be a mom who has her so set apart that she does not slay the Goliaths in her life.

Let me tell you something. You know how David's dad was the one that sent him to take food to his brothers on the battlefield? No mom would ever do that unless she is so in touch with the Holy Spirit and she has planted truth that that truth can be planted in her kids that they can go across the ocean and plant the truth of purity and the gospel of Jesus Christ into others. And that's the point. The point is not to keep our kids sheltered. It's to keep them so set apart and holy that they can go out and be the gospel to a lost world.

So on the back of your sheet you have homework. I have Bible verses that I've treasured and pondered for each of these six things in the last few weeks. And I've written prayers for you so that you can begin praying for your kids with the Scriptures because I believe there is so much power in praying the Scriptures out loud over our kids. Sometimes I'm absolutely stuck, and I don't know how to pray for my kids. But then I pick up the Word, and I just pray it out loud and I put their names in there. And I want to encourage you to be that kind of a mom so that you know when to leave your kid in an art class and you know when to send them to India by themselves.

Let me pray for you. Father God, I pray for each woman in here that she would become a praying mother. And I pray that she would equip herself with tools—that might be friends that believe the same thing she believes; that might mean cleaning out some of her kid's schedules so that they have free time; that might mean buying books so that she becomes more armed about the decisions that she makes. But I pray, Father, above all that they would pick up Your Word and they would pray that truth and that Scripture over their children. And I ask this in the holy name of Jesus Christ. And everybody said "Amen."

Thank you! I love you, guys!