What’s the Big Deal?

This book designed for ages eight to eleven or twelve does three things. First, it reinforces the messages of our first two children’s books: the basics of sexual intercourse and the fundamental goodness of our sexuality. Second, it continues the task of deliberately building your child’s understanding of why God intends sexual intercourse to be reserved for marriage.

Third, it will help you begin the process of “inoculating” your child against the negative moral messages of the world. In How and When to Tell Your Kids About Sex, we argue that Christian parents should not try to completely shelter their children from the destructive moral messages of the world. Children who grow up in environments where they are never exposed to germs grow up with depleted and ineffectual immune systems for resisting disease. When we shelter them too much, we leave them naive and vulnerable, and we risk communicating that the negative messages of the world are so powerful that Christians cannot even talk about them.

But nor should we just let our kids be inundated with the destructive messages of the world. The principle of inoculation suggests that we should deliberately expose kids to the contrary moral messages they will hear from the world. It should be in our homes that our kids first learn that many people in our world do not believe in reserving sex for marriage, and this should also be where they get their first understanding of such problems as teenage pregnancy, AIDS, and homosexuality. But they should be exposed to these realities for a vital purpose: to build their defenses against these terrible problems of our culture.