I still remember the first time I heard it. My wife Meghan and I were just dating at the time. We were cruising in the car, windows down, jamming to a killer mixed CD that I had written all over with a sharpie. The weather was hot and she was looking even hotter in the passenger seat!
Suddenly, she reached over and muted the volume for a couple seconds. The move caught me off guard and completely derailed my terrible singing. It just so happened that at that moment the lyrics included a pretty inappropriate cuss word. But my desensitized brain hadn’t even registered it was coming.
Giving her a quizzical look, she shouted above the music, “I don’t want to bruise my peach!”
What???
What in the world does that mean? Her statement piqued my interest, so at the next red light I turned the radio back down and responded. “Bruise your peach? What are you talking about?”
“You know, your peach, your brain.” She tapped her finger on her forehead and kept going. “When you drop a peach, or handle it too rough, it bruises. Once a peach gets a bruise, the spot will never be the same again. It’s always kinda soft and mushy in that spot and it can’t ever go back to normal. Your brain is your peach. Once you bruise it, it can’t be undone. You’ll always have that little soft spot.”
I soaked in her explanation. “So listening to swearing in a song will bruise your peach?”
“Yeah, if it’s something that I shouldn’t be listening to. Once I let something in there, I can’t un-hear it, or unsee it. If I let bad stuff in, it’s in there forever. It can’t ever be undone. I need to protect my peach!” She smiled at me, lifted her eyebrows up over her sunglasses, then pushed her lips out for a silly kiss, subtly ending the conversation .
As we picked up speed and got back to jamming, I felt a bit annoyed by the exchange. It seemed childish to me, like we were two Christian teenagers scared to break one of the ten commandments. It was just a swear word. Who honestly even cared? I cringed internally a bit at the juvenility of it all but decided to drop it and just enjoy the purity of her heart and the smell of her long hair whipping around the front seat. Little did I know just how much wisdom that girl had just spoken.
As the years have passed, that phrase has become a much bigger part of our lives. We use it pretty regularly around our house now. But its meaning is much deeper than just not listening to swear words. Throughout our marriage we’ve used this concept as a lens to help view our faith, to help us move closer to holiness with Jesus. We try to protect our minds and hearts from damage inflicted by the darkness in the world. Please understand that we are broken, messy people, and we don’t have it all figured out. We screw up daily around here. But the idea of not bruising one’s peach has had a hugely positive impact on our relationship and our experience of raising children.
Innocence Lost Can’t Be Found
Now don’t get me wrong, I do still listen to music with swearing in it sometimes and I do watch Rated R movies. Younger peaches tend to be a lot more prone to bruising than older peaches! And as we mature, we can process things better, so they aren’t damaging to our heads or our spirits. But applying this concept to specific areas of my life has helped me rebuild where damage has been done and protect against more damage.
A great example of this is internet porn. Shocker, I know! But let’s be real here. Most people on the planet over the age of 12 have seen some sort of pornography at this point. Porn has permeated literally every corner of our western society and it’s become a widely accepted thing. Often the extreme lasting damage it causes is overlooked or even joked about. Despite the buckets of research showing the dangers of pornography addiction, our society is continually pushing to not only make it more normalized, but also more accessible to younger and younger people.
According to Common Sense Media, the average age of exposure for American boys is 11-12 years old. This means that most boys across America see porn before they fully transition away from Children’s Tylenol. Unfortunately, I was one of those boys myself, exposed to stuff at a young age that I had no business knowing about. I didn’t fully understand the gravity of what my eyes were seeing and how deeply I would be impacted.
“I was given the keys to the kingdom with no one to tell me what places I should stay out of. And it ended up stealing away my innocence and changing the course of my life.”
The internet was still pretty new when I was a young teen and there were no such things as parental controls or software to block adult websites. It was the wild west and parents knew absolutely nothing about it. So naturally, I found myself at the edge of the abyss with no safety rope. Everything you can imagine was available to us from porn, to games, to chat rooms, to online encyclopedias. And there was basically no rules.
Being one of three kids to a single mom who worked her butt off to take care of us, I had a lot of time with zero adult supervision. Suffice it to say that I ended up bruising my peach pretty badly around that time. I saw things I shouldn’t have and learned about things that were far above my station. In the end, I developed an addiction to porn that took about 20 more years to finally break free of. That will be a subject for a different post. But it all began because I was given the keys to the kingdom with no one to tell me what places I should stay out of. And it ended up stealing away my innocence and changing the course of my life.
As a young man, when I should have been worrying about sports and video games and friends, I was worrying about hiding an addiction and trying to figure out how to take it further. I ended up robbing myself of some of the deepest joys of childhood. My discovery of relationships, holding hands, my first kiss, the excitement of falling for a girl for the first time; it was all stunted because my knowledge and desires were already far past those things. As I got older, it caused problems in my ability to commit, my ability to function properly in relationships, and my ability to develop a healthy marriage. Overall, the affect was much bigger than just learning about sex too early. It impacted all areas of my life. The bruise to one part of my peach ended up infecting the entire thing.
A couple years after I got married I realized just how much damage I had done. My young marriage was in shambles, I was constantly trying to keep my lifestyle hidden from others, and I was still trying to live in my addiction. I knew something had to be done. So, seeking help from trustworthy sources. I decided to try to heal. It took quite a few years of work and humility, and a ton of grace from Jesus, but I was finally able to get to a healthy place and fix a lot of the broken parts of my life.
But this post isn’t about the healing. Its about the protection up front. I told you all of this to help you understand that once the damage is done, its EXTREMELY difficult to come back from. And regardless of your healing, you can’t do anything about the scars. Those will stay forever. What you’ve seen can’t be unseen. What you’ve heard can’t be unheard. You can’t change the past. And once your innocence is gone, it can’t come back.
Be The Window Screen
So how does this translate to raising boys? Well, like I said before, younger peaches tend to bruise more easily than older ones. As you raise your kids, the world is going to influence them. Regardless of how hard you try to keep it at bay, society will find a way to expose your family to all sorts of different things. Some of those things may be really good, like music about true love, movies about heroes and selflessness, or books of adventure and overcoming obstacles. But often times, these mediums can become a conduit for not-so-good concepts, like lust and sexual deviancy, violence and murder, or selfishness. An adult may be able to handle hearing about those things and not have it affect them. But what about a child?
Obviously the government can set policies and force us to abide by them ‘for our own good’, such as movie ratings. But the reality is that some movies may be inappropriate for some kids despite them meeting specific age requirements (like PG-13). Certain swear words or topics might be approved by the FCC for use on FM radio, but that doesn’t mean they are appropriate for your 6 year old to hear. The point is that for our children, WE need to be the window screen which allows the fresh air of appropriate social development to flow, but blocks the black flies of corruption that could expose them to topics they’re not yet ready to explore. Because if the flies get through, they will find the sweet spot on the peach, the mushy bruise, and they will burrow in and cause disease as that peach gets bigger.
Metaphors can often work well to communicate a subject. But we all need action items sometimes. What does this actually look like in the real world? How do you know what types of things are okay for your kids? Is every swear word automatically a no-no? Is a country song about drinking a beer off-limits for your family mini-van rides? Should you let your kids watch Artax slowly sink to his Death while Atreyu screams out in despair in The Never Ending Story?
God’s Passionate Opinion
Well, if you want to know what types of things your children are okay to be exposed to, then you should read what God’s word says about it. Jesus talks time and again about protecting children, about preserving them, and allowing them to come close to Him. He warns against hurting them, not just physically, but also through corruption. He’s very adamant about this. Over and over again God communicates his expectation that kids should be valued and cared for.
Now I know that doesn’t tell you when you should remove the parental controls from your kid’s Youtube App, but it does show you how important The Lord has made your role as a parent. He’s passionate about it. So it’s probably a good idea for you to do your homework. The Bible tells us repeatedly how we should live our lives. God talks about keeping our minds and hearts pure, about letting no evil habit or nature take up residence our in daily lives. He speaks about continually repenting of sin and steering clear of things or people that would pull us away from holiness and goodness.
Discernment and Conviction
That last section was pretty vague. There’s a lot of “christianese” in there. But the reality is, there is no clear-cut answer on what to expose your kids to at what age. YOU need to first be aware of what you should be exposing yourself to. YOU need to align yourself with the teachings of the Lord and walk in his ways, then emulate that for your children to see in your daily life. And as you learn more about God’s holiness and his love, you will be able to make a wiser judgement call on things.
Maybe your 9-year-old can understand that a song about drinking a cold beer while fishing isn’t about getting drunk. But that doesn’t mean he’s okay to listen to some dude sing about slamming shots at the bar and taking a girl home for the night. Every situation is different and requires you as a parent to use discernment. This is where your own personal understanding of how Jesus wants you to live comes in. You must act on the conviction that God places on your heart. And that conviction will become clearer as you spend more time aligning your life with Jesus.
Aside from the Bible, I encourage you to seek out wisdom from other trusted sources. Your local church is a great place to start! Talk to your pastor or talk to your kids’ youth pastor. You could even chat with some of the other parents in your church. If you don’t have a church, find one that you can get involved in and get to know people. Iron sharpens iron. This means that to grow and become wiser, you will need to learn from other folks who have already done their learning. Raising kids is a tough thing to do, especially in the age where the internet infects every part of their life. Not only is it okay to get help as you learn, but it’s really one of the smartest things you can do.
In the end, take care of your peach. Take care of your kid’s peaches. Because once they get bruised, they’ll never go back to the way they were.
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