How can I talk to my children about gender, sexuality, and God's good design? - Podcast Episode 218

Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. Joining me today, again, is one of my favorite guests,

Elisabeth Urbanovic. She's the CEO and founder of Foundation Worldview. And today she's gonna be answering some questions and introducing us to new curriculum that they've produced on a super important topic.

So, Elisabeth, welcome back. Thanks so much for having me on again, Shay. It's a joy to be with you.

So just for our audience who may have not seen one of the previous episodes that you've been in, but tell us this super briefly on what is

Foundation Worldview, and then tell us about what led you to produce the new

God's Good Design curriculum. Yes, so at Foundation Worldview, we are an organization that is designed to create resources that equip

Christian adults, specifically Christian parents and educators and church leaders, to equip the children that God has put in their lives.

And we're also designed to be a place in their care to carefully evaluate all of the ideas that are coming their way, so that they can think clearly and understand the truth of the biblical worldview.

And here at Foundation Worldview, we love God questions, and we are constantly pointing parents and others who are working with kids to God questions, because we say, we don't have all the answers, but the

Bible does. And here's a great resource to help you find some of those biblical answers. So yeah, so that's

Foundation Worldview in a nutshell. And then what we're talking about today, our God's Good Design Curriculum at Foundation Worldview, that this is actually a curriculum for children ages four on up.

So roughly ages four through eight, that's laying the biblical foundation for topics such as identity, gender, sexuality, marriage, and family.

And you know, Shay, as you and I were chatting a little bit before we started recording, I told you, I initially really didn't wanna touch this topic with a 10 foot pole, because it is just such a contentious issue in our culture.

But the longer we've been around as an organization, the more that we've seen that really our children need a solid biblical understanding of who they are, of who

God designed them to be, why it is that God designed us as male or female, what marriage is, what sexuality is, and how all of these things are good gifts from him, so that they can have the positive biblical theology before they ever encounter any deviations from God's good design.

So the goal with these materials is that we would equip Christian parents to build this positive biblical theology for their children, so that when then, when they encounter something out in the world around them or in the media, parents don't have to backpedal, and kids' first exposures to these topics are not from a negative perspective.

It's from the perspective of look at what God has created. It isn't God's design, so good.

So that's really the goal of these new materials, and we are so excited about them. Elizabeth, I'm with you 100%, as we talked about beforehand.

This is an issue, not that it got questions. We're a ministry, we invite people to ask us questions, so people ask us about controversial stuff all the time, but if anything's ever going to get us in trouble, whether it be with the government or with some of the big tech companies out there, it would be an issue related to gender and sexuality.

So we want to present biblical truth on this issue, but we also don't want it to become all -encompassing, that this is what we talk about all the time, but we just get so many questions about it.

So I'm glad you did this curriculum, because it's not just adults, it's not just teenagers who have to deal with this issue, that what's going on in the culture, it's creeping its way to younger and younger kids all the time.

And I love what you said about preparing our kids so the first time they're exposed to it is not when they're being taught something wrong.

And far too often, I know many young adults who they've been going to church their whole lives, but have never been presented with any sort of worldview or apologetics or any of the possible difficult passages in the

Bible or difficult things to explain, and they go away to college, and it's the first time they're ever exposed to it, and that can be devastating.

So yes, present the truth as soon as you can so that the first thing they hear is the truth rather than the first thing they ever hear on an issue being a corruption or a perversion of the truth.

So let me ask you this. What do you see as some of the biggest damage that's being done when a young child, as young as age of four, is presented with, you can choose your gender, you can choose your sexuality, none of this is related to your actual biological sex, everything is just whatever you want to be.

How does that attitude impact a young child? Yeah, that's a really important question for us to think through.

And the way that we encourage parents to start these conversations is actually grounding everything in the concept of design because that's really one of the key questions here is are we as humans designed or did we come to be accidentally?

Because if we were designed, that means we have a designer and we have a specific purpose where if we came to be accidentally through the process of blind, unguided evolution, we are then the ones who are responsible to craft our own identities and our own purpose and our own meaning and our own value.

And so it's really important to first talk with little kids about the concept of design, just to know design is a purposeful plan and to look at all the world around us and see all of the amazing places where we see design, whether it's

Legos or a dollhouse or the refrigerator or a bike or the car, the family car.

And then to talk about how design always comes from a designer. We look at Legos and we don't just think, wow, it's so amazing these

Legos got here by accident or we don't look at a refrigerator and think, wow, it's so great that all these parts came together to make this refrigerator.

We know that someone intelligent designed this. And then we want our kids to understand that designers understand their design best.

So it's best when we know and follow the designer's design. So if our kids are the first time that they're ever spoken to about their purpose, about their meaning, about their identity, is just this narrative that you get to choose your own identity.

Well, a few things happen. One, that puts an incredible weight on a child. We tend to think like, oh, take away all restraints.

That's freedom. What happens when you take a train off of its tracks? That's not freedom for the train.

That's enslavement. It can't go anywhere. Its wheels get stuck. You know, it might roll down a hill where within its proper boundaries, that's where true freedom lies.

And so we're putting just this weight that our children are not designed to carry on them.

But not only that, but then we are taking them away from the designer's design.

Because as you mentioned, you know, a little bit earlier, that the world views the

Christian view of sexuality and gender and marriage and family, you know, as just oppressive and hateful.

Where if God truly is the author of these things, you know, if Jesus truly rose from the dead and Christianity is true, you know, and the rest of the

Bible is true, and God has designed, you know, us as individuals, in a specific way, things are gonna go best.

We are only gonna be able to flourish if we live according to that designer's design.

So I would say with little ones, we want them to understand that they have been designed, that they don't have to bear the weight of figuring out how do they feel about everything and what does that say about their meaning and identity, and they're always having to craft this identity, but that they can rest in what the

Bible has revealed. You know, we look at the first chapter of the Bible in Genesis 1, 27, in that verse,

God, you know, God is saying, let us make man in our own image, and then it says, and God created man in his own image, male and female, he created them.

And so we see right here that there is just this value and this purpose that God has given to every human, and we want to ground our little ones in that so that they know you're created in God's image.

You have value that no one can take away. You have value not because of who you are or what you do or how you look or how you think, you have value just because God designed you in his image.

And then to know that maleness or femaleness is purposeful, and it's purposeful that God created you as a boy or God created you as a girl, and that's such a good thing.

We want to lift that burden off of them that the culture places on them in the name of freedom and help them see that true freedom is living according to the designer's design.

Yeah, I love that illustration of the train on the tracks.

That you may, the rails are, they're restricting, all the train can do is go one direction.

It's like, that may be true, but if off the tracks, the train can't go anywhere at all.

And the, when you said like the Lego blocks, I remember one of the first times I was exposed to like an intelligent design sort of argument, the youth pastor had a couple of the students in the class take some

Legos and actually build something. I don't remember what they build, but then he's like, okay, now tear it all apart and put it in a box, kind of shake the box.

Is it going to reform the, say the castle or whatever you built? It's like, no, do it again, do it again, do it again.

If you did that a billion times, would it ever by random reform? The thing is like, no, it wouldn't.

And we're only talking about maybe a couple of hundred Lego blocks. DNA itself is a million times more complex than that.

And you're trying to get us to believe this all happened by random chance, by an unguided process.

It's like, no, everything about creation speaks to the need for an intelligent designer and even going specific to, yeah, we were designed, but we're designed for a purpose.

I love that. And presenting a biological sex, presenting gender as something that's purposeful rather than something that doesn't carry any meaning.

You can just be whatever you want when that's really not true. And worse than even not true, it's actually very unhealthy.

There's some falsehoods, some lies that really don't do that much damage if you believe them. But when you believe that even your, the way that your body was designed has no purpose, no meaning, no design, no intentionality, that's a harmful attitude to have because it causes you to question, well, why would

God create me a certain way if it has no meaning or purpose to it? So I love that you're, presenting this as a positive thing, but it's far too often

Christians is criticized. Well, they argue against everything rather than presenting, no, here's what's actually true.

I think that's extremely valuable. Yeah, and that's what we want our kids to know that it's not just like, don't do this, don't do that.

Stay away from this, stay away from that. It's like, look at, like God is the author of these things. We shouldn't be excited about these things because God has designed us purposely and his design is inherently good.

And that's what we want our children to see. Here's a question that I know, my wife

Melissa and I, God chose to not bless us with children. So we get to be the cool aunt and uncle to other people's kids.

We get to sometimes be like the grandparents where we take their kids for a weekend and then very gladly give them back to their parents so we can have peace at our house again.

But even knowing some of our friends who are parents and just having this conversation with them, how careful do you have to be with these topics, especially with really young kids?

Because you don't want to introduce them to something like this too early, but at the same time, like we said, we want them, the first thing they hear about these sort of things is

God's good design, that God had a purpose, the way God designed you and your body is good.

But how do you kind of balance that, wanting to get it into their minds early, a proper biblical, true understanding but also not introducing them too quickly when they're really not able to understand all the issues that are inherent there?

Yeah, so I think that there's a certain formula that we can use to break things down to make it very developmentally appropriate for kids.

And then I also think that when we're having the focus on the goodness of God's design, that will cause a mindset shift because as I've been interviewed about this curriculum, a number of people have said, but oh my goodness,

Elizabeth, introducing the concept of being anatomically different as boys and girls are actually introducing, if a parent introduces the concept of sex within marriage, isn't that like stealing a child's innocence?

And I said, okay, obviously there's a developmental appropriateness to this. There's certain details a four -year -old just wouldn't be appropriate for them to know.

But if we think about these concepts in general and we're saying, oh, this is robbing our kids of their innocence, what are we saying?

We're saying that these things that God created as good are inherently dirty and our kids are better off when they don't know about them, which that's not true.

What is true is we just need to make sure that it's in a developmentally appropriate way. And so what we do in our curriculum and what we would encourage parents to do with their children is to first introduce the truth that God has revealed in his word, then talk about how that has been corrupted by sin, then introduce some of the basic corruptions, but circle back and focus on God's goodness.

So I'll say that again. First introduce the biblical truth of the goodness of God's design in a developmentally appropriate way, then talk about how sin has corrupted the goodness of that design, go into some cultural specifics and wrap it up with the goodness of God's design.

So I'll give an example that we use in our God's good design curriculum. We talk about how

God designed us in his image as male or female, that's two separate lessons. Like one lesson is just focused on God designed us in his image and we show pictures of humans and animals and plants.

And the kids have to identify, you know, which is an image bearer and which is not, just so that they're getting in the habit of seeing every time they see a human, that's an image bearer.

Then we have another lesson on God designed us as male or female. And we give examples of kids who have different likes and dislikes and then identifying, are they a boy or a girl?

And well, what makes them a boy? It's not the fact that they like soccer or that they like drawing or that they have best friends who are boys.

It's the fact that their body reveals that they're a boy. Then we talk about how sin corrupts

God's good design and Jesus defeated the power and punishment of sin. So we introduced that. And then one of the deviations from God's good design that we want to prepare our children for is pornography.

Now, obviously you're not going to wanna sit down and have an in -depth conversation with a four -year -old about pornography, but you do want to prepare them because you have no idea what's gonna pop up on some device, whether they're by themselves or with a friend or anything.

So what we say in that curriculum is we say, because of sin, not all pictures are good pictures.

And so that's just an easy developmentally appropriate way to say that to a four -year -old. And we say, the first thing we do is we talk about all the good pictures that there are.

And we talk about what are some good pictures that you love, pictures of a family vacation, pictures from your parents' wedding, pictures of your dog doing a trick.

These are such good pictures. And then we say, sometimes there are not good pictures. And then we say, when you go to the beach, you wear a bathing suit, and that bathing suit covers special parts of your body that nobody should see unless your parents are taking care of you or a doctor is examining you.

But sometimes people take pictures of those special parts of people's bodies. Those are bad pictures.

And if you see a picture like that ever, three things, you wanna stop, run, and tell.

And so we just prepare them to stop, run, and tell. And then we play a game where we give them examples. We don't show them pictures, but we just give them examples.

Most of them are good examples. It's a picture of your cousin's dog doing a trick. It's a picture from your grandparents' wedding.

And then we just give a very brief, like you're playing a math game on your mom's phone and a picture pops up of people not wearing enough clothes.

Is this a good picture or a bad picture? And we always end it then with examples of good pictures.

But just from that, we wanna help them understand we're created in God's image as male or female.

Sin has corrupted God's good design. One of the way it has done that is through people taking bad pictures.

We wanna focus on good pictures. So that's just a very developmentally appropriate way to do that without going into too much detail, without exposing our kids to too much.

And we can do the same thing with any other form of sin, whether it's someone hitting someone else, a brother hitting a sister for taking his truck, or whether it's for something that they're going to encounter in our neighborhood.

If we have neighbors who are in a homosexual relationship, we can just say because of sin, sometimes we desire the wrong kind of love in relationships.

So just very developmentally appropriate ways that aren't causing our kids to overly focus on these topics, but are still preparing them because this is just the reality of the world that we live in that we live in a world where, you know, like there's predatory pornography everywhere.

You know, we live in a world that celebrates forms of sexual expression that God says are not good, that God says are sin.

And so just to prepare them for this without overwhelming them. Like, wow.

I mean, just the idea of how to communicate truth to children about pornography.

I think that's powerful because, I mean, not the exact same thing, but I remember like with me as a teenager and alcohol.

I mean, I'd never tasted alcohol. I remember watching a football game with my dad and a beer commercial came on.

And it's like, dad, what does beer taste like? He was like, well, I'll get you some. So the next day he decided,

I'm trying beer and I think it's disgusting. So it's like when you protect a child too much, like you can have absolutely no, even knowledge of this stuff exists.

You set them up for failure to not knowing what to do when they actually are exposed to it.

But by communicating the truth, like this stuff is out there setting the foundation. I mean,

I still, to this day, I believe, why are we even talking about alcohol?

I know, sorry, I brought it up. It's like, I believe that getting drunk is wrong. I believe getting, being addicted is wrong.

I don't believe drinking in extreme moderation. I don't believe there's anything wrong with that. But I still, to this day, do not like the taste of anything with alcohol in it.

Primarily because my dad just let me try it. So it lost its fascination, lost its excitement. I knew ahead of time,

I did not like that. And so I think what you're describing is similar in that helping them to know that this stuff is out there.

You are at some point going to see it and here's what your reaction should be. I think that is extremely helpful.

And so - And what you're describing is something we say at Foundation Worldview that protection does not equal complete isolation.

That it's protection equals preparation. And so, you know, like your dad was preparing you. He was just like, hey, here's what this tastes like.

You know, like he didn't give you a six pack and say, drink this. You know, he gave you a little sip and you were like, oh, that's disgusting.

I don't want that. You know, like, and it lost any appeal. And so similarly, when we want to protect our children to things that are coming after them in the world, especially, you know, things that are coming after them in more of a predatory way, we want to make sure that we're not just completely isolating them.

You know, do we want to protect them in a certain way by making sure we have filters, you know, like on our phones and on all our devices?

Yes. But we also want to prepare them because there's a big difference in a child, you know, just with this example of pornography, there's a big difference between a child who's been trained to know that the minute that they see something to stop, run and tell, and a child who sees something and they know they don't feel quite right, but they're not sure if they feel curious or if they feel ashamed, but no matter what they feel, they're not going to tell anybody because they just don't feel right about it.

And so rather than complete isolation, we want to prepare them. Yeah, that's excellent.

I love that. I love the core concept you presented at the very beginning that you want to communicate the truth first.

You want to be the truth on an issue to be the first thing someone experiences because that's so helpful in being able to recognize the lies, the perversions, the distortions of that truth and to know they are to be avoided.

So let me ask you one question that we get frequently at GotQuestions, even on our site for kids, the false perception that essentially love equals sex, that if you love someone, that means you're basically,

I was supposed to have sex with that person. The connection between the two that goes, it's not biblical at all.

I mean, the Bible instructs us to love one another, to love one another strongly, passionately, but still only to have sex with your spouse.

But our culture has that so backwards that, yes, so I, wow,

I really, really love this male friend of mine. That must mean that I'm gay and I'm supposed to actually have sex with that person.

How can you communicate the truth on that issue to a young child?

Yes, and I think you put that really well because our world, especially the English -speaking world,

I think can get very confused about this because we only have one word to represent what other languages describe in many different words.

So especially, we talk about loving the pizza that we had last night, and we love our mom and we love our friends and we love our spouse.

And so right now, the cultural moment that we're living in, as we're recording this in 2024, says that all love is sexual desire.

So I even think about myself as a 12 or 13 -year -old girl. If I was growing up nowadays,

I would feel very confused because I remember being on the middle school volleyball team when

I was 12 and 13, and I got so excited when I would see the girls on the varsity volleyball team.

I did not have sexual desires towards them, but I would get little butterflies in my stomach because I thought they were so cool and they were so athletic and they were so beautiful, and I just wanted them to pay attention to me and notice me.

Nothing about it was sexual, and that thought didn't even cross my mind because I grew up in the late 90s, early 2000s, where nowadays

I would probably be a 12 -year -old thinking like, oh my goodness, maybe I'm a lesbian because I feel this way.

And so what we want to prepare our children with from the youngest of ages is to know that God designed different types of love for different relationships.

And that's actually something that we cover in this God's Good Design curriculum because we wanna make sure that our kids understand the goodness of the relationships that God has given us and what a gift they are.

So we have a whole lesson where we talk about just God designed different types of love for different relationships, and then we explore what different types of love

God created. Now in this curriculum, we don't go through exhaustively all the different types of love, but three types of love we do cover that I would encourage parents to cover with their children is we talk about friendship love, marriage love, and family love.

And so we look at different biblical references about friends. There's a lot of the wisdom in the

Proverbs about friendship and we look at how friendship love, usually we share friendship love with people that we share something in common with.

They might be in the same class at school or they might live on the same block or go to our church or maybe we both play the piano or we both play soccer.

And then we talk about how friendship love, love is always giving of ourselves to do what is best for someone else.

And how in friendship love, we give of ourselves to do what is best for these people that are in our community.

And we talk about how we can have one friend, we can have 10 friends, we can have friends who are the same age as us, we can have friends who are older than us or younger than us, we can have friends who are boys, we can have friends who are girls, like friendship love is such a good gift.

Then we can move into talking with our kids about marriage love and saying, hmm, we learned that friendship love is giving of ourselves to do what is best for those around us, our friends.

And we can have one friend, 10 friend, 100 friends. They can be boys, girls, older, younger. And then we say, hmm, is it the same with marriage love?

Can I share marriage love with just about anyone? And we take kids right to the scriptures and look at what

God has said about marriage and how in Genesis two, that marriage is

Adam saying to Eve, this is that last bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. And for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be united with his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

And so we talk about, no, marriage love is different. God designed marriage love to be one man and one woman becoming one flesh for life.

So how many people can be involved in marriage love? Two, and who do those two people need to be? Well, one of them needs to be a man, one of them needs to be a woman and they promise to stay together for their whole lives.

We also talk about from Ephesians five, how later, the full blown biblical theology is that marriage is a picture of Christ in the church.

And so when husbands love their wives sacrificially, they're portraying a picture of Jesus. When wives submit to the loving leadership of their husband, they're portraying a picture of the church.

So just so kids understand there are these different types of love and then we can present family love. What is family love?

It is a mom and dad and children, or like a mom and dad and adopted children, or aunts and uncles and grandparents doing what is best for one another, sacrificing for one another.

And we talk about how this picture of family love is also what God has given us in the church.

You know that we have brothers and sisters in the body of Christ. So just so our kids understand that there are different types of love so that when they feel really strong emotions for someone, you know, we have the example of David and Jonathan in the

Bible as these friends with very strong emotions for one another, but we're not given any hints that this love was anything other than platonic friendship love, that we can have strong emotions towards our friends.

And that is a good thing. That's a gift from God. We should have, you know, strong emotions and connections with our biological and adoptive family members and with those within the body of Christ.

And then there should be a strong, you know, emotional and physical and relational connection between a husband and wife, but it's just the husband and wife.

So that's the first thing I think we need to explain, you know, that there are different types of love. So our kids don't think that anytime they feel something towards someone, that that means that it's a sexual type of love.

And then there is an example given in the book, Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality, that I think is so helpful for understanding, for helping our kids understand why sex is reserved for marriage.

And in that book, the Mama Bears say that we wanna help teach our kids that anytime something is powerful and beautiful, it needs to be protected.

And they give the example of a fire and say, you know, you can make a fire with your kids in the fireplace or in a fire pit outside and talk about, you know, when this fire is within the proper boundaries, you know, it's within the fireplace or it's within the fire pit, what are all of the amazing things that this fire can do?

Well, it gives us light. It lights up the room or it lights up the backyard. It gives off heat. And not only that, that heat warms our bodies.

We can use it to cook food. It's amazing. And then say to our kids, okay, what if we took this fire out of the fireplace or out of the fire pit and we put it smack dab in the middle of our family room?

What would happen then? Well, oh my goodness, the fire would get out of control. It would destroy our whole house.

It might even destroy us because taken outside of its boundaries, this powerful and beautiful thing becomes destructive.

And you know, obviously with four -year -olds, we're not gonna talk about this, but you know, with kids eight and up, we can talk about, you know,

God has given us this gift of sex within marriage. And it's like this fire. It's a powerful thing that the way that God has designed us as humans, that there are actually chemicals in our brain that are released during sex that bond two people together.

And so this is a powerful thing. Not only that, sex can lead to the creation of children.

And then talk about how within the protection of the fireplace or the fire pit, this gift is an amazing and beautiful thing that this bonds a husband and wife together.

It can lead to children who are raised in a home with two parents who love them and are taking care of them.

But once you take that fire and put it in the family room, well, what can happen then? You can be bonding with people and then breaking apart, which

God never designed. You know, that's not how God designed it. Not only that, there can be physical consequences.

You could get sicknesses, you know, that you can never be cured of, you know, that you're gonna have for the rest of your life.

And then if a baby is formed, you know, which is a gift from God, which is a joyous thing, that baby is gonna be brought into a world where it is very vulnerable because its parents might leave one another.

They might not stay together. And, you know, that can lead to higher risks of poverty, you know, and so many different things.

And so we just want our kids to see that, you know, sex is this wonderful gift for this one relationship. And when it's reserved for this relationship, it's like fire in a fireplace or a fire pit.

And when it's outside of that relationship, it's like fire in the middle of the family room. It can destroy everything in its path.

Yeah, I love it. I love, I mean,

I was familiar enough with your curriculum that I knew that that was a question that you had in there, but just hearing you explain it so well.

I mean, if we had kids, we would definitely take them through the God's Good Design curriculum because we can recommend it to our friends who do have kids, who are looking for our church, so many different uses.

So I just love how it focuses on, again, like the foundation, imagine that, of the truth of setting a solid foundation for our kids.

So again, that the first thing they're exposed to is the truth, and then they can build on that foundation, have actually impact how they respond to things as they are exposed to them.

So I love that about this program, and I've always loved that about Foundation Worldview in its entirety. So real quick,

Elizabeth, if people want to learn more about either Foundation Worldview or the God's Good Design curriculum, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yes, well, if you can remember the name Foundation Worldview, just go to foundationworldview .com, or you can

Google us, we should be the first thing that pops up. And then if anybody is interested in purchasing and using the

God's Good Design curriculum or any of our curriculums, if you use the coupon code questions10, you can get 10 % off any family license.

That's awesome. And we'll, of course, include links to foundationworldview .com and also the

God's Good Design curriculum. When this show goes live, it'll be in the show notes, it'll be on the description on the

YouTube video when it's published, and then also at podcast .gotquestions

.org. So Elizabeth, thank you once again for what you're doing.

Thank you for coming on the podcast and explaining it so well. I love what you're doing, and I love the passion that you speak to these issues, that you're both very thoroughly biblically informed, but also truly care about the people you're trying to reach and trying to get them off to a good start.

And that's hugely important, as I've experienced in my life and seen in the lives of others again and again and again.

So thank you for what you're doing, and keep it up. Oh, thanks for the encouragement,

Shay, and thanks so much for having me back on again. Yeah, so this has been the Got Questions podcast with Elizabeth Urbanowitz from Foundation Worldview about their new

God's Good Design curriculum. Got questions? The Bible has answers, and we'll help you find them.