Check out Amber’s recent interview with Laurie Krieg, the director of parent programs and discipleship at the Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender and author of An Impossible Marriage and Raising Wise Kids in a Sexually Broken World.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Amber: We’re just going to jump right in. I’ve got several questions for Lori about her book, about her work, about her wisdom. Why did you write Raising Wise Kids? What was the catalyst for that, and then what is your hope for the book?
Lori: So I was sitting on my couch, about to start my final semester at Wheaton, and I was like, “Lord, what’s next?” And I really wanted to write a book on identity, something slightly less controversial. And I was looking at my kids playing on the floor. And my husband was on the couch. And it literally just felt like the Lord putting this burden on me.
And the burden was for the gap that many of us parents feel. It’s those of us who grew up in a church, or are millennials, maybe younger or older, we grew up a lot hearing purity culture stuff, which I’m not about to just rip that all up. I’m just going to say a flaw was it was “you do good sexually, you get good.” So you don’t have sex, everything’s great. “You do bad, you get bad.” It’s basically karma. It’s not rooted in the gospel. That’s my perception of it. So then, for the last 10 years, we’ve been ripping it up.
Then we’re still parents, and we still have human children who are developing into sexual beings, and they’re going to go through puberty, and it’s like, okay, well, I know what not to say. We just ripped it up. What do I say? Where some of us who didn’t grow up in the church, we grew up in more liberal, progressive worlds. It was like our parents threw a condom at us and were like, “Don’t have sex, or you’ll get chlamydia and die,” to quote Mean Girls. So there’s the gap.
What do we say? And the burden was like, “Hey, Lori, you’ve been workshopping this in ministry life. Ten years you’ve been in this world. Your oldest daughter is ten years old. You’ve been workshopping what to say with your kids. Would you be willing to share that with others?”
And I prayed about it for several months because I was like, “I don’t want to step into mommy world. Are you kidding me?” And so I was like, “All right. Well, if there’s anything I can offer from what I’ve learned and studied that would be a help to one other mom or dad, okay, Lord. I love you. Let’s go.” So that’s the reason for this book.
And what I hope people get out of it is digging up all of our unhealthy, unhelpful frameworks that many of us received. Dig it up, let’s find it. We’re not inventing something. It’s not purity culture 2.0. It’s, “Can we take what God designed and say, ‘This is applicable to today?'” So that’s my hope, that we can do that with confidence.
Amber: I love that, digging up, finding that foundation and building on that foundation from there. So I’m thinking you prayed about this for a while, and then you spent a while reading, researching. What did you notice that changed in your own parenting as you did that research and writing?
Lori: I felt way more confident. Honestly, the one takeaway from all of my research, there were many takeaways, was my parental posture is as important, if not more important, than the specific words I say.
And by that I mean, it’s like, do I feel secure? And can I find my security in Jesus? And then when I’m offering this information, my kids–they have these beautiful mirror neurons–and so they’re picking up on, like, is mom anxious? Is mom okay? Is she telling me this? That’s what their brain is like always in this mode of, like, I’m settling in based on how she’s doing.
It’s not the specific perfect words, although that is important that we know that we have competency at some level. It’s not one big conversation. It’s a hundred little conversations. But what helped me is, “You got to work on your, like, I’m okay in Jesus.” I’m like, oh, I can do that. Okay, so I’m okay in Jesus. Now I just need to approach my kids with some courage and let’s have a conversation. That was so helpful for me. In not being like, “You got one shot. One shot, and it’s out.”
Amber: I like to tell parents, like, “Hey, I know this is hard, and I know it’s scary, and also our kids are worth mastering our own fear and discomfort.” And like you said, being secure in the Lord.
So yeah, kind of speaking to that fear or the temptation to stay silent and hope someone else will talk to kids or hope that the youth group will cover it and that’ll be enough, or we can just put a book on their bed while they’re not home, and then they come home and they read the book, and that’ll be enough. What would you say to the parent who’s secretly hoping this topic just doesn’t come up? And I’m thinking not necessarily about sex, but particularly about sexuality, LGBT+ things, gender, those kinds of topics.
Because I think a lot of parents are like, okay, I can probably do the sex talk, but the sexuality part seems a lot harder, and I don’t want to misstep or misspeak, and I’m just not really sure what to say.
Lori: They’re going to run into it. They likely already have. There’s shows that pop up with two moms, two dads. Even if your kids don’t ask, they’re noticing. That has been a surprise, as I’ve been talking about things, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to address the 11-year-old about this trans person that we just saw.” Because I saw her noticing, and then I’ll bring it up, so I’m like, well, better talk to all three. And then I talk to all three, and the six-year-old is the one that’s like, “Yeah, why is that girl trying to be a boy?” And I was like, “I didn’t even notice you noticing it.”
So they’re noticing. And my favorite posture as a mom that gives me courage is when I see myself as a servant of my kids. Not a slave. What does it mean to serve my kids? Because here’s my little kid in this crazy, mixed-up world. They’re seeing things. They’re seeing on things on screens. They will encounter things. And it goes into their right brain, and it’s like this right brain chaos. What do you mean two girls are married? Even if they’re not asking you. What do you mean? Why does that girl look like a boy?
And I, as a mom, can serve my children by helping put left brain language to right brain chaos. I’m always trying to amp myself up because I can still get nervous for these conversations, and I’ve been doing this for now almost 12 years, and I’ve been a mom for this amount of time, and I’ve been teaching on this, and I still get nervous. I’m giving myself a little pep talk, “You are serving your children. Serve your kid by putting right brain chaos into left brain language and help them understand it.” There’s actually a term for when things just hang out in the right brain, and they just go bouncing around, and they don’t ever find a safe place to land. That can become an unformulated experience. That means just it feels very anxious, it makes your kids just not know what to do and how to thrive in this world. So I’m like, “Okay, how can I help them interpret what they see?” So serve your children, and then give them that left brain language.
The other phrase I like to say, I talk about, is a psychological term, I talk about this a lot, is the anchoring bias. It’s just a psychological term that means the first place you learn about something becomes the anchor for everything else you hear about that; we compare it to the first place we heard it.
So kids are seeing same-sex characters on Disney. They’re hearing about it on the playground. They’re running into it on the internet. They’re seeing it at the grocery store. I want to be the anchor. I don’t want the internet to be the anchor of what they’re seeing. I want the gospel through me, their loving, trusted adult, to be the anchor that interprets all of this, that they’re comparing everything else that they see and hear about this to our conversations. So that I become the place that they’re going back to.
Amber: I really appreciated those sections in your book, particularly the anchoring bias because it’s so true and it’s one thing I think helped me get to a place that’s like, “No, I really do need to talk about these things earlier than we should have to.” But we really do need to talk about them early so that we are the ones giving the information and setting the tone and being the person that they come to.
What if parents say, “My kids are teenagers. I’ve already messed this up. I didn’t have these conversations. Is it too late?”
Lori: It’s never too late to have conversations. Is it going to be harder? It probably is going to be a little harder.
Let me teach you a phrase my older sister taught me, and I’ve been using it, and it is my favorite new phrase. It’s, “I wish I had…” Okay, so your kid goes through something, and you’re like, “Oh, my word, I definitely didn’t get ahead of the game. I didn’t anchoring bias that. Oh, look, now they’re injured. Now they went through a thing.”
So let’s say your teen encounters pornography. As I battle shame that I missed it, I say, “Oh, buddy, thank you for telling me.” I listen and I say, “You know what I wish I had done? I wish…,” let’s say they’re 16, “I wish I had talked to you at eight, nine, 10 years old about these things. I wish I had when you were eight years old… I wish that I had sat down with you and said… Hey, here’s what I wish I would’ve done.”
And there’s something about like, “Okay, my mom recognizes she missed it. I recognize that internally, even if I can’t name it.” There’s something calming that happens to the kid and to you, and then that opens up doors for conversation.
So it’s never actually too late. Could it be harder? Probably, if we’re going to be honest. But I find this phrase to be helpful to start the rewrite process of, “Here’s what I wish I would’ve done. Now let’s have the conversation.”
Amber: Oh, that’s really good. I like that.
So speaking of “I wish I had,” if you go back to parents of younger kids, what’s the maybe biggest mistake or misstep that you see parents, well-meaning Christian parents, who are trying, who want to get this conversation right, what’s the misstep you see that’s most common when a kid brings up something related to gender or attraction, particularly gender incongruence or same-sex attraction? Most of us can probably talk about marriage and singleness, but talking about same-sex attraction, talking about gender incongruence feels a little bit more tricky. Where do you see some kind of missteps that we maybe could just know the minefield and potentially correct if we’ve already made those missteps with our own kids?
Lori: I have so much empathy here because if I wasn’t bathing in this stuff all the time, I would be in the same boat. In our home we say, “Some girls who struggle with like-liking each other, or they heart eyes other girls.” I think some of us think we have to make it sexually explicit as opposed to using language you’re already using about attraction. And so I have empathy because we’re like, “Well, I don’t want to talk about gay sex or something. Do I have to put these things in their head?” And you don’t. You can answer their question, compare it to God’s good design. How can we help them interpret the world and serve our children by being like, “Here’s what this is,” in simple, age-appropriate, non-explicit language.
How can I say, “Oh yeah, that person, when she looks in a mirror, she’s struggling with how she feels inside of her girl body. She sees her girl body, and she feels like her insides and outsides don’t match. She’s taking medicine in order to make her girl body look like a boy body.” So that’s answering the question. Then I compare it to God’s good design. I can ask, “But can she ever actually become a boy?” “No, Mom.” “Why not? What’s a girl?” Or, “What’s a boy?” “A boy has a natural penis and can help make a baby in a special way.” Or “A girl has a natural vagina or has the potential to get pregnant. So she can’t ever become a boy.”
Amber: It goes back to that foundation part. That’s where we start. That’s where we want to build.
You talk, I think, in your book about moving from reactivity to intentionality and how we don’t just want to only have conversations where we’re responding to a question or responding to a cultural event, or responding to something they saw on the TV or out at the mall, at the grocery store. What does that look like practically?
Lori: I don’t usually just randomly bring up same-sex marriage. There usually is something that I’m trying to utilize. Like, we see the whole library turn rainbow in June, and that’s my teaching opportunity.
Here’s a story from my own life. So a few years ago my daughter was going to bring a JoJo Siwa pillow to pajama day at school. I was like, “Oh, shoot.” I know her friends. I know her peers. They could make jokes about her. They may say, “Well, don’t you know about JoJo Siwa? She’s dating a girl.” I was like, “Okay, I don’t want my daughter to anchor about this space.” And we had talked about same-sex marriage, but I was like, “I want to go first. I want to get ahead of the bullying in case that happens, about whatever could happen.” So I was like, “Hey, did you know that JoJo Siwa, she actually like-likes girls, or she heart eyes other girls?” What did my daughters say? “What? That’s not God’s design.” Let them react, which is why we have pre-conversations, so they don’t have to say their unfiltered sentences to other humans.
“Yeah. Oh, what, Mom? That’s not God’s design.” They were so salty about it, which I understand because kids are black and white. Kids’ brains are always trying to spot the different. So I’ve been telling them, they’ve been seeing marriages between a man and a woman. Now I’m saying there’s girls who like their friends, like other girls. “Yeah. Oh, I know. So there’s some people who struggle with that, that they’re wrestling with that. Now, that’s not God’s design for marriage, is it?”
This is me taking it to God’s design. Now I want to point to the good of marriage, the positive
of marriage, not just the no. Why don’t I just do the “no”? Because it actually makes our brains
get anxious, and we actually don’t learn that well. And so I want my kids’ brains to be open and receptive, and that’s how God created the world. It started with, in the beginning, it was good, then the fall, and then Jesus, and then it’s all going to be redeemed.
So I want to start with the, “What’s the aberration? What’s it distorting? So it’s not God’s design.
What is God’s design, kid?” And we had talked about this, we just hadn’t put it in the JoJo Siwa context yet. And I was like, “What is marriage? What’s it mean, guys?” And they were like, “Um, different.” They remembered what I’ve been talking to them since they were three. “Yes, God wants marriage to be between a mommy and a daddy, or two people whose bodies are different. Because when moms and dads love each other, even though they’re so different, they show you a picture of how much God loves you, even though he is so different from us.”
Now, this is a part three. And if you’ve got kids who are like, “And I’m out, that was long enough, two-minute lecture, bye,” you can do this in layers. But the third part is how do we love? So I’d say, “All right, Gwen, when you go to school today, and let’s say someone talks about JoJo Siwa, or is like, ‘Don’t you know she likes girls? She’s gay.’ Or if you meet girls who like-like their friends who like girls. What are you going to say to them?'” I think the second born was like, “Oh, I’m going to tell them that’s not God’s design.” I was like, “No, we’re not going to say that. We’re going to talk to our friends, and we’re going to love them where they’re at because they’re struggling with this inside. But we all struggle with things, don’t we?” “Yeah, we do, Mom.”
“We all struggle. What do you struggle with, Juju?” “I struggle with wanting to hit my sister when I’m mad.” “How about you, Gwen?” “I struggle with fear.”
“How about me, Mom? I struggle with…” They know Mom can struggle making work her life or yelling when she’s mad. And I say, “And what are we supposed to do with our struggles? We’re supposed to take them to our family to help us, take them to Jesus.” “So what we’re going to do with our friends who struggle in this way is we’re going to love them and pray for them to bring their struggles to Jesus, just like we pray for each other to bring our struggles to Jesus.”
So that was a five-minute conversation about how I was contextualizing in eight- or nine- and seven-year-old language.
Amber: I love that it can be one tiny thing. For that conversation, it was a JoJo Siwa pillow. It doesn’t have to be some big, big thing. The Lord gives us opportunities to talk to our kids about a host of things related to his wisdom on a variety of topics, not just sexuality.
One of the things I pray often is, “Lord, just open my eyes to those opportunities. Whatever they are, the simple things that you’ve crossed our paths with, like a JoJo Siwa pillow.” Sometimes if we’re saying, “Lord, how in the world, I’m feeling this anxiety around these conversations. I want to teach your good wisdom to my kids. I just don’t know how to do that.” It’s things like that that can give us an in that lend themselves to starting those conversations in an intentional way. And, again, even if you don’t get everything into that conversation, like you said, you go back later and you just follow up. You have another conversation.
Lori: That’s right. The only one I don’t wait for is talking about porn, just for what it’s worth. It was dinner, and I was like, I’m ripping the Band-Aid off, and I’m talking about how there’s private parts online and what to do with that. So that is one that, don’t wait, because the kids have been through trauma if they’ve seen it.
Amber: What ages do you feel like that conversation has to start? Parents are always shocked at when I give an age that I think they should start that conversation. What would you say you should start that conversation?
Lori: When they have access to screens. But I was more explicit, and maybe this is too late, but my kids were nine, seven, and five. So it was in that window, the, “Okay, everybody’s hearing the
conversation.” And I didn’t use the word porn. I just talked about, “Hey, guys, did you know that there’s some people take pictures of private parts, and they put them online? And I want you to know that if you run into that, you close the screen, you come find me. You won’t get in trouble, and it’s not your fault. It’s the person who made it’s fault.”
I bring that up at least every six months, and they’ll run into different things in books that are inappropriate, things that they just bump into, and then we have the conversation about, “Okay, it’s not your fault. You’re not in trouble. How do we process that?”
Amber: That’s great advice because the average age of exposure to porn is 11. Some studies are showing it’s trending downward, maybe closer to eight. Which is so young, but when we put devices in our kids’ hands, they have access to apps that feature porn. Roblox, YouTube, even YouTube Kids.
Lori: Barbie porn at age three, for my oldest. I was like, “Who is making Barbie porn?”
Amber: So we really, really, really cannot wait for this conversation. Like Lori said, you don’t have to say “porn” explicitly, but you can talk about screen safety. You can talk about how your body feels when you see something that is off, and that kind of alerts you go to mom. And I love what Lori said about, “Close your eyes, come find me. You will not get in trouble.”
So many kids think that yucky feeling in their body means they’re about to get in trouble because they did something wrong. And we have to tell them, “You will not get in trouble.” And then you want to block it, delete it, however you handle that. But yeah, I agree. That’s one we have to start way earlier than we should, way earlier than we want to, but so necessary. If our kids have access to screens anywhere. I have a friend whose kid got into some stuff, not at her house, but at grandma’s house, because grandma forgot how to lock down the iPad. And the kid wasn’t trying to find stuff, but it just popped up in an ad on a game.
Amber: What is a sentence that you think every parent should have in their back pocket for when their kid or a kid’s friend or a kid at Sunday school, just a kid, says, “I like people of the same sex. I think I heart eyes other girls.”? What do you want parents to know before that ever happens to their kid or maybe even to a friend’s kid or a kid who’s a friend of their kids? What’s that one sentence, two sentences they should have ready to go?
Lori: Just, “Thank you so much for telling me. Thank you for entrusting me with that.” When I say this on stages, some parents are like, “What do you mean ‘thank you’?” Roll the tape back in your own life
for when you have ever been struggling with sin of whatever variety, and you come forward, and you tell
someone, you confess, you share. That was a hard thing. And so for someone to be like, “Thank you so much for trusting me with your story.” You’re not saying, “I love this. A+, I’m pro same-sex marriage, I’m pro transitioning.” You’re just saying, “Thank you. That must have been hard.”
And then I would say the next question is, “What’s it been like for you? What’s this like?” And again, that’s not affirmation of same-sex marriage. That is not saying, “I love transitioning.” That is saying, “What’s it like to be you? Help me understand.” Sit next to them, and look at their life with them. Understand their worldview so that then you can keep earning relational equity in order to help be a buddy as they hopefully are following Jesus with whatever version of sexual brokenness God has allowed in them.
I think my theology of suffering is that God entrusted to us to give him glory and to really help us learn dependence on him. And that’s how I see this too. “Okay, God, you’ve entrusted struggle and suffering to me. How do I glorify you in journeying with this well?” And that’s a real privilege. If you get the opportunity to walk with people in their version of brokenness and help them show the worth it-ness of following Jesus with this thorn in their flesh, pretty powerful. Powerful testimony.
Amber: That’s really good. I love your responses, kind of in that immediate– I always tell parents, “Now isn’t the time to bring up theology. You can have those conversations later.” Because we want to be sure, like, “But are you still following Jesus?” That is a question I would want to know. But
yeah, so good to just say, “Thank you for telling me. You’re so brave. What is it like to be you?”
My last question before we get to some of the questions in the chat is, thinking about your book, what chapter do you think parents would be most tempted to skip that you would say, “Absolutely do not skip this chapter”?
Lori: Well, they’re going to want to skip all the gospel chapters. They’re going to want to skip the ones related to theology, like, “Gospel? I already know it.” But when I speak on this, I’m always like, “Hey, what’s the purpose of your life?” And somebody will inevitably shout the Shorter Westminster Catechism to me, like, “Glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” I’m like, “Got you. Hear you.” But so often we live like the purpose of our life is to get married and make Christian babies and tithe and die. And every inch of following God’s design for marriage, his path of flourishing for people who experience wrestling with gender, his path of flourishing for people wrestling with porn addiction, his path of flourishing for people who have experienced abuse, all of it starts here in the gospel.
Amber: Yeah. We love the practical. We want the practical. But we need that foundation. We cannot do the practical until we have that foundation of the gospel.
As we’re leaving this webinar, what is, if we only did one thing after listening to your advice, after being encouraged to read your book, if we only did one thing differently or started one new thing, what would you encourage us to do?
Lori: In those gospel chapters, the mission of us as believers, our purpose is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. We have a mission to advance his kingdom, or I say to my little kids, to push back the darkness and usher in the light. I think we can get so caught in these little questions and these little hairy, scary things and who’s wrestling with God and how do I do it, and we need to do it. We need to do it. Why would I write the book if we didn’t? But if there was one thing, it would be remember the mission that God wants us to advance his rule and reign, and God has created your kids for this time, for this faith, with specific gifts to push back the darkness and usher in the light, linking arms with you.
Amber: The one thing I think Lori and I both would want you to walk away with is not, “Go have this certain conversation about sex or sexuality.” It’s really, “Ground your kids deeply, plant them deeply in the gospel mission, in their true purpose.” Which is, yes, sexuality and sex are part of that, but it’s not the main thing, and that is what we have to instill in our kids because everything flows from that.
Lori, your insights are so valuable. Thank you. We’re so grateful for you and your witness. I hope you keep writing. You and Matt. Keep those resources coming. We need them.
