We want our kids to grow up with healthy views of sexuality. We certainly don't want them to end up with the hangups that many of their millennial/Gen x parents had because of purity culture. But sometimes we can end up going too far in the other direction, and...
The world our kids inhabit changes about every eight years now. With tech and culture changes, the world is speeding ahead as it never has before, and the world our kids are living in is very, very different from the one you grew up in. We're living in different...
We need to have an awkward conversation about an awkward conversation. Kids need to know about sex. And they need to know about it from you. That doesn't mean that you have to do anything perfectly, or that it's not allowed to be awkward. It just means it has to...
I grew up believing God was chronically disappointed in me. I knew He loved me, absolutely. But I also pictured God kind of like a self-help magazine cover: 7 Ways You Could be More Disciplined; 4 Ways You Could Be Getting More Things Done; 3 Ways You Could Stop...
One of the things we're passionate about on this blog is making sure the self-help and relationship advice in the evangelical world is healthy. Over the last few years, our team has surveyed over 32,000 people, measuring how certain teachings common in the evangelical...
Lies Young Women Believe is a dangerous book to use in teen girls' book studies. Yet it is still frequently used! Last season we took a look at Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth's book Lies Women Believe, and showed how it was harmful. Many people then asked us to tackle Lies...
Do teen girls have a sex drive? I’m desperately hoping that you answer, “Of course!” Now, obviously not all teen girls will be sexual (asexuals do make up a small part of the population). But the idea that teen girls are somehow not sexual, while teen boys are...
Getting married to have sex is a really, really bad idea. Unfortunately, though, there are many hard-line patriarchal teachers, as well as many young people, who are adamantly saying that this is God’s design. When your sexual desires are too strong, you should just...
Today I want to talk about another aspect of purity culture: Its affect on overweight girls. I received an Instagram message recently from a woman telling her story, and it was so interesting I thought it deserved its own post so we could think about it and talk about...
We know that parenting is the biggest responsibility we will ever have. But we've been told such different things about the nature of that responsibility. If you grew up in an evangelical church, chances are you were told that a parent's job is to teach them to obey,...
Welcome to a new season on the Bare Marriage blog! We're about to begin a new series, starting tomorrow, on obligation sex--how to understand it and get over it. But before we do that, I received this great article by Dr. Camden Morgante (known as Dr. Camden around...
What if our advice actually triggers the behaviour we want to prevent? One of my favourite places on the internet is our private Patreon Facebook group, where the people who support us financially hang out. For just $5 a month people can join our Patreon group, and in...
Let's use a real-life example of purity culture double standards: Brio Magazine Yesterday on the podcast Rebecca and I read excerpts from old copies of Focus on the Family's Brio magazine, aimed at teen girls 12-16. We wanted you to hear first hand what purity culture...
It's our 200th episode! And we wanted to celebrate by doing something that matters to Rebecca--and to so many of you. We wanted to read some back issues of Brio Magazine, the magazine for preteen and teen girls published by Focus on the Family that encapsulated purity...
She should know that Jesus is not a Jealous Boyfriend. In our book She Deserves Better, we have 32 headings that start "She Should Know..." 32 things that girls need to know, in the very fiber of their being, to dispel a lot of the harmful things we too often have...