3. What Is a Family? A Definition

Questions and Answers with Paul Tripp

My teen is finding ways to hide apps, content, and messages on his or her phone. Do I put restrictions on my teen’s devices? Do teens have a right to privacy, or can I snoop around for my child’s protection?

When Steve Jobs created the iPhone, the culture of the entire world changed. Smartphones can be powerful tools for good, but many negative resources are available through these devices as well. If your teen has a smartphone in his pocket, it is harder than ever to control the influences in his life because the device makes the entire world available—the world in all its beauty and all its deep darkness. You must be concerned about this; I don’t think it’s possible to be too concerned. You must be proactive, and you must be ready.

There is significant pressure on parents to put mobile devices in their children’s hands: pressure from other parents, pressure from their kids, pressure from their friends, pressure from celebrities, media, and advertising. These devices make your life easier, and they make it easier for you to track your kids. On the internet, on social media, and through messaging, however, there’s way more foolishness than there is wisdom. It’s powerful,

it’s attractive, and it’s dangerous. So you must be careful, and you need to take charge of that aspect of your child’s world. That’s called parenting!

You can’t hope that your child will always like you or agree with the choices you make. You must be willing to make unpopular decisions that your child won’t interpret as loving, because you do in fact love him and want to protect him and guard his heart and mind. Some mobile devices function only as phones. If all you need is to have contact with your child over the phone, then use those devices. But whatever you choose, you need to know what is happening on your child’s device and in his life.

I don’t think you should snoop behind your child’s back or parent deceptively. That leads to a lack of trust, a breakdown in the relationship, and an unwillingness of the child to listen to you in the future. This sets up an adversarial relationship that’s not healthy. Instead, put the issue on the table. Be honest about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Be forthright about the controls that, out of love and godly wisdom, you need to put in your child’s life.

The Christian community has been naive about the power of mobile devices, and we are losing our children. We hear about the shocking things parents discover after being way too passive and succumbing to cultural pressure when it came to allowing their children to have mobile devices. Your job is to protect your children from danger. If you want to protect your children from physical danger, how much more should you want to protect them from moral danger?

Now, as your teenager grows, his world widens, his options increase, and his desire for connectivity grows. Naturally, you will feel this changing pressure and want to adjust your approach. But you must ask, “What is it my child actually needs? How does God call me to protect him, and what do I need to do in order to do that?” Know that there is blessing in making these protective choices even if, at the moment, they’re very hard.

How do I teach my teen about God’s plan concerning dating and marriage? I know that teenagers hear the complete opposite message from their peers and from popular culture!

I don’t know if you could discuss a more practically important topic with your teen than her relationships with members of the opposite sex.

When you do, you must approach the conversation in a way that keeps the sanctity and holiness of marriage in view. Other than a relationship with God, no other relationship is so weighty that it’s defined as a covenant. Only marriage rises to that level of significance.

The Bible also places a weighty level of significance on the power, seductiveness, and danger of sexual temptation. These temptations arise in the teen years. If you put a seven-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl in jeans and T-shirts, they sort of look the same. When I asked my sevenyear-old son what he thought of girls, he said girls had cooties. (I still don’t know what cooties are, but my boys seemed very repelled by them!) If you put a seventeen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy in jeans and T-shirts, they don’t look at all the same. A seventeen-year-old suddenly becomes a cootie consumer.

Teens are very interested in the opposite sex, and that’s not a bad thing. God has implanted that awareness, curiosity, and desire in us. It should be beautiful and sweet and, within the proper context, pleasurable.

Here’s what is so important to teach your teenager, and it is bigger than just this issue of dating and sex and marriage: God has designed for us to live in a pleasurable world. That’s his wise choice. This world is pleasurable, and he’s given us pleasure “gates”: our eyes, our ears, our taste, our touch. It’s not wrong to desire the pleasures of our world. It’s not wrong to find pleasure in pleasure. Finding pleasure in pleasure actually glorifies God. But the Bible teaches that pleasure needs boundaries. Pleasure without boundaries is destructive. You can’t eat whatever you want to eat, whenever you want to eat it, in as much quantity as you want to eat it, without hurting yourself.

And so it is with relationships between boys and girls. The desires that grow in these relationships need boundaries. You need to address the issue of boundaries—not just the boundaries of physical behavior but the boundaries of emotions and desire. It’s wrong for a boy to treat a girl like she’s an object for his pleasure. It’s wrong for a girl to treat a boy like he’s an object for her pleasure. “Right now, this person makes me happy, and I will attach myself to him or her for a while; as soon as this person doesn’t make me happy anymore, I will toss him or her away.” That’s a horrible thing even if no sex is involved. That’s an objectification of another human being.

We need to teach our teenagers about the beauty of friendship, the enjoyment of companionship, and the way to honor others for their brains and their wisdom and the quality of their character. I don’t think we talk about these things enough as parents. We need to couple that with talking about the sanctity of marriage. There are things that God, in the goodness of his wisdom and grace, reserves for this lifelong committed relationship that are dangerous to experience outside it.

This is not a conversation you have just once, in that fearful, awkward, intense, rushed talk about “the birds and the bees,” then never address again. You need to offer a safe place for your teenagers to be able to talk about these things. Don’t overreact. Don’t quickly judge and condemn. Your teen should know that you’re going to talk about this stuff with her. It should always be on the table, and if she doesn’t pursue you (which she probably won’t), you need to pursue her.

While the world never quits talking about sex, sadly Christian parents are silent on it. That never works. You need to talk about these things. We should not be embarrassed. Sex is one of God’s good gifts. Relationships are one of God’s good gifts. The creation of male and female is one of God’s good gifts. Companionship is one of God’s good gifts. We need to talk about this with our teenagers, and we should not expect them to be wise on their own. Be active, be involved, and look for opportunities to give guidance to your teenager that she will not come up with on her own.

I just discovered that my child is looking at pornography or interacting with other sexually explicit material. How do I approach the subject with my child? How can I protect my home from this content? It is scary to discover that your child has been viewing pornography and may even be increasingly addicted to that content and behavior. But I want to encourage you to step back and think in broader, more biblical ways about this issue. If the Bible is accurate that your children come into the world as sinners and that their biggest issue is not just that evil exists out there but that there’s sin in their hearts, it should not surprise you when sinners are attracted to sin. It’s always the evil inside us that hooks us to the evil outside us. Because your child has sinful greed inside him,

he may be attracted to materialism. Because your child has selfish desires, she may be attracted to illicit sexuality. You shouldn’t be shocked.

There’s a second important thing to remember: you should not react with such horror, condemnation, and judgment that you drive your child away from you and underground. You want to deal with this scary issue with patience and understanding and grace. How about saying, “I am so sorry that we live in this kind of world and that you have something inside you that pulls you in this direction. I’m like you. I get attracted to things that I should not be attracted to. I go places I shouldn’t go. I hide things that are wrong. I share that identity with you. I can be just as foolish. But there’s hope for us because there is a God who offers help to sinners, who offers power and wisdom that we wouldn’t otherwise have on our own. You need help, and I need help, and I want to be part of this with you”?

It’s important to understand that external protections are never enough because the issue lies within your teenager’s heart. You absolutely ought to have a protective relationship with your teenager and put safeguards in place so illicit material is not readily available. But it’s your teen’s propensity to love what he should not love that is the main problem, not the fact that technology filters are inadequate to prevent this material from finding its way into your home and onto your child’s devices. Protection, while important, is never enough. You need to find loving, patient, gentle, and kind ways of talking to your teen about the presence and power of sin and God’s redeeming, rescuing grace. No matter how vigorously you act to protect your child from the outside world, if she doesn’t interact with God, she won’t be okay. Parenting teens in a sexually insane world doesn’t end with protection; you must constantly, lovingly, patiently, and situationally preach the gospel of sin and grace to your child.

There’s an even larger issue at play than the fact that your child is struggling with pornography. This larger issue of life and death and eternity is that your child naturally doesn’t have a heart for God. Because he doesn’t have a heart for God, he doesn’t care what God says and he will go wherever his pleasure leads him. One of the things you want to do, by God’s grace, is to produce in your teenager an awe of God. Talk about the glory of God with him every opportunity you can. Don’t scramble an egg without talking about the glory of God. “Isn’t it amazing what God

created? Look at this embryo—it turns into something that you love for breakfast. God created that for you.” Whether it’s an egg, the sunset, or the song of a bird, you can seize opportunities to talk about God all the time. Here’s why: when a teenager is in awe of God, he is predisposed to listen to the Word of God. If your child has no awe of God in his heart, it’s easy for him to blow off the call of God in his Word.

You don’t just fight the sex and pornography battle horizontally with protections and filters. You fight it vertically. When a struggling, tempted teenager has a desire for God, you now have the material for spiritual protection. Yes, you need horizontal protections in place, but you’ve got to get at the vertical issues that drive a pleasure-oriented way of living.

What is the gospel response to teens who announce they are gender confused or transgender?

We are living in a very confused and difficult period when it comes to gender. Don’t ever think that somehow you can isolate or protect your children enough to prevent these powerful influences from entering your home. Particularly if your children attend a public school, they will be indoctrinated with a way of thinking about gender that is radically different from what the Bible has to say about this important topic.

After God created human beings as male and female, he stood back from his creation and said it was very good. Operating from a biblical worldview, it’s impossible to think that you are mistakenly trapped in a body that is not who you are meant to be. It is very sad that this view has become so prominent and normalized in our culture. In the 1970s, the great Christian philosopher and theologian Francis Schaeffer made a statement that human rationality, apart from God’s revelation, will always end in irrationality. Think about that. Human reason, if it is not rescued by divine revelation, always ends in irrational conclusions. It’s not surprising that a culture that has walked away from the revelation of God would end in this form of irrationality.

If your teenager is struggling with gender issues, it could be that he or she is experiencing real emotional, psychological body dysmorphia. We should not discount that. Let me give you an example. We know that it’s possible for human beings to come to the point where they hate their