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Do you ever feel awkward or overwhelmed with the thought of talking to your teenagers about sex? Author and Christian counselor, Eliza Huie, joins me today as we talk through this immensely practical book that she wrote called Raising Teenagers in a Hyper-Sexualized World .
I found this book so helpful and insightful that I asked the author, Eliza Huie, to come and discuss what she brings to light in the book. Eliza is the Director of Life Counselling Ministry and the Dean of Biblical Counselling at Metro-Baltimore Seminary. Eliza is also a wife, mother of three, and new mother-in-law to one!
Depending on what you’re dealing with right now, this podcast might be a life-saver for you. And if you’re not there yet, you will be. So, I just encourage you to take this podcast and share it with those who are there right now.
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Some recent Patreon supporters I’d like to thank are: Steve and Keisha Peterson, Brad and Robin Rogers, Sally Harris, and Nick VanGoor. Thank you so much!
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Show Highlights
J: Thank you for joining me, Eliza. I do want to state that I sought you out. One of my good friends handed me this book and I think I read it in a day. Can you tell me why did you write this book, Raising Teenagers in a Hyper-Sexualized World ?
E: I didn’t set out to write a book. This was a thesis project for the Master’s degree that I was in and one of our assignments was to write something that was really practical. I wrote it and my professor told me I should teach it or put it out there for other people. So, I put it out as a free book online and a publisher contacted me and asked if I’d mind taking it down, and they would publish it and try and get it out to more people. This is a publisher who is really looking for books that are very readable and very practical so that people actually get through it. I think one of the biggest struggles, especially as parents, is to find the time to read an entire parenting book. So that was really the motivation behind it.
J: I would love to walk through some of your guideposts for parents. Did you have a particular parent or parenting situation in mind as you wrote this?
E: Yes. There really wasn’t a whole lot written to parents raising teens. It was a lot of parenting in the earlier years and so I wanted to target that audience specifically. I had just kind of started to finish the teen years myself. We have three children and I think my youngest was 17 or 18 when I wrote this. So, I felt like I really wanted to help that age group and parents raising that age group. I started with just tips for parents. In the book they’re written as “Don’ts.” Don’t do this or don’t do that. However, it’s actually a very positive book. It gives you a lot of “Do’s” in the midst of the “Don’ts.” I wanted to start with helping parents from a biblical standpoint to understand their teens. To understand that the teenage years is the stage of a lot of chaos in teens’ bodies and in their minds. I wanted to help parents understand how they’re made, and to be compassionate in light of that, especially in light of their sins, during that time-frame.
J: Absolutely. Having been a youth pastor for 20 years now, I can tell you that this is so helpful as a parent. If I was talking or counselling someone else, I would say that this is obvious, but when it’s your family and your situation it feels like the stakes are so infinitely high.
So, let’s get into these guideposts.
• Don’t overreact.
Can you speak to this and why you started with it?
E: Mostly because that’s our natural tendency, especially in the teen years. In the younger years, it seems like we have a lot more understanding to the fact that they are toddlers or they’re little children. As they get to be about our size, we tend to have a lot more expectation of how they’re going to respond to things. So, when they respond in ways that are still foolish, it’s easy to overreact, especially when it comes to sexual sin or even sexual exploration. If we find our children exploring certain things, having curiosity about certain things, or we catch them in certain things related to sexual sin, the easiest thing to do is overact and feel like this is the worst thing. And I think that’s really what I wanted parents to step away from. This really isn’t the worst thing that could happen, depending on what your child is struggling with or dealing with. It’s really a part of the growing up process-to become sexually c
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