“Be safe” rolls off the lips of most moms quicker than “I love you” as their children leave the house. Sure, I don’t want my kids to jump in front of a mack truck just to test the thrill factor, but as a dad, safety isn’t always my highest priority.
My phrase?
“Make good choices”.
Sure it covers safety. And yes, I hope the application of this phrase will keep them out of jail one day. But, more than that, I hope the concept will guide them in the sexual nature of their lives now and in the future.
You can’t take your boys (or girls… but I don’t have any of those) to the the grocery store without them noticing the bikini mags. We can’t edit every TV commercial. We can’t avoid every billboard. And even at the PG movies you will still encounter references that you were hoping to avoid by screening the movie with your favorite Christian movie alert website.
It is absolutely impossible to create safety bubbles for our kids. They are going to get injured. Same is true with the Internet and, unfortunately, the same is true with pornography. And even if we could create these mythological forms of societal prophylactics, it wouldn’t serve them well for when we finally shove them out on their own.
Bottom line: We can’t limit our children’s ability to see and experience content on devices we don’t own or in environments we don’t control.
What can we do?
We can teach our kids about the power of choice. Our kids have the ability to make choices about what they will and won’t do when it comes to pornography. Better still, we can teach our kids the WHY behind these choices. My sons are 9, 10 and 12. I had the first (but not last) porn talk with them when each of them was 8. It seems like not a day goes by where we don’t talk about the Internet and all of the things that they could encounter on google if they are not careful. I use filters like SafeEyes on our home computers, but I know, like you do, that so many of their friends have smart phones and unfiltered access to the Internet at their houses. So, I tell my kids about porn addictions. I tell them about so many other men that I know who are dying and fighting just to stop looking at porn. I tell them about the devastation. And I also tell them about the future of their lives if they can make the choice to live free from porn.
I want my boys to experience guilt free, addiction free, sexually monogamous and pleasing future with their wives. That future starts now by teaching them through how to make good choices. It’s daily instruction in the world we live in.