Sexual Character: Values

Parents are the most important influences in forming children’s values. Values tell each of us what helps us in our quest for relatedness and significance. We must think deliberately about the values worth communicating to our children and praise and cultivate these values—and remember that values, like faith, are more powerfully caught than taught.

Consider the following as key values to develop in your child’s life:

Vibrant faith is perhaps your child’s most fundamental need for the future. Parents shape children to value such a faith by modeling that faith themselves, by talking openly about how important faith is, and by praising any manifestation of such faith in their children.

As parents, we often reminded our own children, “We are proud that you are doing well in school (or piano, baseball, friendships, etc.), but what matters most is whether you love God with your whole heart and are following him. If you do, your life will have value. Without that, nothing really matters. God is calling you right now to be a student (or pianist, second baseman, etc.), and we think God is happy that you are doing well at that for him!”

Christian virtue should be tangibly valued in our homes. Beyond any particular achievement in this life, we and our children will be successful and blessed as we and they manifest the vital Christian virtues of love, faith, and hope (1 Corinthians 13). So also the fruit of the Spirit—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23)—flow from the presence of the Holy Spirit, though these traits are also are built upon preexisting human characteristics. Parents can begin to develop these traits in their children. In an era of rampant cynicism, impulsiveness, licentiousness, and instant celebrity, do you in contrast cultivate the traits of gentleness, self-control, and patience in your children?

Purity and chastity. These words are heard rarely today, yet we must teach our children to value purity and chastity. For some today, these words communicate a sense of constriction or punitive asceticism, an anti-body and anti-pleasure ugliness. But understood biblically, purity and chastity communicate a sense of rightness and fullness. Pure gold, after all, is the best gold.

We should teach our children to value faithfulness to their vows to God and to their future spouses. We should model for them total fidelity to our spouse; the loving example of parents faithful to each other is incredibly powerful.

Our children’s deep need for relatedness—to God, to a future spouse, and to loving friends—will be met most fully in living by God’s standard of purity. The world says that immoral sex is a way to get your love need met, but the best evidence suggests that living life by God’s rules produces the best outcomes: Chaste people are likely to have more satisfying and stable marriages and to have better sex lives in their marriages. God’s way is the best way.

We should teach our children that it is blessed in the eye of God for an unmarried person to be a virgin. God values the virtue of self-control and the heart with pure motives in relationships. This doesn’t mean it’s bad to have sexual feelings and desires or to struggle to contain or manage those feelings. In fact, God wants us to be the sexually alive person he made us to be. To be sexual and pure is God’s intent.

However—and this is important—values are not simply something we decide upon and proclaim to our children in the hopes they will decide to claim those values as their own. How we communicate important values is critical in developing healthy perspectives in our children.

We Communicate Values in Our Choices as Model Adults

The father who says he values time with his children but is never there reveals his real values. Children read parents like a book; our lives tell our children what we deem important and not important. Because of their deep emotional bond with us, our children read us and, given a positive relationship with the parent, tend to internalize our values—good, bad, and ugly.

It behooves all of us to honestly assess where our time is going and what this says about our values. We should purposely evaluate our values and ask, “Is this what I want to teach my child to value; is this what really matters?” How we allocate our time is the most powerful way we teach values to our children.

We Communicate Values in Praise

We also communicate our values in our praise. We should praise our children not for what they achieve (the gold star, the ranking, the trophy) but rather for who they are (their character) and for the effort they exert to do what is right. Do you praise your children for grades they get—or for the skills that they are developing? Do you praise your children for fitting in, for being popular, for going with the flow—or for showing strength, independence, and character even when they are not as accepted by others as they might otherwise have been?

We Communicate Values in the Stories That We Tell

As we will develop further in chapter 13, the stories that we tell—whether about ourselves, about people we know as a family, about people we as parents know, or even about the people in the Bible and other great literature—have power to make connections with the hearts of our children beyond a straight declaration such as “you should value love.” We can engage our children’s imaginations as we teach them from our lives and the lives of others through story.

Some content taken from HOW AND WHEN TO TELL YOUR KIDS ABOUT SEX, by Stan and Brenna Jones. Copyright © 1993, 2007, 2019. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. To purchase books in the GOD’S DESIGN FOR SEX book series, go to https://www.navpress.com.