Raising Kids to Be Different—But Not Divisive | Rachel Gilson

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FamilyLife Today® with Dave and Ann Wilson; Podcast Transcript

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How to Parent Without Panic in an LGBT-Affirming World

Guest:Rachel Gilson

Release Date:July 17, 2025

Rachel:When we operate out of fear, fear makes us isolate. Fear makes us attack and Jesus didn’t call us to do either of those things. Our children need to understand that Christians are different from non-Christians, and they need to understand that Jesus has always called us to love our neighbors no matter how they live, no matter what they believe. Which doesn’t mean we condone everything our neighbors think or do, but we always love.

Dave:Okay, we have Rachel Gilson with us, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this is one of the best minds and thinkers on the topic of the world we’re living in, in terms of same sex attraction, transgender, LGBT. I mean, who else would you want to sit in the studio and talk to you about this.

Ann:I mean, I feel like you and Sam Allberry are some of our favorites because you’re good thinkers theologically, and biblically speaking you’re always drawing from the text of the Bible in scripture.

Rachel:It’s one of my favorite things about Sam. He can’t answer a question without pointing to an actual text.

Ann:Yes,

Rachel:I love sitting under his teaching.

Ann:Me too. And you’re like that too, Rachel. All of it is from “Here’s what the Bible says,” and I think that we really need that. I’m glad that you know what the Bible says.

Rachel:I really need it.

Ann:We all do.

Dave:Yeah. I love your book, Parenting Without Panic. The only problem with this title really not the title, the cover. Your name’s not big enough. That’s what I was thinking.

Rachel:That’s what my mom said. Yeah, that’s what my mom said.

Dave:You told us that. Your mom really said that.

Rachel:Well, there were two cover options and one of them, my name was quite prominent, and my mom was—

Ann:but it is by itself in the corner.

Rachel:It’s still clear that I wrote it. It is. And my mother’s still proud of me.

Dave:Parenting without Panic in an LGBT-Affirming World; this is the world parents are navigating.

Rachel:That’s right.

Dave:You open the book with this story of your daughter, about her teacher. You got to tell us, start there.

Rachel:Well, anytime you have a child, your oldest child’s going to school for the first time, you got a lot of big feelings. And I wanted to figure out what was going on. We were going to put her in the local public school. I had a good friend, Laura. Laura’s a stay-at-home mom who’s actually a missionary. She is just evangelizing the whole neighborhood. Love Laura. And she still has two children that are older than mine, so her kids were already in the school.

It’s like, “Laura, give me the details on the kindergarten teachers.” And she’s like, “Oh, well, all the kindergarten teachers at this school are amazing great teachers. And one of them is a woman who’s married to another woman.” And I forget what even happened. I think I probably lightly blacked out after—you know on the Charlie Brown—because I was thinking, “Oh no, please don’t let my daughter get that teacher.”

And then the shame and embarrassment of that being my first thought, because I was like, “Of all the people, I should be able to walk my daughter through having a teacher who’s a woman married to another woman. This is part of my background. This is a place out of which I do ministry. I’ve written books on this. I help other people navigate this.”

Ann:Rachel, when I read that, I’m just going to say I was shocked that because every other parent in the world is like, “Oh no, what do I say?” I would’ve thought you’re thinking “This is right up my alley,” but you’re feeling the same thing.

Rachel:It was the opposite of “I’ve got this.” I thought, “Oh no, please God, answer this one prayer; put her in any of the other classes.”

Dave:And He didn’t.

Rachel:God in His kindness said, “Nope, she’s going to have that teacher.” What were some of my fears, right, because fear can kind of spring upon you, animal instinct, and there’s a lot of reasons that we might have fears. A couple of mine: I was afraid that whatever I said to my daughter, which in my mouth would be so carefully chosen and nuanced and articulate, would come out of her the worst version of telephone you’ve ever imagined.

Ann:Yes, straight back to her peers and teachers.

Rachel:And her teacher’s face. I would be getting phone calls and emails. I would be tarred and feathered and taken around my neighborhood. So I was worried about that. If I’m honest, I was also just worried about, what if secular culture’s vision of sexuality is more attractive to my daughter than the Bibles? What if—because it’s always the lies that are closest to the truth that trap us more easily. What if it gets to her heart?

Ann:And what if she just loves this teacher and puts her on a pedestal.

Rachel:What is she does, and gosh, I want her to love her own kindergarten teacher and yeah, the complications of that. What does it mean to love someone who we really disagree with? And of course, just the awkwardness of can a five-year-old understand the various things that need to be understood? I’d initiated conversations about our bodies and about sex with my daughter early because I thought this is going to be embarrassing no matter when it happens, so I want to get in early before she notices that I’m no good at this. I had a decent foundation sort of by accident.

Ann:Was that through the birds and the bees?

Rachel:No, I encountered the birds and the bees way later. This was just sort of raw instinct of like, shoot, I’m going to have to talk about this. So I’m just going to practice now. Because I talked to a lot of my friends who grew up in Christian households. Mileage may vary in terms of how their parents had the sex talk with them, but many seem to have an experience where their parents, kind of awkwardly gave them a book around the age of puberty, like Our Changing Bodies, left it in their room or something.

And the reality is, in a culture like mine, even if she hadn’t had the teacher who was a woman married to another woman, the librarian at our public library identifies as non-binary. One of her soccer coaches later was also a woman married to another woman. We go to the playground. People have two dads, two moms. Our across the street neighbor is a man living in the world as a woman.

Ann:Our kids are going to, at one point—

Rachel:She wasn’t going to have to go very far, right?

Dave:Yeah, yeah.

Ann:Well wait, so she goes to school, she comes home, does she not say anything? What happens?

Rachel:Well, terribly, my daughter’s a little—she likes pretty things. And her kindergarten teacher was a little plain. She comes home, she’s like, “Mom, my teacher’s kind of fat and kind of plain. I don’t think I like her.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh.” But eventually she really—I mean this woman had been teaching kindergarten for 16 years at this point.

Ann:She was probably amazing.

Rachel:She was amazing. But there was a day, several months into the year—it was before COVID shut down kindergarten, so it was probably like January—we were walking home and she’s like, “Oh,”—I forget exactly how she put it—she was like, “Well, my teacher said today that her wife is pregnant and going to have a baby, so she’s going to be taking time off when the baby is born.” And “Well, a baby only comes with a man and a woman so I’m not sure what they did about that, but they must’ve done something.”

It was just so, and I was walking along side of her, and it was so interesting. We clearly talked enough about reproduction. I’m like, okay, so she knows something different had to be going on in this family structure. You can’t put together two ladies and get a baby out of that. But also, she wasn’t afraid of her teacher. She wasn’t denigrating her teacher. She was just kind of reporting it to me.

And that felt like a success to me in the sense of, I want my daughter and the other children in my church who I’m part of caring for, I want these kids to know that our neighbors are always first our potential siblings in Christ. Our neighbors are always first potential brothers and sisters in the Lord. So they might not know Jesus right now. So there’s going to be differences. But those differences don’t have to make us afraid. Those differences are they’re just there because well, if you have Jesus as your king and someone else doesn’t, you’re going to follow different rules.

Ann:Oh, that’s good.

Rachel:So I wanted to help her see that being a Christian means you’re different. And in New England, that’s not hard to communicate. Forty years ago on my block, it would not have been missionally interesting at all to be a man married to a woman raising a child, going to church. That would’ve been called “normal.” Now, in this culture, that’s actually missionally interesting. “You mean you’re a man married to a woman raising a child, going to church. Tell me about that lifestyle choice.”

So our children need to understand that Christians are different from non-Christians, and they need to understand that Jesus has always called us to love our neighbors because when we operate out of fear, fear makes us isolate. Fear makes us attack. And Jesus didn’t call us to do either of those things. We’re called to keep ourselves pure, but we’re supposed to be the light of the world not hidden under a bushel. We’re the salt of the world. That means we’ve got to be interacting with the meat.

We are called by Jesus to love our neighbors, even to the point of death, no matter how they live, no matter what they believe. Which doesn’t mean we condone everything our neighbors think or do. Certainly not. We’ve got God’s word that tells us what’s good, but we always love, and that’s one of the foundations I wanted to get to. Can she see her neighbors as people who are, people who Jesus died for and who need to hear about Him?

Ann:So you said fear—

Rachel:Yeah.

Ann:—was at the root of some of that. And I think that’s true for so many parents with all the things that you thought, the what ifs, what if. But you also mentioned shame. Why is that a piece of it?

Rachel:Yeah. Well, for me in particular, I thought “I’m supposed to know how this goes.” I was embarrassed that I didn’t—

Ann:I think it’s reassuring for the rest of us in the world, because this is your area of expertise and you are still, it shows us our need to lean into Christ. And for wisdom, from James it says, “I’ll give you wisdom” and we’re all dying to know. What did you say about all of that? Anything?

Rachel:About which part?

Ann:Well, that she’s having a baby. Did you get into any of that?

Rachel:I just affirmed to her, “You’re right. There must be. We only get a new human from a seed and an egg so somewhere they had to bring something in, and we don’t necessarily know what they did in order to bring about this child, but I’m sure they’ll love that child and we’ll just keep praying for them and just keep praying for them to know the Lord.”

Dave:Now, if your daughter was 10, 12, 13—

Rachel:Yeah.

Dave:—what’s the conversation look like?

Rachel:Yeah. Well, I think it probably at this point, because she’s 11 now, if she had a teacher in that same situation, she might not even mention it to me because sort of like old news, but we can have, so for example, at her school, they’ve been recently having the talk.

Dave:At the school they have?

Ann:Fifth grade, that’s normal.

Rachel:At the school, fifth grade they’re talking about. But because it’s progressive Boston, they don’t separate the boys from the girls. In fact, they don’t even use the language boys and girls. They say people with penises and people with vaginas.

Ann:Whoa.

Dave:They really say that.

Rachel:They absolutely do because they’re very progressive. And so my daughter kind of lightly rolls her eyes and she’s like, “Well, at least we’re getting really used to saying penis and vagina.”

Dave:Oh my gosh, gee whiz.

Rachel:Because we’ve been having these conversations for a long time, she knows she can come to me with any question she has. I’m never going to shame her. I’m never going to make her feel embarrassed. I’m going to tell her everything I know. And if I don’t know something, I’ll look it up.

Ann:And you won’t berate.

Rachel:No.

Ann:People that are different have different views or beliefs. Would you ever call it sin? How would you—and it would vary according to age.

Rachel:I think that that’s important language. We need to talk to our children about what sin is because they need to understand what’s wrong with them, what’s wrong with mom and dad, and what’s wrong with the world. So if we don’t have categories of sin—so with a very little kid, I might choose at certain points to say sin, but I might choose languages like “That’s not how God designed marriage. So if we belong to Jesus, we don’t enter into marriages like that.”

So for example, in an interview—I don’t remember—Tim Keller was talking about talking to his granddaughter about this same issue. I think his granddaughter asked him, “Can two women get married?” And he’s like, “Well, you have to consider the difference between what a law says in a country and what Christians do. In this country, it’s legal for a Christian to marry a non-Christian, for example. But according to the Bible, we would say it’s sin to enter into an unequally yoked marriage.” That was his response to her.

So I got to be careful with that. In fact, my mother-in-law became a Christian after she married so you end up in situations where—

Ann:It’s so tricky.

Rachel:—it happens. But Paul says, as a believer, you need to marry another believer. And part of what Christian marriage is like, “Hey, it’s a man married to a woman,” and “Hey, it needs to be fully faithful,” and “Hey, you need to have a sexual relationship that is safe and honoring,” and all kinds. Christian marriage means certain things that maybe culture doesn’t agree with.

So you can use sin language and sometimes it’s helpful and sometimes it’s just helpful to say, “Look at what God has built. There’s a reason that He says no to certain things. God has designed marriage and singleness to function in certain ways. When we know what God has said yes to, that helps us understand what he said no to.” And for older children, we can talk about the distinction. This is like high tech theology, right? There’s a difference between original sin, indwelling sin, and actual sin. We, all of us have both things going on. We are born guilty and corrupt.

Now, when we come to know Jesus, He frees us from the penalty of sin, and He frees us from the power of sin. I never have to sin. 1 Corinthians 10:13, there’s “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God will provide the way of escape.”

Ann:Have you shared that with your daughter?

Rachel:I don’t remember, maybe. I don’t know. We have so many conversations over the year.

Ann:I was going to say you’re the kind of person I can tell—

Rachel:It’s important to me.

Ann:—your theology and your faith just flow out of you. And I’m sure you’ve had many conversations.

Rachel:It’d be hard to imagine I haven’t shared that one with her.

Dave:And she’s 11 years old, but it also sounds like you’ve talked about sexual things a lot.

Ann:Since she was little.

Rachel:Yes, since she was like two or three.

Dave:It isn’t a one time, “Let’s have the talk.”

Rachel:You don’t need to have these complex conversations when they’re little, just like when you’re teaching the gospel. My three-year-old daughter doesn’t need to know pages and pages of atonement theory, but she does need to know that Jesus died for her. She doesn’t need to know reams and reams of Trinitarian theology, but she does need to know that there’s one God in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and that God loves her.

And so it’s similar with gender and sexuality. The conversations are going to be multiple and you’re going to start small and work big and depending on what your child is like, some kids are question askers, some kids don’t.

Ann:But I really like that you start with a positive vision of how God says yes. I think as a parent, I probably started with the noes, like, “No, don’t do”—but I like that you’re starting with the yes, of God often says these are good things.

Dave:Explain the yes.

Rachel:Well, the thing is the Bible is first yes.

Ann:Yes!

Rachel:God creates our bodies; these are very good. He creates the world. He says, this is good. He gives us a vision. It’s so good. It’s yes, and no enters in to protect the yes. No is second.

Ann:Yes. That’s so good to protect.

Rachel:I tell my daughter she’s not allowed to run into the street without looking because I’m saying yes to her life. The no isn’t random. It’s that I’ve watched the drivers on this street. They’re not looking at you. They’re looking at their phones.

Ann:It’s not because you’re a bad or mean mom. It’s because you love her.

Rachel:The noes, when you’re a good parent, the noes are very important, but they’re always set against something that’s a yes. And so I think what the Bible offers us is actually a beautiful vision. God says yes to so many things: to deep relationships, to the goodness of male and female, to the dignity of singleness and of marriage. And we’re made to live into yes, which doesn’t mean that the noes aren’t there. It doesn’t mean the noes aren’t important, but I just think theologically as we balance, it’s really great for our children to see both.

Dave:I mean, it’s interesting when you say that about sexuality and God’s design. I wasn’t around the church a lot growing up, but my single mom sort of said, “You’re going to church.” Sort of had to go. If I could fake her out that I was asleep—I mean, literally, I’d lay there and I’d hear her look in “David.” Sometimes she’d go without me. I’d be so glad.

Rachel:Oh gosh.

Dave:I grew up enough around a church to know this. Whenever a sermon, a person, anybody at church talked about sex, it was no. That’s all I heard was no. I never even heard God’s design for married sex is a beautiful thing. It was like, “Nope, don’t do it. Don’t think about it. Don’t get anywhere around it.” That’s all I heard. There was never this positive like in your chapter “God’s Positive Vision.” It’s a positive thing. What a great way to start with your kids. That’s where they should first start. And then out of that come some of the boundaries.

Rachel:And it makes sense that when we look around the world, there’s a lot that we look at and we go like, “No,” right.

Dave:Yeah.

Ann:Yeah, yeah.

Rachel:And some of us have experienced real—we’ve been sexually abused. We’ve made our own sexual mistakes. We want to protect our children from those things. It makes sense sometimes why we lead with “No.”

Dave:I think we led with “No.”

Ann:I just said that. We totally did out of fear. I have sexual abuse in my background, so talk about fear and panic for my kids. It’s like I scared them. I wanted to scare them.

Rachel:Sometimes fear works for certain things, but it’s just both.

Ann:It is both.

Rachel:The Bible gives us access to both yes and no so we’re permissioned to use both yes and no.

Dave:But one of the things you said in this book that I had never read—maybe I have. I don’t remember anybody else saying this—teach your children earlier than you think. And one of the reasons is it protects them from knowing sexual abuse.

Rachel:Yeah. Well, some of the things that sexual predators will do is they will prey on the fact that children don’t know the names of their body parts. So even if children wanted to communicate what happened to them, no one in their life has actually used the phrase penis or vagina.

Dave:They don’t live in Boston.

Rachel:They don’t go to school where there’s a person with a penis.

Dave:But that is so true.

Ann:Yeah.

Rachel:It’s something that I picked up—I forget in what literature—it was in a kid’s book, and part of it was saying like, “Hey, you need to know what your body is called because you need to understand who is supposed to have access to these parts of your body and who isn’t. Your parents have access to this part of your body, doctors—frankly, it was just walking through like, “Hey, you need to understand.”

Dave:You just gave one of three reasons why to talk to your kids about sex early. What we’re actually going to do is have a bonus section for our subscribers: people that are partners with us and FamilyLife. They give financially.

Rachel:Sounds good.

Dave:Alright, so I’m sort of teasing—

Rachel:I won’t say them now.

Dave:I’m teasing you to say, “Man, I hope you are a partner with us, and if you’re not, you can jump in right now and become one,” but that’s going to be later. So you got one, we won’t do it now. We’ll save the other two for later.

Rachel:It’s like the appetizing.

Ann:That’s good. When you say, “When it comes to sexuality, one place where we can and should start with our kids is simply this. They can trust their body to tell them who they are.” I mean, that’s simple, but it’s also profound.

Rachel:It’s so simple, and it’s not something we needed 40 years ago.

Dave:What do you mean? Because some people hear that and go, “Oh, my body tells me I’m attracted to same sex, so that’s who I am.”

Rachel:Oh, sure.

Dave:So it could be spun the other way. That’s not what you mean.

Rachel:That’s not what I mean. No, I mean that—

Ann:Physical, your physical body.

Rachel:Your physical body.

Dave:Exactly, exactly.

Rachel:Part of what’s happened, and this is complex, but part of what’s happened is we’ve decided that masculinity or femininity is entirely wrapped up in interests. So if you’re a tomboy and you’re interested in rough and tumble play, “Hey, maybe you’re really a boy.” Or if you’re a boy, but actually you’re interested in tea parties or learning to sew or you’re kind of a quiet kid, maybe you’re really a girl. God’s word says, “Hey, you can know who you are. It’s the body I gave you; that God created male and female, very good.” And that when you’re giving your kids a little bath, you point out all their cute little body parts. You can be like, “Hey, you know how we’re a girl. This is your body.” “Hey, you know how you’re a little boy. This is your body.” And “God loves little boys. They’re so great, and God loves little girls. They’re so great. It’s so good that you’re a little girl.”

Ann:Rachel, those conversations come up really naturally a lot. I’m around our grandkids who are six and four, and I shared some of the stories with Rachel already, but I will say to them, one of our grandsons said, “Why did God make me a boy?” And I said, “I don’t know. Isn’t it fascinating? But it says in the Bible that He made you. He knit you together,” it says. “I’m so glad that he made you a boy, and it was on purpose.”

Rachel:And it was on purpose, and it’s good.

Ann:It’s good. “I’m so glad. And He thought it was good for you to be a boy.” I mean, they’re little. They’re three, four, two.

Rachel:And you’re not having to do complex gender theory. You’re just like, “Hey, you know what? You can know who you are. Your identity is received.”

Ann:“And guess what? You were created by a good God”—

Rachel:A good God.

Ann:—”who has a purpose for you and for you being a boy.”

Rachel:That’s right.

Ann:They’re so simple, but that stuff locks into the kids. And if we never share that, but the culture is telling them, “Oh, I wonder;” that’s confusing.

Rachel:And that’s why it’s so helpful to even point out, “There’s a lot of different good ways to be a girl.” Like, “Oh, some of your classmates, they’re really girly and some of your classmates aren’t, but you know what? They’re both valid interpretations of girls.” Valid interpretation; that’s like a 39-year old’s way to say it. My parents, my friends used to always laugh at me like, “You talk to your four-year-old like she’s in her thirties.” I’m like, “I don’t know that I was made to be around children.” But there’s a way in which our culture wants to load all this ontological meaning into personality traits. It’s like sometimes a guy is just a gentle guy and he’s allowed to still be a man.

Ann:Yeah.

Dave:Yeah. That’s so true.

Ann:That’s really good.

Dave:I mean, how do you help your children understand the impact of the fall on their sexuality or on them as a whole? I mean, you have a whole chapter on that.

Rachel:Yeah. Well, it’s really important because they need to understand what’s wrong with them and what’s wrong with mom and dad and what’s wrong with the world. So we have to say God created the world very good, but the sin of our first parents plunged everything into trouble. So things are both broken and things are both wrong. So the brokenness touches our bodies.

So for example, almost everyone has a body that’s identifiably male or female, but there are dysfunctions of sexual development, disorders of sexual development. And that’s not—if a child has a disorder of sexual development, sometimes they’re called intersex conditions. It’s not because that child is particularly sinful. It’s not because their parents are particularly sinful. It’s just a way that the fall has touched their embodiment.

There are a variety of disorders of sexual development. For example, there’s one where you might remember a biology class. Women have XX chromosomes, men have XY. Well, there is a type of disorder of sexual development where someone has an XY chromosome and the Y is sending out a little signal like, “Hey, I need to develop as a male.” But the disorder is that it’s almost like a radio that the antenna was snapped off. It can’t pick up the signal.

Ann:Was this the Olympic boxing thing? Do you remember that?

Rachel:Maybe; I didn’t read carefully about that.

Ann:I didn’t read it carefully but—

Rachel:There was something like this.

Dave:Yeah, I think it was.

Rachel:So chromosomally, that person is XY, but the body isn’t picking up to develop as a male. But it also means the body isn’t going to—that body isn’t going to develop with ovaries or a uterus because it doesn’t have what it needs but it also isn’t going to fully develop as a male body. So sometimes if you get in these situations like, “Well, you just know by the chromosomes,” it’s like, “Well, there are a small number of cases where actually embodiment has been troubled by the fall.” But we can still affirm, “Hey, that person is still made in God’s image.” We’re going to help them figure out, what does faithfulness and embodiment look like as a disciple here?

And in the resurrection, God is going to give us all brand-new bodies. We are going to finally be at home in our bodies because all of us experience embodiment in ways that are troubled. At the very least we age.

Ann:Yes. And I talk about that too with our kids and grandkids, even the world, how the world is broken—

Rachel:—the world is broken.

Ann:—and what will it be like one day—

Rachel:That’s right.

Ann:—when God renews all of it?

Rachel:Hurricanes and wildfires and earthquakes, I mean—

Ann:Did you get into the XY chromosome thing with your daughter? Would you recommend for parents to even get into that? I don’t think we even thought about it.

Rachel:I don’t think you need to, except you might be in a community where there is a child with an intersex condition or disorder sexual development. And that can be a case where it’s important for your children to know, “Hey, sometimes these things happen because of the way the fall has touched our bodies,” especially sometimes when intersex conditions get used to assert that there’s more than two genders or they get used like mascots to press other issues.

With an older child, you may need to differentiate like, “Hey, a disorder in someone’s body is different than when you have a normal functioning male or female body and decide to take on a transgender identity. Those are actually different things.” I don’t know that you could have that conversation very easily with a four-year-old, but you could have it with a ten-year-old.

Ann:Yeah.

Dave:And one of the things you say in that chapter about the impact of the fall is don’t trust your feelings.

Rachel:No, that’s right.

Dave:Which is the opposite of what the culture’s saying.

Rachel:I know, and I need to be able to lay that groundwork early. When I’m talking to my daughter, she needs to see that she feels things that she shouldn’t. She’ll get angry just like mom gets angry, or she’ll get selfish just like mom gets selfish. Christian obedience is saying, “Hey, I need to test my big feelings against the Word.” So I did that with every sort of feeling. And so sin means, original sin means I will be tempted by myself. There are going to be—some temptations come from the world and the devil, some of my temptations come from me. But it’s always worth it to say no to temptation. It’s always good to say no to temptation and yes to God’s spirit so that original sin, which will be dealt with when Jesus comes back fully doesn’t go to actual sin, which is never okay for a Christian to embrace actual sin; that crossing the line in our thoughts or our actions.

Ann:Parents are having so many conversations with their kids coming home with all the stories: “My teacher’s married to a woman.” There’s for really little kids, “Hey, they’re not married, and they had a baby.”

Rachel:I mean, my daughter’s school, there were kindergartners who were identifying as transgender.

Ann:Okay, so you have to have those conversations.

Rachel:Have to have conversations.

Dave:Kindergarteners?

Ann:Coach parents of how to have that conversation with their kids when I don’t know, elementary school, middle school, and high school could look different.

Rachel:Absolutely, yeah.

Ann:You’re going to go deeper into it, but how do you coach parents?

Rachel:Well, one thing I want to say really quickly is there are going to be some listeners who think, “Well, this is exactly why I don’t send my kids to public school,” or “It’s exactly why I protect my kids from the world.” And honestly, some of our kids do need—we have to make each of our own decisions as family.

Dave:For each kid.

Rachel:For each kid, for each situation. So I love that people embrace homeschooling. I think that that’s really beautiful. But sometimes you also be at church and you’re like your child who has been carefully preserved against the world is sitting next to the other six-year-old who has an eighteen-year-old brother who’s visiting from college and says the ridiculous things around his brother and then suddenly—there’s just a lot of places where the barrier can be permeated.

So even if your child isn’t getting exposed to the exact things that my child is, because she’s in the public school, we still want to prepare them because we actually don’t know when it’s going to intersect our child. We want them to know.

Dave:At some point it will.

Rachel:At some point it will. And I want them to be able to ask mom and dad. “Mom and Dad will tell me the truth. They’ll tell me without making me feel ashamed. They’ll tell me with confidence.”

Ann:That’s good.

Rachel:So I think that’s really important.

Ann:We can all do that.

Rachel:We can all do that. I want them to go to me and Andrew first. They’re going to get dumb answers from the internet. They’re going to get dumb answers from their friends.

Ann:Can we say that to our kids? You’re going to get dumb answers on the internet.

Rachel:I tell it to my daughter all the time.

Ann:I would too. I do too.

Rachel:I constantly tell her, I’m like, “Girl, the internet is full of lies.” It’s just important. There’re some things that’s true on there, but honestly probably three quarters of it’s a lie. So you just got to be, have your wits about you.

Ann:So for parent to say—

Dave:A lot of what your friends are going to tell you are going to be lies too.

Rachel:A lot of what your friends are going to tell you, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and you’ve met them. They’re a bunch of liars too.

Ann:So for a mom or dad to say, “But you can come to me, and I’ll tell you the truth.”

Rachel:And not just say it but demonstrate it. Like, hey, when they ask me that weird question, you take a beat and you think, you vamp by saying “That’s a really important question.” And you say, “Let me tell you about that. But one of my instincts is when my daughter shares something like that at school, because she was the one who told me that there was the kindergartner identifying as trans.

Ann:She said that?

Rachel:Yeah, I don’t even remember the context, but it was my daughter who told me. I’m always going to lead with questions. I want to know, how good is her information because sometimes she’s just wrong. How is this making her feel? What does she want from me right now? She might just want to tell me, because my daughter’s a little contrarian. She doesn’t want to get lectured all the time. Sometimes she really wants to have a conversation. Sometimes she just wants to inform me, and she’ll want to talk later.

Dave:I wonder if she’s a little bit like her mom.

Rachel:I try to blame it on Andrew, but I don’t think it succeeds, unfortunately. I want to because most of the time she’s actually just telling me because she finds it interesting. She’s not actually bothered by it.

But I remember one of her friends was reporting something that happened in her school, and her friend was a little bothered, “I don’t know what to do with this.” And I watched her mom say, “Okay, well let’s think about it together. Okay, so we know your friend’s family background.” Because in that particular case, the family background was really pro LGBT identification. It’s like, “Okay, well maybe the child is taking seriously what her, what their parents are saying when they decide to identify as trans. So we have to consider this isn’t coming out of nowhere for your friend.” “Well, what do we do?” “We keep praying. We keep showing up and loving.”

It’s really interesting. So my best friend, she has a daughter who’s now in high school, but when she was in seventh grade, there was this gay straight alliance in the Cambridge Public School.

She was like, “It’s a bunch of seventh grade girls, most of whom are identifying as non-binary. And one as a seventh grader who identifying as a political lesbian,” which most seventh graders in the country doesn’t even know what that is. And my friend’s daughter’s like, “Well, I mean you’re not attracted to anybody right now. Really, this all seems a little—probably not all of you are actually non-binary, right?” And she started high school and there was this friend who in seventh grade had been identifying as non-binary and came up to my friend’s daughter, very feminine. She had discovered boys over the summer. She’s like, “I just want you to know I am using she/her pronouns again.” And my friend’s daughter was like, “That’s cool. That’s great.”

Ann:Wow.

Rachel:My friend’s daughter, because she had been having these conversations, had never treated her friends with stigma because this identification, and so it actually made it okay for her friend to change her mind and tell her that. People take on transgender identities for a wide variety of reasons.

Ann:But there’s a reason.

Rachel:But there’s always some sort of reason. And I heard a minister once say this recently, and I really liked it. He’s like, “You don’t know whether someone’s having a deep end of the pool experience or a shallow end of the pool experience.” Some of those girls in that group, they were probably identifying as that because seventh grade girls don’t know what the heck to do with themselves. And so that’s what was going on.

Now maybe for one, there really is something going on and you, kind of don’t know at that stage. And so as her Christian peer and friend, what do you do? Well, I’m just going to love you. I’m going to relate to you. You know that Jesus is a priority in my life. And my friend’s daughter was actually mistreated in a little bit of ways because of her Christian identification. That can be one of our fears is that if our kids actually do follow Jesus, they’re going to suffer for that socially. I’ve seen my friend’s daughter suffer for that socially.

I’ve also seen over time the fruit it’s born as even the people who mistreated her still see “That girl is full of something different.” And Jesus said if we follow Him, we’re going to get treated just like He was treated and we’re not nearly as good at being Jesus as He was.

Ann:Rachel, I feel like when you talk about this, it’s with truth, but it’s also with grace. And sometimes the stuff coming, sometimes the things going around are to me like, “What is happening?”

I talked to this woman who her husband was a pro baseball player, and when his career was done, they moved back to where they grew up and they put their child, a middle schooler, in school at the public school. He came home and goes and says, “These kids in the school are identifying as furries and there’s litter boxes.”

Rachel:That’s right.

Ann:And I’m like, as a parent, how do you not go, “This is the dumbest thing ever”?

Rachel:I know, I know.

Ann:Do we need to be careful, or can we let that out?

Rachel:So I know, so this is a balance. I kind of feel like there are some expressions of it where you’re like, “Okay, well that’s just silly.”

Ann:Can we say that?

Rachel:So I think—one of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is what does it mean to identify when aspects of the ideology are silly?

Ann:That’s it.

Rachel:So I can laugh at the ideology in certain parts—

Ann:—but not at the person.

Rachel:—but I don’t want to laugh at the person.

Ann:That’s the difference.

Dave:That’s hard.

Ann:It’s really hard.

Dave:You got to separate it.

Rachel:I don’t want to be cruel. It’s actually really hard and I don’t think I get the balance always right because sometimes you hear something and you’re like, “Oh my—okay, okay.”

Ann:But to give dignity to the person.

Rachel:But the thing is, I’ve got to remember that person is trapped.

Ann:That’s it.

Rachel:They’re looking for life and they’ve been sold a false bill. They’ve been sold, “Hey, you’re going to find life”—

Ann:—or attention or love.

Rachel:And of course we’re made for love. So that person’s desire for love is not what’s wrong. They’re being lied to and manipulated.

Ann:And I think we can say that, can’t we?

Rachel:I think we can say that. It’s actually really important. This isn’t like the four-year-old conversation, but I was talking to my daughter about this seven, eight, nine, getting older like, “Hey, listen, there is a spiritual world we can’t see. And lies, lies encircle us. There is an enemy of our souls, and we have to take him seriously. And this is why Jesus is actually the only safe place. It says in the scriptures, he came to destroy the works of the devil.”

Ann:That’s good.

Rachel:And so we can’t pretend that this ideology isn’t hurting people, trapping people, enslaving people. But what do we do? What does Jesus say he does for the slaves? He sets them free. And we’re called to be agents of the gospel. So I don’t want to be ridiculing the person. I want to be figuring out how can I love them? Because God’s kindness is what leads us to repentance. I don’t know of anyone who’s been shamed by a human into the gospel.

Now, God confronted me with the bad news first, but it was God confronted. And a person can say, you might have a moment to say, “Listen, you need to consider your sin.” That can happen. But when someone’s trapped by an ideology, we have to think as missionaries and be like, “Okay, what’s happening here? What are they looking for in this that the gospel could actually give to them? Because there’s some valid fear or some valid need that’s not being met correctly, that’s being met in a sinful or deforming way.

Ann:Which is true of not just our sexuality—

Rachel:Oh my goodness.

Ann:—but any area of life. What are they looking for?

Rachel:Look at the way Americans treat our money. We think that our money is going to give us life, and it doesn’t. Jesus says that exceedingly clearly. And we fall for it all the time. We’re like, “Well, but if I had that cool outfit, I would feel so great.”

Dave:—that square footage, those RPMs—

Ann:As we close, before we get to our last question, any last thought that parents—you’re like, “Oh, I hope they understand this or get this”?

Rachel:I think my last thought is that we have to take refuge in the fact that Jesus loves our children more than we do. There’s no amount of books we can read or techniques we can master to make sure that our children go through life unscathed. It’s just not going to happen.

But we have the amazing resource of prayer, and we have to run there. We are just not smart enough, strong enough, present everywhere enough to protect our children. God’s got a call and a vision for their life. He’s capable and intelligent and good enough to work it out. So we need to trust Him. I mean, that scares me a lot, right? I would love if there was some guaranteed way to make sure that my girl was walking with Jesus and walking strong, and so I pray. What can I do? I have to leave it in His hands.

Ann:And we have to remember that as parents because when I get into that fear-based thinking, I become controlling. And to remember that God’s always chasing them. He hears every single prayer, and He has them, and He has us.

Dave:I love—I mean our conversation has calmed my spirit. It’s like we don’t have to live in fear. We don’t have to parent in panic. We can parent without panic. And by the way, you can get this book, just go to FamilyLifeToday.com and we have a link there. But you can go buy the book. And I would buy it for not just yourself, several people. What a great conversation.

Rachel:And for those who don’t like to read, I recorded the audio book version. Sometimes you think I actually do have a three-year-old, and so I can’t sit down and read a book.

Ann:I like that it’s short. It’s not that long. So it’s like it’s doable and it’s something we really need today. Thanks Rachel.

Dave:Yeah.

Ann:Hey, thanks for watching. And if you’d like this episode—

Dave:You better like it.

Ann:—just hit that like button.

Dave:And we’d like you to subscribe. So all you got to do is go down and hit the subscribe. I can’t say the word “subscribe.” Hit the subscribe button. I don’t think I can say this word.

Ann:Like and subscribe.

Dave:Look at that, you say it so easy. Subscribe, there it goes.

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