Preparing Your Son for Every Man's Battle: Honest Conversations About Sexual Integrity (The Every Man Series)

Book by Arterburn Stephen Stoeker Fred Yorkey Mike

Introduction

I saw Ben not long ago on a bright, crisp autumn Thursday in Iowa. Ben is a business client of mine from Mason City. I see Ben exactly once a year when he places his annual order with me. Our actual business takes but a minute or two, and then we’re off to talking about more important things—kids and boats and golf, topics that middle-aged Midwestern fathers like to talk about.

When Ben inquired about my son Jasen, his eyes lit up when I told him that my oldest child was enjoying his freshmen year at Iowa State University, which happened to be Ben’s alma mater. “How ’bout those Cyclones?” Ben asked, proud that his football team was having a banner season.

We jabbered on about Iowa State football and the big game coming up on the weekend. “Yeah, I’m taking my son Derek down to see the Texas Tech game on Saturday,” Ben said. “I usually go down to Ames for one game each year, and I really like the atmosphere of those 6:00 P.M. games, with the crisp, autumn air and popcorn under the lights. And what a great match-up this year too! Oughta be a wild one!”

“I’ll say,” I offered. “With Tech’s offense averaging forty points a game, the ’Clones should have a real track meet on their hands.”

“Yep, they always put on a good show down there,” Ben said. “My son’s really looking forward to the game. He’s in eighth grade now, you know. You have one in junior high too, don’t you?”

“Correct. She’s in eighth grade too. Ah, junior high! Weird times, dontcha think?”

That casual comment struck a chord with Ben, who used my comment to shift the conversation in a different direction “You know, Fred, you’re so right about that. It’s funny,” he mused. “I’ve always felt close to my kids. But now, with Derek in junior high, I can’t really read him any more. Well, some days I can, like I’m reading his mail, but there are many days that I look at him and I just can’t read him at all.”

I chuckled. It seems as our children age, it is our sight that diminishes! This hardly seems fair, since there will never be a time when we need our insight to be sharper. Our parenting trek enters our own personal “final frontier” when adolescence arrives. But unlike television’s Star Trek, we must boldly go where many have gone before—the teenage years! As Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear might say, “To their puberty...and beyond!”

And though you may have trouble reading adolescents as you’re warping your way into uncharted space, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to read one thing loud and clear: Your teen needs you in the captain’s chair on this voyage. Your kids need your input, your leadership, your heritage, and stories from your youth. They need to hear from you immediately, because many teens bounce into adolescence having no idea what hit them. When that happens, they feel...desperate.

Trouble is, too often they remain desperate. They don’t get our input because our subspace communications with our kids have failed.

Why is that? Is it because they’ve changed so much as they’ve moved into adolescence and have become harder to read, jamming communication?

Nope. These changes are just a normal, glorious part of God’s plans for our kids’ growth into adulthood. That’s why our teens aren’t the problem. The real problem lies with our sins as fathers.

You heard me right. Among fathers, what is the most common sin in this world? If you’ve read our first book, Every Man’s Battle, you might suspect I’d name sexual impurity as our number one transgression. If we were playing Family Feud, there’s no doubt that sexual sin would rank as one of the top three answers. But what is the number one most common sin of the fathers?

The answer is: failing to make the hand-off.

What do I mean by hand-off? For those of you who grew up in Antarctica, the hand-off is a football term for when the quarterback hands the football to the running back, hoping that he’ll escape the clutches of the defensive linemen and break free for a long run. The hand-off is a great metaphor for what we’ll be discussing throughout the rest of this book, and it’s all laid out here in Scripture:

Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. (Deuteronomy 11:18-19)
JUST HALF A MINUTE

How’s your ball-handling? Do you feel like you are—or have been—successfully handing the ball to your son?

It’s our belief that too many parents are fumbling away their chances to make a successful hand-off. Recent studies have replicated what earlier studies reported years ago: Fathers are not interacting with their children. When fathers were wired with recording devices and sent home to tape their interactions with their kids at night, the average American father spent about thirty seconds in direct conversation with his children. Thirty seconds! Little is happening as we sit, walk, lie down, and get up in our homes.

Bart Starr, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers dynasty of the sixties, believed that one of his most important responsibilities was the hand-off, an aspect of the game that few football fans notice. Starr practiced for years placing the ball into the runner’s hands at just the right spot, at just the right time, with the same precision and pressure. Why? To insure that his running backs could fulfill their roles too. The responsibility for the hand-off lay with the quarterback, never with the running back.

I quarterbacked my high-school team for three seasons, and I worked extra snaps after practice to perfect the proper hand-off. Like Bart Starr, I was determined that no player on my team would ever wonder if he was going to get the ball when and where he should.

My days of gridiron glory are long past. But, in a sense, the art of the hand-off has never been more critical for me. Why is that? Because I have an eleven-year old son on my team, ready to run for daylight, and I’m responsible for getting him the ball.

We’ve huddled up, and Michael’s play has been called—adolescence is upon him. The ball of truth has been snapped, and as the quarterback and leader of my team, I must get the ball into Michael’s hands. God is opening holes in the offensive line of life for him to safely pass through. But if I’m sloppy with the hand-off or a split second late, the gap in the line may close, stacking him up at the line of scrimmage until an enemy wave overwhelms him.

But how do I accomplish this hand-off? What do I tell my son about how his transition from boy to man is going to go? How do I tell him all that I’ve learned from God, my pastors, and my mentors? What do I tell him about my mistakes and what I’ve learned from them? Most difficult of all, when do I tell him? Life is just so doggone busy.

Beneath the roar in the stadium of life, the crush of school performances, swim meets, and piano recitals, how can I even be sure that Michael is hearing my signals? If you are remotely like those average fathers who interact just thirty seconds a day, you can be sure he isn’t. It’s not because he has hearing problems; it’s because you aren’t talking enough.

You haven’t had much practice making that hand-off. You’ve got to get talking. For now, beginning in junior high and through early high school, our boys really want to hear from us. So many things are confusing them, and so many things are new.

When my firstborn son, Jasen, was eleven years old, I stumbled onto a process that opened my life to Jasen and gave him a steady voice that he could hear and understand as he entered this strange, strange world of puberty and adolescence. I got him the ball.

Jasen is in college now, charging through the opposing lines on the field of life, the ball of truth safely tucked under his lanky arm. As he runs for daylight, a lump comes to my throat as I whisper a line from a favorite song: “Godspeed, dear runner. Carry it home!” I know Jasen will not fumble.

What about your little runner? It’s tough for a man to talk to his son about sexual issues. To raise the subject fights against that time-honored code that almost every male we’ve known has followed, which is called the Sexual Code of Silence.

The code states that it’s okay to joke about sex or even lie about it, but other than that, it’s your solemn duty—as a male—to keep silent whenever a serious discussion about sex takes place.

Everyone seems determined not to talk about the eight-hundred-pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the living room. Maybe it is too embarrassing, but it doesn’t help that we adults often have a fuzzy picture of what healthy sex is all about. If we’re confused, imagine what is going on in the heads of our pubescent sons! They must be walking around in a twisting, swirling fog.

Even the best fathers we know fear discussing the topic. They can’t bring themselves to convey the truths they long to share with their sons. My friend Kenny, a father of three, once told me, “I remember when I was in high school and my father and I were driving home from a fishing trip in southern Missouri. I noticed his hands tightening their grip on the steering wheel, and then he said it: ‘Son, you’re getting older. Do you have any questions about girls?’

“And in my great wisdom at age fifteen, I emphatically said, ‘No!’ And nothing else was said about ...