Help for Parents

Are You a Parent Concerned About Your Kids’ Sexuality?

As a parent you know that technology is threatening to overwhelm your adolescent’s sexuality and relational future. Did you know:

  • Your son or daughter may not be dating, but could become secretly sexually active with one or more partners.
  • It is more likely than not that your son or daughter may, or will, have a problem with viewing or making pornography.
  • Your son or daughter may already be sexting, sending nude pictures via text message, and those images are passed on to other kids.
  • Some boys and girls have been charged with child pornography or other illegal sexual activity.
  • Your son or daughter can download a free App to find a homosexual partner using their cellphone and GPS technology.

We can’t sit back, home school our kids, get them involved in youth group and hope for the best! It is time to become a more proactive parent.

As texting has become a centerpiece in teen social life, parents, pastors and teachers have grown increasingly concerned about the role of cell phones in the sexual lives of pre-teens and teens. Sexual images are shared as a part of, or instead of, sexual activity. Sharing sexual images is the new way of starting or maintaining a relationship. Often sexual images are passed along to friends for their entertainment value, as a joke or for fun.

Dating has ended, but not for the reason parents think. To take comfort in the idea that your daughter has put off dating until later could be putting her at more risk for sexual activity than dating ever could. Traditional dating has not been the dominant sexual script on the college campus for over three decades. Students “hook up.” Hooking up involves a man or a woman (or boy or girl) paring off at the end of a party to engage in a physical sexual encounter. Regardless of what happens sexually, a hallmark of hooking up is that there are no obligations or strings attached to the encounter. This behavior has easily crept into high schools as dating has disappeared.

In today’s non-dating world, gender roles have shifted. In the dating world of the past, boys worked up the courage to ask a girl for a date. Today, girls have become sexually aggressive, and boys can be more passive and wait to be serviced by the girl sexually.

Every concerned parent must ask, “Why has technology, the lack of formal dating, risky sex, and more sexually aggressive girls taken over the sexual and relational behavior of children in Christian families? Kids are home schooled, brought up in church, and involved in youth group and mission trips. Something isn’t working! The answers are complex, but one issue every parent must honestly face is; “Am I a spiritually, relationally, and sexually mature adult? The fact is, some parents are, some are not! It’s time to take an inventory because you have to be not only your kids primary role model, but also their primary resource on spirituality, relationships, and sexuality at least into their late twenties, even after they are married.

Ask yourself and your spouse:

  • Do I as a father demonstrate diminished masculinity in our marriage?
  • Do I as a mother demonstrate a spiritual, relational and sexual control over our relationship?
  • As a father, am I the spiritual leader in the home?
  • As a mother, do I feel at times like my husband is just another one of the kids?
  • Do we follow the admonition of having consistent meaningful sexual intimacy in our marriage as outlined in 1 Corinthians 7:2-5?
  • As a woman do you feel like a sexual object when we are making love?
  • As a man are you frustrated with my lack of sexual interest?

It is time to increase your effectiveness as a parent! The job of shaping a young person’s life is a very personal, time consuming, and painstaking task, but very worth it. It must go beyond what you say or do to draw upon who you are on the inside. How you deal with adversity. How you deal with relationships. How you deal with sexuality. How you trust in God. That’s why it is impossible to help your kids spiritually, relationally, and sexually until you address your spiritual, relational, and sexual maturity together as a couple. Don’t expect others to fill this role!

Stone Gate Resources has a twenty-year history of effectively helping couples struggling with marital unfaithfulness to restore their marriages. The same biblical principals for developing spiritual, relational, and sexual maturity can be applied to all parents who want to help their children and grandchildren. Our Biblical Intensive Counseling Workshop (BIC) can be a vital resource in developing maturity and wisdom in your life and marriage. Rather than a series of formulas designed to generate better behavior in your kids, the BIC Workshop will show you how, in a marriage between two sinners, you can build God-glorifying intimacy and character in your lives, and at the same time, in the lives of your children.

If you have young children, now is the time to correct the problem. If you are the parents of teens or young adults, it is not too late to have a positive influence on your children. Please call Dr. Harry Schaumburg for a personal and confidential consultation on your situation. He will help you determine if the BIC Workshop is for you.

Call 888-575-3030, or send a confidential email to, harry@stonegateoffice.com. Also visit our website, stonegateresources.org.