Also by this author: An Impossible Marriage: What Our Mixed-Orientation Marriage Has Taught Us about Love and the Gospel
Published by IVP on January 13, 2026
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life, Parenting
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"This book is a gift to all parents trying to navigate the complexity of raising children in today's world. ... I wish I could make this book required reading for every parent." - Christine Caine, founder of A21 and Propel Women
How can you raise your children to not just to survive but to thrive in a world filled with complex and confusing conversations about gender, sexuality, and relationships?
Navigating the birds and bees is challenging enough for parents. Kids today are faced with all sorts of complex issues, and often at a very early age. When is it too early to talk about sex? How can we begin to view the gender conversation? How do we help our kids not to approach the world fearfully but to walk into it confidently--even in the world's most controversial spaces?
Laurie and Matt Krieg believe that, as a Christian parent, you can approach sexual topics with confidence and grace by laying a solid gospel-centered foundation from early childhood onward. Raising Wise Kids in a Sexually Broken World offers you theological guidance, parenting principles, and age-appropriate insights for addressing complex issues in healthy issues like marriage and singleness, God's design for sex, same-sex attraction and sexual orientation, gender identity, sexual abuse, and pornography.
In Raising Wise Kids in a Sexually Broken World, you'll learn to:
Present God's purpose for both marriage and singleness
Explain God's design for sex with clarity
Discuss gender identity from a biblical perspective
Protect your children from sexual abuse
Prevent porn addiction
Promote online safeguardsRaising Wise Kids in a Sexually Broken World is a timely and essential resource for today's Christian parents. Rather than retreating in fear, you can respond to the brokenness of the world with the goodness, truth, and beauty of the gospel and help your kids to do the same. Cast a gospel vision for your kids so that no matter how they experience sexual brokenness within them or around them, they have the tools they need to choose the way of Jesus no matter what.
This guide for Christian parents shares advice for teaching younger children about sexuality. Authors Laurie and Matt Krieg write to their audience as fellow parents, and they draw on Laurie’s advocacy work and Matt’s therapy practice for additional perspective. This book focuses on laying a good foundation from early childhood through age twelve. The chapters go back and forth between big concepts and practical suggestions for how to communicate these ideas and live them out in daily practice.
Raising Wise Kids in a Sexually Broken World engages with how to talk to kids about reproduction, sexuality, and sexual issues within contemporary culture. There are also chapters about sexual abuse prevention and how to talk to kids about pornography. The authors write with a traditional, orthodox view of biblical sexual ethics, and each chapter relates its themes to creation, the fall, and redemption, showing how parents can use a gospel framework to better understand and teach biblical sexual ethics. One of this book’s strongest points is in its portrayal of singleness and marriage. Because so many Christian resources assume that marriage is each child’s future destiny, I appreciate this book explicitly, repeatedly communicating God’s vision for both singleness and marriage.
I also appreciated the calm, measured tone throughout the book. This mindful, thought-provoking guide will appeal to parents who are weary of fear-driven and rigid, rules-based discourse. Laurie Krieg also highlights the importance of dealing with your own fears or trauma surrounding sexuality before pursuing these conversations with your kids, since kids can so easily pick up on and internalize that distress.
Although I liked this book overall, I felt that it focused too much on the authors’ family and their conversation style, which tends to be very heady and academic. This book will resonate the most with intellectuals who are passionate about big ideas, and it will not feel as relevant or accessible to parents from less academic backgrounds. I wish that this book had included some stories or scripts from different families, so that readers with a less academic bent or different theological applications could have more to draw from.
Raising Wise Kids in a Sexually Broken World: A Gospel-Centered Approach is a thought-provoking, helpful resource. The authors combine biblical teaching, current research, and practical examples to equip parents for much-needed conversations with their kids about sexuality. Since the subject is so controversial, readers will disagree with the authors on various points, but they can gain a lot from the book regardless of where they differ. However, I would mainly recommend this book to deep thinkers who often have abstract conversations with their kids about big ideas. People who are looking for a more straightforward guide and example scripts, without as much high-level theory, may be better off choosing a different resource.