Culture is pushing the idea that gender is fluid, despite clear evidence to the contrary. So how can we raise confident sons and secure daughters in a gender-confused world?
Glenn Stanton offers wise advice and biblical counsel on raising our children with authentic masculinity and femininity. He points out that, by nature, there are consistent similarities that men and women have shared throughout the centuries.
“This whole transgender idea or that gender is a spectrum, that there are many different genders, is absolutely brand new. Through the years and through different cultures, we find that there is a constant nature of male and female. What I love about that is that God has wired that within us; it’s part of how we come out of the factory, if you will.”
“We shouldn’t be surprised that everywhere we go in the world at any time, even to the most remote cultures, you find similarities between men and women, male and female.”
To debunk some of the cultural assumptions, Glenn highlights a few of these similarities.
“It’s interesting that we will tend to say, ‘well little boys act this way and little girls act this way because culture demands that they are,’ but no. Throughout the world boys like to hunt, they like to fight, they like to break things, they like to dig in and explore things.”
“Women are not likely that way, they don’t like to fight; they will argue with each other and they will get jealous with one another, we find that across all cultures, but they do not like to hunt as much. Now, there are women that do hunt.”
While we do see a similarity of interests between men and women, Glenn says that there are certain innate characteristics that distinctly set us apart from one another.
“For women it’s interesting. In-curiously, they are more centered around the home. In very primitive cultures, they are the ones that will kind of tend to the smaller livestock and the garden around the house. Their interest is just simply toward the home itself.”
“Men want to go out and do stuff. They are the guys that will go out into the woods, and now we go out into the work place. Of course, there’s women who work and do wonderfully and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s the male inclination more than the woman inclination to go out into the world, to expand the boundaries, and to explore new things.”
“We need to understand that that’s not a lesser way of being. The home is where humanity happens; the home is where the big things happen. You think of anybody that has made a real difference in the world and how they got a good start. They got a good start because their mother provided a good home for them.”
It’s important for us to understand that men and women are different by nature and by design. In a world of gender confusion, we can raise our kids to be confident in who they are by helping them understand who God created them to be.
Glenn T. Stanton is the director of Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs and a research fellow at the Institute of Marriage and Family in Ottawa. He debates and lectures extensively on the issues of gender, sexuality, marriage and parenting at universities and churches around the world. He is author of several books including
Nurturing your child's God-given design
