What Should I Communicate to My Daughter About Sexuality?

Having a daughter is both an incredible privilege and an incredible responsibility. There are so many challenges that my 14-year-old daughter faces today that threaten her sense of self. I deeply desire that my daughter will be a young woman who knows that she is a daughter of the King and a sister of the Lord Jesus. Her mother and I pray that all of her identity and sense of worth would come from those relationships.

My responsibility as her earthly father is to talk to her with the words of her heavenly Father, and, through my relationship with her, to incarnate in limited ways the limitless love, integrity, strength, faithfulness, mercy, and grace that God the Father shows her. I want her to know who she is, and whose she is, through her relationship with me.

That’s particularly important in this day and age, when so many messages bombard our young women with the message that sex and sexuality are ultimate. Everything communicated by our culture screams to young women that sex and sexuality are tools at their disposal for identity, for connectedness, and for pleasure.

Cultivating a godly worldview in my daughter, that sex and sexuality are wonderful aspects of her created nature and yet are not ultimate, is so very important. And this is what I hope many other fathers and mothers will undertake in their own daughters’ lives.

One of the big takeaways that I want my own daughter to embrace is that it’s simply not acceptable to allow someone to use sex, sexuality, or outward appearance to judge you. And a second takeaway is like the first: don’t use sex, your sexuality, or your outward appearance as a way to feel better about yourself.

Only the Lord is capable of giving personal identity and worth. And for the woman who is in Christ, there is no greater worth you could hope for than to be found lovely by him.