Sexual Character: Needs
Beyond obvious basic needs such as water and food, we believe every human being has two basic psychological needs: relatedness and significance (in love and work). These needs are constantly driving us; like the need for food, we have to address them again and again in life. You can help your child understand these important needs and meet many of those needs until your child is an adult. When these needs are met adequately in childhood, your child will face adolescence and adulthood with a strong foundation of strength for facing the challenges of life.
Why these two needs? These needs appear in the Genesis 1 Creation account, reflected implicitly in the blessings God bestows upon the man and woman. In verse 28, Adam and Eve are told both to “be fruitful and multiply” (the fruit of love) and to exercise “dominion” over creation (work of significance). We believe that these two blessings that are also directives form the basis for these basic psychological needs for all humans.
In Genesis 2, these two blessings that form the basis of our needs appear in the reverse order. God puts the man “in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (2:15). God made us for significant work, for a purpose that transcends our own individual pleasure and sustenance. Then God pronounces that “It is not good that the man should be alone” (2:18), clearly diagnosing a need for relationship. He then gives Adam his greatest gift: Eve, of whom Adam declares, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” The passage continues, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (2:23-24). The need for love and the need for significance have been with us from the start.
Our Ultimate Need
The ultimate need of each of us as individuals is a relationship with the God of the universe: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There’s no greater reality than the fact that we can become, by the grace of God, the “beloved” of the Father. In the Gospels, we learn directly from the voice of God in the narratives of Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22) that Jesus is God’s true “beloved Son.” Later in the New Testament, we learn that because we are in Christ, we are “beloved by the Lord” (2 Thessalonians 2:13) and “beloved in God the Father” (Jude 1:2).
Grounded as the beloved of God himself, we have the assurance that we are loved and that we are significant, no matter what we do. But at least during life on this earth, before we are perfected in heaven, we have a need for human relationships of love and for significant work.
Relatedness
Relatedness means that we need to love and be loved, to affirm and be affirmed. A sense of being loved forms a foundation that gives us stability for life ahead. Proverbs 19:22 says, “What is desired in a man is steadfast love.” Many sexual problems for teenagers begin when this fundamental need goes unmet in childhood, leaving a child feeling unloved or rejected. Adult sexual addicts often were kids with an unresolved and consuming hunger for any personal connection. Parents are meant to satisfy this powerful need in their kids for a season.
There is no one way, no easy formula, for meeting this need for loving relatedness. Families differ in how they express love and acceptance. Children will differ in their individual needs; one child’s needs might be met by one hug a day, while another might be in constant need of reassurance and affection. The needs of children change over time. Truly responsive parents will respect and adjust to the changing needs of their child.
Strive to fill your child with a rock-steady sense of being loved and accepted. You and your spouse are the most important people in your child’s life—from their earliest days, when they do not understand words at all but can understand that the parent looking into their eyes exudes a sense of joy and warmth and that a loving embrace expresses the deepest acceptance imaginable.
Significance
God means for each of us to have a vocation, a calling to meaningful work from which we derive a sense of significance. Your vocation may or may not overlap with your employment; not every calling earns a salary. The meaningfulness of your work is not defined by its earthly success.
Further, it makes no difference if the work is “sacred” or “secular.” We need to recapture the biblical sense of the apostle Paul’s instructions to even those doing the least respected forms of work that “whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. . . . You are serving the Lord Christ” (Colossians 3:23-24). Any work done for the Lord—changing dirty diapers, emptying garbage cans, programing computers, or pastoring a church—is significant work.
Meeting your children’s need for significance is both future-oriented and present-oriented. In the present, you can assign them meaningful contributions to make in the family. Affirm them when they do their homework and clean their rooms, and increase their responsibilities for chores as they grow. Also, see their play and friendships as some of their most important work, for out of these will emerge patterns for their entire lives. See them as having a calling here and now to be about the Father’s business (see Luke 2:49, where the twelve-year-old Jesus explains his earthly mission).
A sense of hope for future significance can be demonstrated through your confident expectations for their lives. Affirm their growing gifts and abilities in school, in sports, in friendships. Express confidence in the future God has for them and in their ability to contribute meaningfully to God’s work in the world—but without burdening them with expectations for success dictated by worldly standards.
Two strong predictors of teen sexual experimentation emerge from research: (1) closeness to a parent, and (2) academic confidence and achievement. Children who feel close to a parent and do well in school tend to delay or avoid sexual experimentation and pregnancy. As we’ve discussed before, closeness to a parent meets their needs for loving relatedness. Doing well in school—for those who can succeed—probably gives a sense of significance and hope for their future work. But your child does not have to be an academic whiz to feel significant because (1) their calling is to do the best they can with the abilities God has given them, and (2) school is just one kind of work children can do. We can teach our children that they are significant in God’s eyes regardless of GPA.
It is vital for parents to see that this need for significance is not the same thing as the need for success. The quadriplegic child or adult will still have a vocation from God as they live their lives; this vocation may simply be a calling to love and support others, or even just to pray. We succeed when we do what God is calling us to do according to the standards that he sets for us.
Understanding and acting to meet your children’s need for relatedness and significance is foundational for shaping their character. You can never meet all their needs, but you can provide a foundation from which they face the world in strength, able to make decisions that God will bless.
Think of a sixteen-year-old girl or boy out on a date who is confident of her or his significance and filled with her or his parents’ love. Contrast that to a disillusioned and hopeless teen who is thirsty for anyone’s acceptance and love. Which teen is going to make the right decision when pressured to have sex?
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.