Author: Anne Marie Miller

On August 19, 2013, I posted an article titled Three Things You Don’t Know About Your Children and Sex.

The day I actually wrote the article was the day after my last camp speaking engagement back in July. I was on a bus and on the verge of tears with 80 junior high students sitting behind me, my laptop bouncing as we raced up bumpy Illinois highways. Very few times in my life has my heart been that heavy. As the students filed off the bus to find eagerly waiting parents back at their church, I stayed on board, hiding behind the tinted windows recalling stories and innocent eyes. My heart got heavier knowing the weight of what was unspoken while the talk bubbles of “hello-how-are-you-how-was-camp?” floated in the air.

Now, my inbox is full. Over 300 comments sit: words of pain, hope, questions. Even confirmation.

Like this comment from a 15 year old girl:

As a 15 year old girl, I can’t thank you enough…I was introduced to the world of sex when I was 8, and have been frustrated ever since. It started off with masturbation every day, but eventually that wasn’t enough, and I experimented with my best friend (girl) one night last year. After that, my addiction rose to a whole new level…Every single one of my friends (all of whom have been raised in the church) have been introduced to sex early, and a good number of them have been battling pornography as I have. This really can’t continue any longer. I beg of you, parents, be vigilante with your children. As Christians, we can’t stand on the sidelines and let Satan and the rest of the world win. Don’t let them suffer as I have.

And these questions from parents:

When do I talk to my kids about this?

How much do I say?

What’s appropriate? 

I don’t want to cause them to be any more curious than they need to be.

What do I do? I’ve been struggling my entire adult life? 

As someone who is not a parent, you can imagine my sense of inadequacy in answering your questions, at least with wisdom of my own. I haven’t had to sit down with my own child, explain these things, and make decisions about technology (while dealing with my own past, my own questions, my own struggles.)

And to reiterate something I said yesterday, I believe to be the most important thing any of us can do, parent, child, bystander, we first must pray. We first must allow ourselves to be broken beyond our pretty surface smiles and casual, comfortable lives and we must expose our hearts to God, asking Him to stop this, to help us intervene, to give us courage and strength to fight and to show grace and not condemnation with ourselves and others.

*****

Please accept my feeble attempt to provide you with some helpful guidance from some research I did on the internet. If you have resources of your own, please leave links to them in the comments so that others can benefit. Allow this to be a place we can all share links, books, advice. I urge you to not keep what you know to yourself – go in the comments and help others. If you have a question, post it. Keep checking back, keep helping each other.

Books:

Click Here

 

From Focus on the Family:

In the Parenting/Sexuality and Parenting/Protecting Your Family areas of their website:

·        “Healthy Childhood Sexual Development”

·        “Teaching Children Healthy Sexuality”

·        “Talking About Sex and Puberty”

·        “Prevent the Sexualization of Your Daughter”

·        “When Children View Pornography”

·        “Combatting Cultural Influences”

 

Online Safety:

Tim and I personally use Covenant Eyes on both our iPhones and all of our computers. We don’t use the filtering option now, but when we have kids will probably investigate it.

XXXChurch.com has accountability software at both free and paid levels, as well as resources and support. They have a great “Ask the Expert” section that you can read through and learn how other parents are dealing with tough situations and ask your own question.

NetNanny has filtering, time, and monitoring software.

For women and girls struggling with pornography addiction, I recommend my friend Crystal’s ministry Whole Women Ministries. I met Crystal when she was in high school years ago and I was the first person she told and now she is reaching thousands of women with hope.

*****

I realize there are many, many other books and blogs and sermons and just good, old-fashioned advice that lives in our experience and the strings of the interwebs. So please, dive in. Educate yourself. Find what resources you think can work for you and your family. Talk to your spouse, parents, family, pastors, counselors. Ask each other. Help each other. Encourage each other.

With God’s help, we got this. I believe now more than ever that we can reshape our culture with our humility, our surrender, and our proactive (difficult!, awkward!, clumsy!, worth it!) communication with our children and other parents.

Tomorrow, I’ll be sharing my own story as the good Christian girl who found herself in a battle with pornography she never expected.

So for today…Pray. Learn. Fight.

The Video Music Awards on Sunday night provide me an easy way to begin this post. I didn’t watch the VMAs last night but when I returned home from having dinner with a friend, my main Twitter list feed (mostly full of pastors and gal-pals and authors) was full of the words

shock!, heartbreak!, Miley Cyrus!, sad!, our children!, pray!

A few minutes of browsing through the #VMA hashtag provided me with more than enough imagery to see what it was that caused people to respond this way. I don’t recommend you Google it.

But generally speaking, this is a timely milestone in our culture and it gives me the chance to ask you one question:

Who do you want teaching your children about sex?

The answer is fairly simple.

a) You

b) Culture

“But I would never in a million years let my child watch the VMAs.”

Fair enough. But if your child is in contact with any other child in school, in church, on her soccer team, at sleepovers…if your child stands next to you as you check out at Kroger and sees the cover of any one of the magazines in line, or walks with you in the mall, or …

I think you get the point.

This is why it is essential you have these conversations with your children. And you may not know how. Or where to begin. Or want to believe it’s necessary, but it is. It is entirely mandatory for you, as a parent, to stand in between the pixels and skin of the media and the heart and the mind of your child.

Tomorrow, I’ll provide you with an extensive list of resources to help you do this but I felt the need to preface the resources.

This is not about behavioral modification. This is not about “doing” the “right” things to shelter and protect our kids. 

It has to begin somewhere below the surface, on a battlefield that is not fought on earth.

FIRST – It has to begin with prayer.

My pastor met with a college student recently who shared her small Christian liberal arts college was experience an epidemic of pornography. It almost became an acceptable thing to “struggle” with. She asked for resources – software, Bible studies, books – to help combat it. His reply?

“Do you guys have a prayer meeting?”

They didn’t. He went on to explain how we can try to change our actions, to do things we think are right but until we are on our face, humbled in prayer before our God, we don’t stand a chance.

So before we read twenty books and blogs on how to do the right things, we must begin to fight this battle in prayer. Pray for your children, for your church, for your community, for those in the media, for our country, for our world. Call me old fashioned, but I still believe in miracles. Call me naive, but I believe it doesn’t have to only get worse from here. I believe as we pray and fight on the spiritual plane, the dark forces that continue taking over us, that continue taking over our children must stop in Jesus’ name.

The same power that raised Christ from the dead lives in us and that same power can put to death the evil that wants to destroy our lives.

SECOND – Act. Yes, we must act. Erwin McManus once said, “Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.” 

Right now, media is shaping our culture. It’s saying what’s right and wrong. What’s okay and what’s not. A relatively recent study (10 years ago, so I imagine the numbers are probably worse now) says about media with sexual content:

“Risks and negative consequences of sexual behavior were found in only 2% of all scenes with sexual content.”

This is after learning “83% of programs popular with teens had sexual content, and 20% contained explicit or implicit intercourse. On average, each hour of programming popular with teens had 6.7 scenes that included sexual topics.”

We must tell a better story. We must portray the beauty of what the Scriptures say about sex and educate the brokenness that happens when we make choices outside of what the Bible says. We do this with our lives. We do this with our words. We do this with what we create.

If we make the choice to sit by and let conversations with our children just happen, we have waited too long. Involve your church, involve your pastors, involve your family, involve your neighborhood. Don’t go into this battle alone. Link arms, pray, and fight by painting beauty.

We cannot be afraid of this anymore. 

We can change this.

First, thank you.

A week ago today, I published an article titled “Three Things You Don’t Know About Your Children and Sex.” Three web server crashes and now, almost 750,000 total views later, I am overwhelmed…in a good way. In the best way. Has every response been positive? A few haven’t. But by and large the feedback has communicated two things:

Thank you.

and

Help.

I have wrestled the last week with how to respond to the help me replies.

“How do we talk to our children?”

“When?”

“How much?”

“Are there any resources you recommend?”

“What’s age appropriate?”

And this is where I got stuck. I am not a parent. I’ve never had to even plan how to have discussions of this nature. Tim and I will one day, but that hasn’t been in our periphery.

We have to embrace our roles.

You are the parent. You are the ones on the front line, intervening and protecting the innocence and mind and heart and soul of your child. This is your role, your part of the story.

I’m the storyteller. I am not a child development expert. Yes, I’m a sociology major and yes, I focus on the science of the brain but I still have many (many, many!) hours to commit to my education. I tell the truth about what I see and hear and how God redeemed my broken pieces.

In order to follow up to those questions and to the ones asking how I found freedom in my own addiction and to provide you with some resources, I’ve decided to break up the responses into a few posts that will publish this week.

1) Who Do You Want Teaching Your Children About Sex? – Monday, August 26

2) Resources to Educate and Equip Parents and Children About Sex – Tuesday, August 27

3) How I Found Freedom from My Pornography Addiction – Wednesday, August 28

Right now, can I encourage you to do three things?

1) Go to the comments in the original post. There are hurting people there. There are questions there. So many have already stepped in and started responding and sharing advice and encouraging. Read through the comments and as you feel led, reply, pray, build up.

2) Subscribe to these posts so you can learn when the follow up articles are published? You can subscribe by email or RSS here.

3) Pray. Pray for those reading who are having conversations. Praise God for the freedom that is happening. Pray for me that I can listen and write the words God wants me to write.

Again, thank you all for reading, sharing, and encouraging. I truly believe we can step in and break the snowball avalanche cycle of this world’s distorted views on sexuality.

 

 

 

 

New here? Here are some follow up posts to help answer your questions.

20 Resources to Help talk to Your Kids

My Story – Part 1

My Story – Part 2

Follow Up Post to “Three Things…”

***

Dear Parents,

Please allow me a quick moment to introduce myself before we go much further. My name is Anne Marie Miller. I’m thirty-three years old. I’m newly married to a wonderful man named Tim. We don’t have any children yet, but we’re planning on it. For the purpose of this letter, you need to know I’m a recovering addict. Pornography was my drug of choice.

I grew up in the church – the daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher man with a passion for learning the Bible. I was the honors student; the athlete; the girl who got along with everyone from the weird kids to the popular ones. It was a good life. I was raised in a good home.

It was 1996, I was sixteen, and the Internet was new. After my family moved from a sheltered, conservative life in west Texas to the ethnically and sexually diverse culture of Dallas/Fort Worth, I found myself lonely, curious, and confused.

Because of the volatile combination of life circumstances: the drastic change of scenery when we moved, my dad’s depression, and a youth pastor who sexually abused me during my junior year of high school, I turned to the Internet for education. I didn’t know what certain words meant or if what the youth pastor was doing to me was good or bad and I was too afraid to ask. What started as an innocent pursuit of knowledge quickly escalated into a coping mechanism.

When I looked at pornography, I felt a feeling of love and safety – at least for a brief moment. But those brief moments of relief disappeared and I was left even more ashamed and confused than when I started. Pornography provided me both an emotional and a sexual release.

For five years I carried this secret. I was twenty-one when I finally opened up to a friend only because she opened up to me first about her struggle with sexual sin. We began a path of healing in 2001 and for the last twelve years, although not a perfect journey, I can say with great confidence God has set me free from that addiction and from the shame that followed. I returned to school to study the science behind addiction and family dynamics.

Over the last six years I’ve had the opportunity to share my story in a variety of venues: thousands of college students, men, women and teens. This summer, I was invited to speak at several camps to both junior high and high school students and it’s without exaggeration when I tell you with each year I counsel students, the numbers and the stories shock me more and more.

[Tweet “There are more students compulsively looking at pornography at younger ages and with greater frequency than ever before.”]

This summer, by a long stretch, was the “worst” in terms of what secrets I learned students carried. After my last night speaking at my last camp, I retreated to my room and collapsed on the bed face-first. Tim simply laid his hand on my back to comfort me.

I could not logically reconcile in my mind all the confessions I heard over the summer with the children who shared them. While every story was unique in the details, in most situations, there were three common themes that kept surfacing.

1. [Tweet “Google is the new Sex-Ed”]: Remember the first time you, as a parent, saw pornography? Likely it was a friend’s parent who had a dirty magazine or maybe you saw something somebody brought to school. Now, when a student hears a word or phrase they don’t understand, they don’t ask you what it means (because they fear getting in trouble). They don’t ask their friends (because they fear being ashamed for not knowing). They ask Google.Google won’t judge them for not knowing. Because of our short attention spans and desire for instant gratification, they don’t click the first link that shows up – they go straight to Google Images. In almost all of the stories I heard, this is how someone was first exposed to pornography – Google Image searching. The average age of first exposure in my experience was 9 years old.
2. [Tweet “If Your Child was Ever Molested, You Likely Don’t Know”]: Another extremely common theme was children being inappropriately touched, often by close family members or friends. When I was molested at sixteen, I didn’t tell a soul until I was in my twenties. I didn’t tell my own mother until I was twenty-eight. The stigma and shame of being a victim coupled with the trauma that happens with this experience is confusing to a child of any age: our systems weren’t made to process that event. Many things keep children from confessing abuse: being told they’ve made it up or are exaggerating, being a disappointment, and in most cases, getting the other person in trouble. While a child can look at pornography without being abused, children who have been molested by and large look at pornography and act out sexually.
3. [Tweet “Your Child is Not the Exception”]: After speaking with a youth pastor at a camp, he said most parents live with the belief their child is the exception. Your child is not. The camps I went to this summer weren’t camps full of children on life’s fringes that one would stereotypically believe experience these traumatic events or have access to these inappropriate things. You must throw your stereotypes aside. Most of the children at these camps were middle class, mostly churched students.Let me give you a snapshot of a few things I heard from these students:

• They’ve sent X-rated photos of themselves to their classmates (or received them).
• They’ve exposed themselves to strangers on the Internet or through sexting.
• They’ve seen pornography.
• They’ve read pornography.
• They’ve watched pornography.
• The girls compare their bodies to the ones they see in ads at the mall or of actresses and keep those images hidden on their phone (or iPod, or whatever device they have) so they can try to imitate them.
• They question their sexuality.
• They’ve masturbated.
• They know exactly where and in what movies sex scenes are shown and they watch them for sexual gratification.
• They’ve had a same-sex experience.

And they’re terrified to tell you.

(Update: The focus of this article is on the conversation, not the action, though as parents, you need to be aware of the fact young children are experiencing these things. I feel the need to clarify none of these actions make someone a “bad” person. While this specific list does contain things many people with a Christian background consider to be sin, it is lack of communication that makes this dangerous at this age. Most of us go through exploratory phases before sexual phases: a three year old masturbating because he knows it feels good and a seventeen year old masturbating to porn for a sexual release are two different things. If your child is uninformed or uneducated about things they need to know based on what is appropriate for their age and sexual development, regardless of your beliefs, it leads to shame and self-doubt.)

But maybe you’re right. Maybe your child is the exception. I would argue at this juncture in life, being the exception is as equally dangerous.

At the end of every session I presented I intentionally and clearly directed students to ask me or another leader if they didn’t understand or know what a certain word meant. “Do not go to the Internet and look it up.”

Sure enough, there is always the child who stays behind until everyone leaves and quietly asks what the word “porn” means or if God is angry because that boy or girl from down the street told them it was okay for them to touch them “down there.” There is the child in the back row who leans over to his friend and asks, “what does molest mean?” and the other boy shrugs.

This summer, I am beyond grateful that mature, God-fearing adults were available to answer those questions with grace and tact and maturity; that we were in a setting that was safe for questions and confessions. It was entirely appropriate. Not every child gets that opportunity. Most won’t. Most will find out from the Internet or from a peer who isn’t equipped to provide the correct answer in the correct context.

As the summer camp season ends, I feel a shift in my heart. For the last six years, I’ve felt a calling to share with students how God has set me free from the shame and actions of my past and that they aren’t alone (because they truly believe they are). One college dean referred to me as “the grenade we’re tossing into our student body to get the conversation of sex started” because they realized how sweeping these topics under the rug caused their students to live trapped and addicted and ashamed. I will continue sharing my testimony in that capacity as long as there is a student in front of me that needs to hear it.

However, I am more aware now more than ever before in my ministry how little parents know about what’s happening. And because I’m not a parent, I feel terribly inadequate in telling you this.

But I can’t not tell you. After seeing the innocence in the eyes of ten year olds who’ve carried secrets nobody, let alone a child, should carry; after hearing some of the most horrific accounts from students I’ve ever heard this year, I cannot go one more day without pleading with you to open up and have these difficult conversations with your children. Would you prefer your son or daughter learn what a “fetish” is from you or from searching Google Images? Talk to them about abuse and yes, even trafficking.

Just this month I met a relative of a girl whose own mother was selling her body from the time she was five until now, when she’s sixteen. This was not in some drug-infested ghetto you’d see on a news story. It was in a very upscale town in a very upscale state known for its nature and beauty and summer houses. Abuse does not discriminate.

[Tweet “Your children need to know about sex now.”] If not for them, maybe for a friend. Maybe they can help bring context or see warning signs.

Ask them what they know. Ask them what they’ve done. Ask them what’s been done to them. Show grace and love. Stay far away from judgment and condemnation. If you feel ill equipped, ask a pastor or counselor for help. If you hear an answer you didn’t expect and your first instinct is to dismiss it – don’t. Find a counselor. Look for resources. Continue following up. If you struggle with this (and let’s admit it, statistically, a lot of us do), get help too.

Do the right thing, the hard thing, for the sake of your children. If we don’t do this now, I am terrified of how the enemy will continue stealing hope and joy from our youngest generation and how they’ll be paralyzed to advance the Kingdom of God as they mature.

[Tweet “We cannot let this happen on our watch.”]

*Specific details that could identify children have been changed in such a way that it does not affect the story and only protects the children. Mandatory Reporters reported confessions that involved abuse or neglect or situations that indicated a child was in any type of danger by using proper state laws and procedures.