Navigating the teenage years has never been easy, whether you’re the parent or the child. So as parents, how can you help your teenager or pre-teen have a better experience? What practically can you do to put them in a stronger position to navigate their teenage years safely, with more clarity about God’s love for them and design for their sexuality?
Three guests – James Talbert, Josh Miller, and Chelsey Nugteren – joined Juli to share some much-needed practical advice for raising surrendered kids in our current cultural moment.
Prefer to listen? Listen to the full episode here.
Juli (00:01.678)
Hey there, friend. So I want to take a minute to invite you to think back to your teenage or preteen years. Maybe you don’t want to go there. If you’re like me, it’s probably been a couple years and might be hard to actually cast your mind back to what it was like to be a teenager. Maybe you remember feeling like you were lost and everybody else knew what they were doing except for you or all the focus was on you. They could see your weakness.
Maybe you remember your body doing really weird things that you didn’t fully understand or like and sensing pressure to fit in Well, I am your host of Java with Juli My name is Juli Slattery and let me remind you that this podcast is an outreach of Authentic Intimacy Which is a ministry dedicated to helping you make sense of God and sexuality For a lot of us those teenage years were tough. And let me just say things have not gotten easier.
When we look at their research on the level of depression and anxiety and stress for teenagers today, it’s pretty overwhelming. If you’re a parent, you are likely wanting your teen or preteen to have a better experience than you did. So how are you going to help them do that? What practically can you do to put them in a better position to navigate their teen years with wisdom and safety and clarity about God’s love for them specifically around his design for their sexuality?
Well, the conversation that you’re getting ready here today is a panel that we did at our Reclaim Conference in 2024. I invited three guests. James Talbert is a coach and pastor. Josh Miller, pastor, and Chelsey Nugteren works with the Navigators. All of them, themselves, are parents, and they talk about some of the practical challenges parents are facing today as they seek to raise kids who know and love Jesus.
And I think this conversation will be one that covers some difficult truths, but also provides encouragement to you if you are a parent. So let’s go ahead and jump into my conversation with James, Josh, and Chelsey.
Juli
All right, well, you are here for the breakout session on parenting and sexuality. Let me introduce to you our panel. So James Talbert over here is not only the pastor of Citizen Church in downtown Akron, but also you teach at CVCA, the Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy. So I love, James, the diversity of your experience, both with some inner city work with kids and teens, but also with kids in sort of the Christian subculture. And you and your wife have one daughter?
James
Yeah.
Juli
How old is she? Jada?
James
Seven.
Juli
Jada’s seven. Let’s make sure your mic’s working. All right, Chelsey Nugteren. She actually, her and her husband and family, their three daughters were in the Netherlands for how many years were you there serving?
Chelsey
Four years.
Juli
Serving as missionaries with the Navigators. Chelsey and I actually met when we both were working at Focus on the Family.
Juli (03:04.948)
Small fact here, she was one of my co-writers for Sex and the Single Girl. So Chelsey has had a heart just for parenting and sexuality and youth culture for many years. And so we’re grateful to have your expertise, but also you’re in the thick of it as a mom. And you know, like, culture is even crazier some places in Europe, right? Yeah. All right. And then Josh Miller. Josh is married to Kristi Miller. Where’s Kristi? Over here. Kristi is the person who runs AI. Like for real, this conference would not happen without Kristi and Josh. And so Josh is the Children’s and Youth Pastor at Riverwood Chapel, which is a local church around here. You’ve been doing that for how long?
Josh
For seven years. Yeah, over seven years now.
Juli
They have two of the most adorable kids you’ve ever seen.
Josh
We think so too.
Juli
Yeah, they’re amazing. All right. So you guys ready for some questions? Let’s do it. Okay. Let me also mention we’ve got a Slido that scan we’re going to put up there.
Juli (04:03.81)
This is not for me to ask my questions, I get to do that all the time on Java with Juli. This is for me to ask your questions that you have about parenting and sexuality. So please go ahead and just start typing those questions in and I will be monitoring those and asking those. But we’re gonna start out with a broad one just to kind of get things started.
You know, when even as parents are listening to the things that they’ve heard over the last 24 hours at this conference, and their blood pressure might be rising in terms of, my goodness, like, my kids are growing up in this world. I’m seeing the statistics on pornography, LGBTQ, abuse. Where do I even start? Like, nobody ever talked to me about sex. I don’t want to do the purity culture message. Where do we start? And so, you know, again, that’s a broad question, but I’d love for each of you just to kind of say, hey, here’s maybe a starting place, and we’ll just kind of work down the panel that way. So, James?
Yeah, I think a great place to start is to actually start. So if you look at youth culture right now, you look at Gen Z, which is a sociological designation of what most of your kids probably are. And if you have young kids, they’re probably in Gen Alpha, but they resemble this. So says Barna as well. They are a generation that seeks vulnerability. So vulnerability for them is a gateway to truth.
So for us, it may be facts, information, it may be a more objective presentation of information, but for them, vulnerability is a gateway to truth. So the best way to start, especially with your teens, is to just start. It’s to just have a conversation. And for them, vulnerability breeds vulnerability. So in very real sense, it’s to share with them.
Your past, to share with them parts of your experience in a vulnerable way will lead them to a place of vulnerability. Because they’re not just watching what you’re saying in instructive moments. They’re watching what you’re saying and doing in non-intentional instructive moments. So I would say a great way to start is to just start and to lead with vulnerability.
Chelsey (06:18.4)
I’m on the younger side of parenting. My daughters are ages five, seven, and nine, so I’m also learning a lot as I go. I feel like they’re still in that young stage, not super curious or asking questions that I can’t answer quite yet. And so I feel like the stage that I’m in, what I’m trying to discover for myself is like, I need to be okay where I’m at and understand my sexuality and have health around that and display that in our home and in our marriage and make sure my girls are surrounded by people, where they’re seeing health, sexuality and played out in other people’s marriages and our church and in people’s lives and just surrounding them by those people. But I think starting with myself, because they’re gonna start asking questions. And we’ve had conversations, we’ll probably get to that here soon, but I think it starts for me staying connected to Jesus so when the time comes when they ask those questions that.
Yeah, they’re learning from the example that they see in my life, but that I know that when they come to me, I’m prepared.
Josh
Beautiful. And that’s where my mind’s going to, Chelsey, is we can’t give away as parents what we don’t have. And so I would encourage parents to not just talk to their kids about sex, but what do sexual conversations look like with your friends, with the life group that you’re in, with your spouse if you’re married. I know the statistics are high on how many not just married couples who don’t have sex, but who don’t talk about their sex life. So I think just becoming more familiar and comfortable with having those conversations, those appropriate conversations in the right context so that it becomes more natural to talk to your kids. I think a shift that we’ve had to make is to take the pressure off feeling like you have to have this one time conversation where, hey, let’s have that one weekend. Let’s do the birds and the bees and man, we better get it all right because that’s like our shot.
Josh (08:19.79)
To transition away from a one-time conversation to this is an ongoing conversation to make it natural. We, it sounds like all of us are in the stage of like having young kids. And so we get the opportunity to build in our, culture of our family, like, hey, we’re going to talk about anything. We will just talk about anything. And we want our kids to talk to us about anything that they’re experiencing. And so one aspect of that is like questions that they may have, but we want to create a culture of we’re not scared when our kids have questions of things that happened at school or whatever, that we want to have a safe place in our home that conversations can happen naturally.
Juli
All right, great. I know you guys would do awesome with that advice there. All right, we’re going to dive into some of the more specific questions. How do you protect your kids online? How do you deal with things like social media apps, access to the internet? James, I know this is something that you speak quite a bit about and see where we start with advice on that.
James
Where do you start? Yikes. Right, social media, online stuff. Where in the world do you start? The statistics say that all of us spend far too much time, so around on average five hours a day is spent looking at some sort of screen. Where do you start? And then you go to teens and that number of hours rises. So the reality is, what Bishop Juli–in my church background and culture, we call people who preach like that bishops. So Bishop Juli, amen. She talked earlier about the stream of culture and the water of culture. And the reality is, our students, our kids, are being formed by that water of culture. So I would say where to start is with reverse formation. I would say where to start is not actually with social media at all.
James (10:21.41)
I would say where to start is with conversations. Our children are people, and they’re people who can be taught. And when they see things, they will do those things. So I would say to not even start on social media, but then I would also say some great resources and things to look at. There’s a guy named Tristan Harris, and he runs the Center for Humane Technology. So that’s a not-for-profit that he started. He worked in Silicon Valley, and he worked for Google, and he was an ethicist for them, and he decided that what was happening was actually unjust. He calls it the attention economy. He has a documentary on Netflix called “The Social Dilemma”. That’s actually something good to look at. There’s some things you can take away from “The Social Dilemma”, and there’s some resources on his website also. It’s ways to keep kids safe. So, built in to many of the social media platforms that your kids are using, there are safeguards, and there are ways to learn about those safeguards. And Tristan Harris, I think, does a really good job of explaining that in simple ways. So I would say the Center for Humane Technology, if you’re looking for really practical ways to go about that, there are a lot of safeguards that are there on his website.
Juli
Thanks. Chelsey?
Chelsey
We had the gift of living in the Netherlands for four years and I got to learn that the screen-based parenting is a very American problem. so living in Europe for those four years, you don’t go into a restaurant and see all the kids on their own iPad. And we were just kind of blown away. And our kids are pretty young. When we moved, they were four, two, and two months. And so we felt like we got to kind of be discipled in that culture and watch how they use technology with kids or the lack thereof.
Chelsey (12:11.404)
And so then moving back to the States last year and just seeing, yeah, going into a restaurant and seeing every child with a screen or just at the airport yesterday. And I get it. Like I’m a mom of little kids and sometimes you just gotta cook dinner. And sometimes you just need to give them a screen so you can get something done for five minutes. But something in our home that we’ve realized is like we have agency for when we give them a screen and when we allow them to watch something. So seeing some of these numbers are pretty staggering and we have some pretty strict screen rules in our home. Our girls watch TV on Saturday mornings and that’s it. It was hard I feel like in the beginning because when they were littler, know, I’d let them watch something like Cook Dinner or For A Minute of Sanity but as we’ve like weaned them off of it, they don’t even ask for it anymore. And so I think we’ve just discovered like we have agency, we’re the parents and we can say no. They don’t need to be on a screen, there’s other things that they can do and so I think thinking about screens too, just having more boundaries around it. It’s pretty shocking. I know if you’ve read Anxious Generation, just seeing some of those statistics are pretty eye-opening for me as a mom of three girls and thinking about what they could be moving into. But our step where we’re at right now with having this young of kids is just no screens.
Josh
Yes, we have a 9 and 11 year old and so our 11 year old has already started asking when she can get a phone. And so we think that there’s wisdom in waiting as long as possible. And I know that that’s kind of a great answer. We know that there’s a push for wait for 8, meaning wait until 8th grade. And so I think that there’s also wisdom in seeking out other families that are like minded to. So when the kids say like “All my friends have a phone”, you can say like, “but not this friend and this friend and this friend” to kind of help delay that. And what’s also convicting is like, why are our kids wanting phones? Well, they see me on my phone and they see my wife on her phone. And I think as parents, we need to do a better job in our own homes of having boundaries on our phones and also thinking through what are the steps that we’re going to take our kids through? Because the reality is they’re going to live in a digital world.
Josh (14:27.778)
So we need to help prepare them for that as opposed to like, “Hey, now that you’re 18 and on your own, figure this all out on your own”. And we think that there’s wisdom in creating stair steps while they’re in our home to help prepare them for that. Just like you don’t throw the car keys at your 16 year old and say, luck, and give them all the freedom. There’s stair steps to freedom. There also needs to be some stair steps digitally to help prepare them for how to use it. And I would say the phone, that’s our phone. We’ve bought the phone.
Josh (14:57.646)
We’re paying for the phone. And so at any moment in time, we’re going to, you know, that’s our phone. And so we can remove it from you or we can look at it and see what’s on it. Like it is our phone and you’re not ready yet to fully understand how to navigate this. Yeah.
Juli
Good advice, tough to stand against culture in that. But it’s interesting to see some of the even tech giants, the people who work for the tech companies, they’re not maybe Christians, but they’re like, we’re not giving our kids phones, because we see what they do. So yeah, it’s convicting. Okay, we’ve got a lot of questions around LGBT, and we will be addressing some of this in our last panel, but I would like to ask the question: How do we teach our kids about biblical sexuality, particularly around sexual orientation and gender orientation, and root them in biblical sexuality while also not projecting judgment and teaching them to love like Christ loves?
Chelsey
I would just say being gracious with yourself in that process too. My five-year-old, when we’re living in the Netherlands, a friend came to school and was telling her how she had gone to a wedding that weekend of her two uncles. And so our five-year-old comes home and she is confused and asking questions, and we’re like doing our best. This is our first conversation about this. And so my husband and I were like trying to explain things to her and what God’s best is and what his good story is. And she comes home the next day just weeping. And she’s like, “Ada’s uncle is going to hell!” and she’s crying. And we’re like, that’s not what we were trying to say! And so I think being gracious with yourself and like you said too, it’s not one conversation, but it’s an open door for an ongoing formational journey that you get to have with your kids. But taking those opportunities to have conversations, to share about God’s design, what God’s best is, his story of love and pursuit over us.
Chelsey (16:53.922)
But yeah, being gracious, if sometimes they get the message a little bit different than what you tried to portray, then try again the next time.
Juli
Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, I’m sure living in the Netherlands, it’s like you guys over there were a little bit in front of us on this. so these are, and I love what you said there, to give yourself grace. Like we as adults are trying to figure this out. And I would just say in this generation, like no one knows, like we can’t say, this is how our grandparents did it. Like everything is sort of figuring this out in real time with the wisdom of God.
All right, this is a heavy one. How can I help my child who is a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a peer? And we know this happens all too often.
James
Yeah, so this is really difficult and to step into this with deep sensitivity. So I exist in two very different worlds and two very different cultures every day. So I go to my day job. I’m a teacher at a school that is in an area that’s pretty affluent. It costs a lot of money to go there. So the kids who go there deal with one set of issues.
James (18:06.168)
And then I go home, I live in downtown Akron, and I love my little neighbors. I love, yeah, Tykesia, and I love Xavier a whole lot. Those are my little pals. And the things that they struggle with are incredibly different, but one core longing that they all have that I believe is a ubiquitous longing is to be safe.
So if you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, like safety is one of the core longings that they have. And the reality is when a kid’s safety is breached, and when they’re sexually harmed or when they’re sexually abused, that’s gonna leave a scar on them for a long time. We know Jesus can heal wounds, and we believe that he breaks chains and heals wounds, but this is a scar that’s gonna live on a kid for very long time.
So in very real and a very practical sense, a kid who lives in my neighborhood, the school, the high school in our cluster is a middle school and a high school put together, and the separating barriers kind of don’t exist. So in a very real way, there’s like 11 year olds who are in a building with 18 year olds. So one of our middle school kids, who’s one of my neighbors, would tell me often, like, I hold it until I get home, because I’m afraid to go to the bathroom. And at first I would say to him, like, man, you gotta go to bathroom, dude. You don’t need to hold it all day, you’ll get a UTI, bro. Go to the bathroom. And one day I was in front of my house and he came up and sat on my porch and he just starts telling me about something that happened to him in the bathroom that shouldn’t have happened to him at all. Now, the reality of his life is like, he has no idea where his dad’s at. Yeah, his mom’s working a lot. She’s just trying to make ends meet. So him and his little brother are like running up and down our street all day because they’re alone often. And he needs people to pray for him. He needs people to listen to him. And my wife’s a clinical counselor, so she was able to connect him with clinical help. He needed clinical help.
James (20:27.746)
So there’s a spiritual side of it where there are people. There’s myself and there’s many other mentors who are part of our community who are investing in his life, who are praying for him, who are trying to show him a better way, who are listening and who are talking to him. But there’s also a very real clinical aspect of it where things are now being unearthed and where he’s able to be with a professional who is helping him through that experience. As Christians, we love Jesus. Jesus is dope. Bless up. She was up here singing. I felt the Holy Ghost in the back, almost passed out.
I’m sorry, I’m a Pentecostal, I almost passed out in the back. I felt the Holy Ghost when she was up here singing. We need that, we need the Holy Ghost, but we also need the Holy Spirit who works through clinical therapists as well. And if something like that has happened, yeah, you can clap for that, amen. And if something like that has happened to your child, you’re doing them a disservice. Just like if their arm was broken, they need a cast. They go to the doctor. Clinical therapists are good.
So I would say Jesus and therapy.
Juli
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, and that safety piece is so huge. And it’s great that your child was able to tell you, because a lot of times they’re afraid to tell anyone. A few other things I would say is don’t be the investigator. So from a parent’s point of view, sometimes you want to be like, what exactly happened? How did it happen? And that’s really not your role. It’s more just, honey, I’m so sorry. Let me hold you. Let me just weep with you. I’m always here if you want to talk.
Juli (21:58.018)
Don’t be the therapist, don’t be the investigator. Like those are other roles, you’re the parent. And the other thing I think is really critical, whether this happens to a child or an adult, one of the things that haunts us is the fear that this was my fault. And so it’s really important to assure them that this was not your fault, not at all. Like this was horrible, it shouldn’t have never happened. And a lot of times the trauma we experience younger as children or teens, we start to deal with them at another layer as we get older too. So not all that work is gonna be done in the teen years, but it’s great to start some of that as much as they’re able to process.
Juli (22:40.174)
Hey friends, if you’ve been listening to Java with Juli for a while, then you know that this podcast is listener-supported and you might not know exactly what that means. Well, as a ministry, the majority of the work that we do is made possible only through generous donations from people who engage with our resources online, read our blogs, and listen to our podcast. So if this podcast has been a blessing to you and you like what we’re doing at Authentic Intimacy,
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Juli (23:39.576)
All right, let’s move on. One person asked, how do I parent around biblical sexuality if I’m married to somebody who’s not a Christian?
James
So if you’re married to someone who’s not a Christian, there are lots of parents that I know who aren’t married at all and who are traversing through that. There are lots of parents that I know who are in wildly broken relationships who are traversing through that. So I would say that, yeah, that situation is not ideal to try to parent a kid, and especially if their other parent is not a Christian and is trying to guide them in the other direction. So man, like, whoever asked that question, that is incredibly difficult. And man, do we see you. Man, that’s incredibly difficult. I would also say that, man, the Holy Spirit works through individuals and through communities. So the Holy Spirit can work through a healthy marriage, which is a community of people trying to parent and invest a child. But the Holy Spirit can work through you as an individual as well. So I would say, man, to pray, stand 10 toes down, trust God’s word, and continue to just, in word and deed, guide your kid in that direction. At the same time, pray for your spouse. Pray for your spouse. And yeah, again, God works through communities. So in that situation, I’m sure if you’re a part of a church, there are other male role models there who would be willing to speak into those situations. Yeah, pastors, youth pastors, but man, some of the best male role models are just folks who are sitting in the pews who would be unsuspecting. So I would say, yeah, pray and look into the Christian community around you for other male role models as well.
Josh (25:29.364)
All right, yeah. Yeah, James, that’s where my mind was going to is just I wouldn’t want that person to feel like they’re alone in the fight. And so, yeah, ideally, there’s two Christian parents who are pouring into their kids when that’s not happening. Just make sure that you have others in your life who are speaking into you, encouraging you, friends, mentors, pastors in a life group, whatever that looks like, so that you don’t feel alone in that. Yeah.
Juli
And I would add also, find places where you agree. Even as we’ve shared these last few sessions, there’s a lot of social science that talks about the harm of pornography and hooking up and even depression rates among kids that are struggling with gender identity and things like that. So lean into the natural sciences to say, hey, you both have the same goal of raising a healthy kid who is free from harm. And so we might start even with that. Here’s what we do agree on, even though maybe the road to get there looks a little bit different for each of us. There are a number of questions that you all are asking about pornography. One of them I think is good, like, do you confront porn use? Do you ask your teen about it? What do you do if you see them watching porn on their phone? So maybe just some thoughts on how to disciple kids through technology and pornography use.
Chelsey
I was just gonna say, like I said, my girls being young, that hasn’t been an issue specifically porn yet, but I think starting when they’re young, teaching them how to articulate if they see something that they’re uncomfortable with. And so, like I said, we have very limited screen time, very specific shows that they watch on Saturday mornings when they do watch TV. I forgot, we do watch TV on Sundays, we watch the Great British Baking Show as family. So we also do that.
But there was a show that a friend of mine recommended to me, allowing the girls to watch it, and then one day I was like, how was your show? And my seven-year-old got really squirmy, and she’s like, well, Mom, I think you’re gonna make a stop watching it because so-and-so, now she has two moms, then her friend over there has two dads down the street. And I was like, wow, thank you for sharing that with me. And again, led to another conversation.
Chelsey (27:42.872)
But I feel like we had done a good job of having conversations with them of like, if you see things that make you feel uncomfortable or you think that aren’t God’s best, talk to us about it. So I was so proud of her in that moment. So I think although we’re not maybe to that stage yet, monitoring what they watch, because yeah, even in cartoons, they’re grooming kids to desire things that they aren’t desiring naturally. And so helping them have conversations with you about what they see that makes them feel uncomfortable.
Josh
I think a hard pill to swallow, one that we as parents need to is to shift from if my child is going to view pornography to when they’re going to view pornography. I mean, the statistics are through the roof. And so we shouldn’t be surprised when our kids view pornography. So to prepare, if that hasn’t happened yet, to really prepare for what am I going to do in that situation?
To practice your “I’m not surprised” face in the mirror and to really plan through like how will I react graciously and with understanding and to help walk them through that. I do think that it’s really important to not just tell the next generation what not to do but to explain why pornography is damaging and what the goodness of sex is. Because we don’t have that answer. It’s just kind of like behavior management. So to explain why God has created sex in the way that he has for a covenantal marriage and how pornography really is a distortion of that, I think we need to frame it in a big picture and help them explain the why as opposed to just, you know, it’s just something bad and you’re not supposed to do.
Juli (29:35.426)
Yeah, and I’m big on discipleship. And so one of the things that I had to learn as a parent was to shift my mindset from, want to keep my kids unharmed and pure, to know actually that’s not the goal of parenting. The goal of parenting is to introduce them to the love and grace of Jesus. And all of us in our own stories, whatever we might have encountered, we were lost in our sin before we really learned to rely on Jesus. And so it’s that shifting from always protecting and it’s a big failure if something happens to, all right, where’s the grace of God in this? And how do we disciple towards confession and repentance and freedom and healing and dependence on the Holy Spirit? And that’s something that I’m still learning in my own life, but also just something that I’m learning, wow, that’s the model of discipleship that Jesus gave us that we need to take into parenting.
James
Yeah, just one more thing to add on there. So one thing we’re doing at CVCA right now, the school that I teach at, we’re having a whole lot of conversations with parents about this right now. What he’s saying is true. The numbers are staggering nationally, but I would say even the numbers locally, they’re staggering. One thing that we’re finding really, really helpful is the education of parents in that.
So I would say parents, like at all levels, whether you have small children like us or whether you have teenagers, like seek to educate yourself. Like pornography is not what it was in the 1990s. So it’s probably your children are experiencing it differently than you may have heard about it. There’s a lot of insider language that goes into that. If your kid is on social media, then they’re watching like, I hate to be the bearer bad news, but their Explore Page is, yeah, the way the algorithm works, it’s going to pop it in there some way somehow. So I would, like, if you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say Explore Page, like, you have to educate yourself around what that is now.
James (31:50.55)
So the what and the where of pornography are huge and they’re good. There a lot of good resources that you can look at towards that. I’ll be around here afterwards. I’d love to point you at some, but yeah.
Josh
And last thing I would say is I would view it less as a disciplinary issue and more of a discipleship issue of, you know, we want to be the type of parents that when our kids are in trouble, they run to us, not that they run away from us. And so again, that’s a bigger, broader umbrella of like how we’re parenting in general. But that’s something we’re striving to be so that we’re when they’re in situations. Yeah, I would just encourage like, you know, if pornography is something that your child or student is wrestling with to not view it as like, disciplinary issue. Now there may be a time where it’s like, okay, you know, we’re to take a break from the phone or that sort of thing. I get that. But to see it as more of an opportunity to disciple and to introduce the gospel and the grace that we all need as opposed to like coming down with a hammer and being really hard disciplinary wise.
Juli
Yeah, boy, these kids, they’re just in over their heads. I mean, we as adults have trouble with this, but our kids, they really do need that discipleship. I can’t hear everything on stage, just because of the echo. I don’t know if you had mentioned it, but I really recommend the website, axis.org. They do a really good job of keeping you up to date on some of the slang of culture, some of the trends, some of the things that our kids are dealing with, but also giving you what they call conversation kits, little short videos you can watch with students or kids and talk some things through with them.
James (33:24.328)
Yeah, and just a few others. The Barna Institute just came out with a really good report on pornography. has a lot of good resources in it. You can go to Barna.com and you can look up that report. It’s on pornography. It’s incredible. And then Covenant Eyes, I believe they have a booth outside, but Covenant Eyes has incredible resources on their website. I read their blogs like weekly. Like, it’s absolutely incredible. And yeah, a lot of the stuff that I talk about parents with comes from Covenant Eyes website. So they’re incredible as well.
Juli
Yeah. We kind of started with this question, but I want to go back to it a little more detail. Some people are asking like, when do we start having these conversations? Because I don’t want to expose my kids to things that they’re not ready to hear about, but I also don’t want to wait too long. So do you have some recommendations on sort of that age appropriate, like at this age talk about this, at this age start talking about this issue, just some general generalities?
Josh
Yeah, I think there are some intentional things you can do, like developmentally, like maybe it makes sense at this age to sit down with this book and go through your child and as they become teenagers, like have some intentional conversations. I think there are some intentional things to do, like maybe put it on the calendar. And my wife’s a lot better than I am to like remind us like, hey, we need to be having these conversations. But I also think just look for opportunities, like class is kind of always in session.
Josh (34:55.949)
So a few weeks ago, my son was asking why can’t he watch rated R movies? He’s been asking about like, what’s the difference between PG and PG-13 and rated R? And he’s like, he’s got a couple of buddies that they watched a rated R movie from, you know, at school or whatever. So he’s like, why can’t we watch rated R movies? And so I was just like, okay, this is an opportunity, right? Like, okay, Levi, do you, like, why can’t we? Like what is in rated R movies that is not good? And he’s like, well, bad words. I’m like, yeah, bad words. What else? He’s like, you know, fighting and violence and like, yeah, that’s right. I’m like, do you know anything else? He’s like, no. I said, well, do you know that sometimes radar movies have naked people in them? And he’s like, no, I didn’t know that. I’m like, well, why might that be bad, right? Why would it be bad to see someone naked? And he’s like, well, cause it’s our private parts. I’m like, yeah, you’re right. And remember like God has created that to be between like two married people. And so that would be inappropriate to see that.
And then he was like, okay, will you time me as I run to that tree and back? You know, he was like, you know, like, can you time me? I want to like see how fast they am like, yeah, sure. Okay, go ahead. You know, and so conversation was clearly over, but, but it did. I don’t know. It’s just that small, like, I’m going to try to have it be natural. Just like see a crack of like, I think I can talk about this here. And then like, at least at his age, it’s like, okay, now, you know, one of those squirrel moments of like, he’s onto the next thing. So, I think looking for those things that come up in parenting of like just being willing to enter in and see like the questions that they’re having and maybe it leads down a way to bring something up like that.
Juli
We have a number of questions around schooling. So some people are asking private school, public school, home school. Another parent is saying, I’m worried about the things that my kid is being exposed to in school. I think we have a teacher or two in here and a public school is saying, how do I get healthy messages to a kid and to our kids in the school? So I know you all have different experiences with schooling. So if you want to give some advice on that.
Juli (37:02.99)
You want to start?
James
Yeah, I guess I’ll start. Yeah, so again, I have like, I live in two very, very different worlds. So I teach at a private Christian school. Wonderful folks, wonderful school. If you’re thinking about sending your kids to a private Christian school, go ahead and send them to the academy. Very nice place. And again, I live in downtown Akron and we’re really connected to the public school system there.
James (37:30.804)
My daughter goes to the school that’s like right outside of my house. It is a very public school and it struggles with all the public school stuff. So the public school down the street closed because of resources and there’s 200 more kids in my daughter’s school now than there was last year. So that alone, the mobility rate in my daughter’s school is 60%. What that means is 60 % of the kids who start the year at that school don’t end there.
So it’s an incredibly transient school, in a transient neighborhood, because it sits between two homeless shelters. So very different experiences. I would say that there’s pros and cons to all the experiences. And I would say that school is not a one-size-fits-all thing. I would say for some kids, and for some families, and for some parents, home school can work, and home school can be absolutely wonderful, and it can be absolutely what the kid needs.
For some kids, private Christian school is good and it’s wonderful. And for other parents and other families and other kids, public school, especially depending on what school system you have and what your personal value system is. I would say like, we run into problems as Christians when we try to make things like where we send our kids to school biblical doctrine. Those aren’t biblical doctrines. Those are our perspectives.
And I think it’s okay. You know your kids best. You know what culture you’re trying to facilitate in your home. And I think with that, you have the Holy Spirit and you have community around you to help you discern what the Spirit is doing that will give you the ability to make good decisions around schooling.
Josh
And when I talk to parents about this decision, I kind of jokingly say like, you kind of have to pick your path of how you want to screw your kid up. Do you want to screw your kid up by sending him to public school? Do you want to screw him up by sending him to private school? Or do you want to screw him up by homeschooling him? Right? That’s not true. Is that? Yeah. But I think it prompts to just be aware of the positives and the negatives of the path that you’re on. Right? And so if you’re at a public school, you’re probably going to need to be more proactive to have conversations about what they’re experiencing and what they’re hearing and all that.
Josh (39:45.954)
And if you’re at a private school, you may need to have some, you know, be more intentional with like really showing them the world and showing, you know, like kind of getting outside the Christian bubble and doing those things. So I think just being aware of maybe the negatives of wherever your student is. And again, there’s not a cookie cutter, one answer for every family, discern from the spirit. I think we as a culture, as a Christian culture need Christian schools, and I also think we need Christian kids in the public schools. So I think God’s gonna, you know, maybe spread some kids out that way, and we just have to discern where the Lord’s leading in that.
Chelsey
Yeah, I grew up going to private Christian school, K, through graduating college. And I think my parents thought that that was enough, and it was going to be this perfect, safe environment. And so, my kids now are in a Christian school, but I know it’s not a perfect, safe environment, and nothing replaces the home. And nothing replaces the discipleship that you can do around the kitchen table, over dinner, the conversations that you can have, and you need to have those conversations.
If your kids are getting great discipleship out of Christian school or a sex education you don’t agree with at a public school, you still have to have those conversations with your kids, no matter what school they’re in. Yeah, and if I can be really honest, Bishop Juli, from my experience in CVCA, kids are watching porn, drinking, and having sex too. They just memorize Romans 12.
Juli
Yeah. Yeah. And I think with you said, with public schools, here’s what the danger is. Another danger with private school is just legalism and hypocrisy. And these are still kids trying to figure things out just because their parents send them there doesn’t mean they have that relationship with Jesus or they may be very immature in it. I think that’s something to be aware of. All right. I got a personal question that I was asked here.
Juli (41:45.55)
I wonder if my son asked this. Juli, as you look back on raising adolescents, what do feel you did well around this topic and what do you wish you would have done differently? I think I have two kids in this room. I answer this question, think they could probably answer. No, I wish I knew all this information when we raising teenagers. Like, I’ve been learning along with you. And so what did we do well?
Juli (42:13.344)
I think we modeled for our kids what love is. We modeled what an authentic relationship with Jesus is, what confession is. I think that we learned to show humility to them that they knew that we were walking with Jesus too. We had conversations with them about sexuality and pornography and some of those things. But what we did poorly, I think we had too few conversations. I think, and I don’t think, I know as a parent, I kind of went in with that mindset of like, I want to keep my kids pure. And I felt the extra burden because of the ministry I do, like, my kids had to be extra pure, you know, like olive oil. And so I think when they struggled, I didn’t know how to handle it, and I didn’t handle it well many times. And I had to learn grace. I needed to learn the very things I’m telling you about learning to disciple and that this is not as easy as choosing to do right or wrong. It’s about the worldview we grow up with. It’s about learning to depend on God. It’s learning to be good confessors and not hiders. And so there’s a lot I wish I could do differently. And I know we have parents in this room who, that’s their question. Like my kids are 19 or 25 or 15 and there’s so much I did wrong. Join the club. know, God is a God of grace, not just for our kids, but for us as parents.
And I’m so thankful that we continue to have close relationships with our sons who are young adults because they’re still learning from us and we’re still learning from them and we’re pursuing the Lord together. So it’s not like it’s done once they leave your home. So there’s just some of my thoughts on that. How did I do? Kids, OK? All right, if you really want to know, ask this guy. He’ll tell you all the things they did wrong.
Juli
All right, we are about to wrap up this session. Hey, thanks so much for being on the panel. These are just amazing people here that live real life. And so feel free to–I’m going to offer you up–if you want to follow up with them, ask them more questions. They’re just great resources. So can we give them a hand?
