For a handful of us, we remember that awkward talk with our parents. THE talk. The one where many parents blushed and searched for words, mumbled some things under their breath and talked about the act of procreation.
For many of us we never had that talk. We just kinda pieced things together from friends, sex ed. at school, and increasingly porn caps off the education.
As the father of two sons and a daughter, I want to help my kids to understand more than the mechanics of sex. I want them to be prepared for a wider picture of the changes, challenges and temptations that arrive with adolescence.
This past weekend I took one of my sons away for the weekend and we used the Passport to Purity program by Family Life. This was my second time using this program and I found it to be very beneficial! This is not a paid infomercial and nobody has put me up to writing this blog. But I am so grateful for this resource that I wanted to pass it along.
The point of the material is somewhat in the timing. The goal is to get parents away for a weekend with their preteen child and go through a set curriculum that covers everything from peer pressure, physical changes, to rightly ordered sexual desire. The goal of the program is proactive instead of reactive. By the time that your son is chasing girls or your daughter is already flirting with the boys, they will likely find the program juvenile.
Having gone through the program a couple of years ago with my oldest, I have found that it was much more than THE talk. Instead, it has opened up an ongoing conversation . . . A conversation that picks up when we are on the way home from band practice or when he has a question as we are praying and talking before he goes to bed. The program has afforded me the privilege to enter into a dialogue with my boys that would not otherwise come naturally to me.
And the comprehensiveness of the curriculum helped me to delve into topics and subjects that most parents just couldn’t bring themselves to discuss. I recommend this program so highly that we have an offer at ReCAST Church to purchase the program for anyone who will take their preteen through the program.
One thing is for sure, if we do not intentionally engage our children at a young age, someone else will become an authority for them on the subject of sexuality. As we live in a society where adults are increasingly unbalanced on the subject of sexuality, we often forget that the kids are watching. One of my son’s questions over the weekend, “what do the signs on the highway mean when they show women and say ‘adult store’?” He had made that connection.
I was was happy to be the one answering that question for him!