Why I Told My Four Year Old About Condoms - It's Scriptural

“Mama, what is a condom?”

We were at a family member’s house when my four year old daughter decided that she needed to ask this question right now.

The family member, without missing a beat, said, “It’s condominium. It’s a place to live. We just call it an apartment.” My daughter looked puzzled and suspicious, but the family member kept smiling in an assuring manner.

I shot the family member a look, turned to my daughter, and said, “It’s something people use when they are trying not to have babies.”

“Oh,” my daughter said and returned to her Nutella sandwich.

It was the family member’s turn to shoot me a look and indicate that we should leave the room for a moment. I was pretty sure what was going to happen, and I was right.

“Don’t tell that baby that!” she said as the door closed between us and the kids. “She’s too young to know about stuff like that!”

“Evidently not, she asked and I am not going to lie to my children,” I stated. “And it’s not like I gave her the banana demonstration.”

This was just one of the many questions I got asked as parent, and one of the many times I found myself bucking the trend among my conservative Christian family and friends about how I answered them. I decided early in life that I was not going to raise my kids the way so many of my peers and I were raised. That is I was not going to raise them in a Christian bubble that denied or avoided all the ugly out there in the world in an attempt to protect my children’s innocence.

Several things lead me to this decision: My own experience in a marriage where my now ex-husband’s sexual practices were so foreign to me that I did not know how to cope. The number of “good Christian kids” who were first stunned, then shaken, and then embracers of values new and exotic that they discovered when they left their parents’ home, and the large number of these kids who became victims of abuse because they were not prepared to deal with real world.

It was not an easy decision. Friends and family could not understand why I would be so frank with my children about the hard realities of this world, and they were not shy in telling me that I was screwing my kids up by telling them these things. “They are just children,” “They are little girls,” “Babies don’t need to hear that”, or “I can’t believe you told her that” were constant refrains in my life. Nor did the girls make it any easier because they did something that few kids are willing to do to their parents – they asked me the hard questions, and the questions just kept getting harder as they grew older because they knew they could trust me to give them an honest answer.

I won’t lie. It wasn’t always easy and there were times that I had to fight not to flinch. Like the one night my daughter calmly asked, “Is anal sex what you do when you are on your period?” I had to take a deep breath and remind myself that I was the cool mom – and try not to choke on the fish we were having for dinner. (In the meantime, Ty has fallen out of his chair and had small seizure in the dining room floor.) Turns out that the cafeteria conversation among the thirteen year olds at school had revolved around this topic that I was blissfully oblivious to until I was twenty one and married.

So why did I do it? Even when it was one of the most difficult and unpopular things I have ever done in my life?

I never allowed myself to think of my children as “little girls”. They were young women who just happened to be little girls at that time. My job was never to keep them in that state or to hold them in some type of stasis. In fact, my job was the exact opposite of this. My job was to help them become women who could handle whatever the world had to offer them and help them not flinch when confronted by those realities that I could not protect them from indefinitely. Talking about these things at home, where it was safe, where they could consider different and opposing views without outside pressure or threats, where they could ask why this or that was contrary to our faith, or why it might be a danger physically or emotionally, gave them the room to determine their course of action before someone else could present a counter-argument that just made mom look like a naïve relic.

I, also, believe that this is a Scriptural approach to parenting. Stop and consider these verses:

Therefore impress these My words upon your very heart: bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead, and teach them to your children – reciting them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up; and inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and one your gates – to the end  that you and your children may endure, in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers to assign to them as long as there is a heaven over the earth. Deuteronomy 11:18-21

What were these words? The Torah, otherwise known as the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures! The laws that God handed down to Moses on Siani, the ones that recorded the history of the Jewish people with all the sex and violence that anyone could want, the ones the described proper sexual expressions, how to deal with bodily fluids, rape, incest, homosexuality, witchcraft, death, burial, childbirth, and so much more! Teaching the Bible, really teaching it and not just doing a cute flannel graph presentation of it, means that we talk about the hard issues with our kids.

I know someone is reading this thinking, “But our lessons need to be age appropriate!” Really? Your ideas of age appropriate or God’s?

Jewish custom dictates that children should begin learning Torah as soon as they can speak, and by the age of 13 they are responsible for fulfilling all the laws contained in the Torah. Now, how can they fulfill what they do not know? And remember we are not talking about the Ten Commandments, we are talking about the entirety of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – not something you are going to cram into a six month crash course. This is why formal training in the Torah began at the age of five.

And we should consider the example of Jesus in Luke 2:41-52 when he was found at the Temple asking questions of the teachers and amazing them with his understanding and answers. What would the standard conversation have been between the teachers and boy of twelve? It would have been about the Torah, double checking to see if his parents had been faithful in their obligation as presented in Deuteronomy. Luke specifically tells us that Jesus was growing/filled in wisdom, both before and after this passage, and in rabbinic debate we find that to be wise was to be “wise in Torah.”

Now this is where I could get lost in a big long lesson about how each part of the Bible hinges on another and that cutting and pasting the pretty parts together while ignoring the messy bits leaves us with nothing but fluff that will not sustain our faith. I won’t, at least not here, but I could and so could anyone who took the time to really study the totality of its message.

Unfortunately, this is what we have done for our kids and we wonder why their faith crumbles the moment they leave home. The issues addressed in the Bible were meant to be taught in the safe and loving environment of the home. They were not to be ignored because they make parents uncomfortable. They weren’t to be skipped over in favor stories that we can give the Precious Moment treatment – no! We are to discuss it all, and when we do we will find that there is no modern issue of sex that is left unaddressed. All the answers and tools our children need to make wise decisions is right there, but if we are shielding our kids from it then we do them a disservice in offering a form of religion without the substance of wisdom.

Furthermore, we need to remember that these words were not given in a sexual vacuum. Quite the contrary, with temple prostitution, the small cramped houses, the agrarian lifestyles, sex was at the center of the ancient world. Daily families would have been confronted by the need to teach wisdom and truth their children concerning this issue. Thankfully, God gave them the means to do so in His Word, and notice what you don't find, you don't find any commands to deny reality or to hide the truth from your children. Instead we are told to discuss these things at every waking moment and teach them to guard their hearts, a command that I believe encompasses the need to guard their trust in our integrity and courage by speaking even the uncomfortable truths. (Proverbs 4:20-27, A passage written by a father to a son and is followed by blunt discussion over the dangers of adultery.)

This is why I don’t worry about the news stories or what TV shows. In our home, they were just an opportunity to dive deeper into what the Bible had to teach us about sex and sexuality. We turned what is tearing so many families apart into a springboard for what brought us closer together, and my children learned three significant lessons from this approach – 1. God is not ashamed or confused by sexual issues. 2. There are answers to be found in His Word. 3. They can always come to me with the hard questions and I won’t flinch because the God I serve doesn’t flinch.

Together we can seek out the answers and there is no shame in having the question or need to fear a world that does not share our faith.

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