Shepherding a Child's Heart (Part 1) | Ep. 105

How do we effectively apply true biblical principles in order to shepherd our child's heart? Today, we're joined by my wife and daughter as we share our personal experiences of raising our children and applying these values in our own lives. We discuss two important resources, Shepherding a Child's Heart by Ted Tripp and Boundaries with Kids by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend, and how they have influenced and shaped our approach to parenting.

We delve into the power of intrinsic motivation and its role in shaping our children's behavior in contrast to using external rewards and the potential to create a 'performance trap' with our children. 

Furthermore, Social media can be a minefield for both parents and children. We shed light on the growing concern around the impact of social media on youth mental health, as highlighted by the US Surgeon General's Advisory. As social media continues to be an influential part of our lives, it's essential to be aware of the potential dangers it poses, such as groupthink, and its implications on children exploring their gender identity through online apps and platforms. 

We stress the importance of understanding the root causes of children's behaviors to prevent them from making the same mistakes. So, join us in this candid conversation as we aim to encourage and equip you with the knowledge and tools to shepherd your children's hearts and foster strong relationships built on trust, love, and faith in the Word of God.

Transcript

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 0:03

The vision received was that of blood cells traveling throughout the body, supplying the much needed oxygen and other nutrients to the differing members of the body to fulfill their purpose. Once the blood cells are spent, they must return back to the heart to be refilled before being sent out again and fulfill their purpose. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of our Father's Heart podcast. This is one of those special ones where we take the time out to speak directly to you. This is not a pre-recorded session of something that I had shared in the past, but this is one that we wanted to do, live and have it with you in mind. Today's series or episode probably will become a series, depending on how long I take is on shepherding a child's heart, basically parenting. It's kind of been on my mind, on my heart. If I've spoken with my wife recently about doing this, I thought I would ask my eldest if she wanted to be a part of it. I have both of them here with me. Do they sound the same? We were doing a microphone check before we got started and one of them said oh my god, we sound the same. So I'll let you guys be the judge of that. But before we get started. I've got two books in front of me And I want to start off this series for all those parents that might be listening that are wondering, gosh, what resources could I look to that are trusted, that are respected, that have been used by others and they have found success. And so if you kind of have that esteem for us and our father's heart, we will both my wife and I will both readily recommend, highly recommend shepherding a child's heart. That was written by Tedd Tripp. This one probably made the most impact on us and how gave us sort of a schematic of how we should be raising our children and how to have the word be the foundation of the decisions that we make in regards to raising our children. This one is the one that was most memorable for us because in our previous fellowship we actually did Is that right? The special ministry time with the parents in our previous fellowship and kind of laid out a lot of these concepts to them so that they could find ways to properly apply those in their homes. But the other book is called Boundaries with Kids. This one was written by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend. This one was another very good book. There's actually a boundary series, I think, boundaries in general. There's boundaries in marriage, there's boundaries with kids, and there may be some other ones I don't know all of them, but I know that this particular book gave us more practical ways to apply a lot of biblical principles that you might not think are biblical principles, but they actually were. So we highly recommend both of these two books.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 3:45

Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp, that's Tedd with a double D, Tripp with a double P, and then you have Boundaries with Kids. And again there's a series of boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend. But again, today's focus is really on shepherding a child's heart. And what I'd like to do with this particular series, in having my wife and my daughter here, is I'd like to go over some of the elements in an outline form. I'm not going in depth and reading the book to you, but I wanted to pull out some of the important things that I felt were very important, that we applied in raising our children. And as I do that, I've kind of opened it up to my wife and my daughter that if there's anything that I said that they want to kind of comment, interject, and give some feedback, to just give me a motion so that I'll kind of stop it at a certain point and then we'll have at it and see what exchange and dialogue we can have concerning it. They have notes on their own, so hopefully there will be a time and opportunity in this podcast that they can share some things that my daughter is probably going to come out with questions on, maybe why we did things or maybe have an understanding of why we did things now and then my wife here probably has a better memory than I do on how we raised our kids and details that I probably don't remember. So I'm hoping that she'll be able to kind of kind of meet, give the skeleton and she'll give the meat to a lot of this.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 5:34

So, in Shepherding a Child's Heart, probably the most important point that was made and it was right at the beginning was about authority. We all live under authority. It doesn't matter what setting you find yourself in. For those that are Christians that confess to be Christian, almighty. God is our authority, Jesus is our authority. But if you have followed us along in many of our teachings, you'd realize through the scriptures that he has vested authority in institutions that he has established, starting with the first and foremost, the first one that we all come to recognize is home He has established authority in the home, first and foremost. He's established authority in the church. He's established authority in governments, although we might not like that, but he has established authority in governments.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 6:38

He has established authority in business, and we need to recognize that, because, in everything we do, there is not an area in our life where there is not some authority of some kind inherent in some person who's holding some position that we must abide by. As parents, we have been given authority as God's agent over our children, and so we, being parents, must not direct them just for our own convenience, just to fulfill our own agenda, to kind of get them out of our way so that we can live life the way that we want to, and kind of very selfish in that way. But no, our authority being that it comes from God, we must direct them on God's behalf, for their good, according to his will, according to his word, according to his ways, and not just because we think we have a bright idea of something that we think is good. So did anybody want to comment on that or anything? No, okay, okay, so we'll move on. So, as we continue reading in the book.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 8:03

He goes from authority then to shepherding. And he states that the best description of the activity between a parent and a child is shepherding, and I firmly, completely agree with that. When we are shepherds, we are overseeing. That's what a shepherd is. I've talked about this in other podcasts, that well, maybe not another podcast, but in my other teachings in our home that the word bishop, the word pastor, the word elders, presbytery, even the qualifications of a deacon, they all are so interchangeable that you come to realize that all of those are basically serving the same function. They may just have synonymous terms And shepherding is a term that we connote with a pastor, but shepherding is basically what a bishop does, an overseer, what an elder does. They are overseeing the flock in a church, and so in a home, parents are the shepherds, they are the shepherds of everyone in the home and we need to kind of embrace that and realize that. Now, not only when we're talking about the parent and child relationship,

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 9:23

we don't want to solely address the what of a child's actions. That's surface level, that's outward, that's, you know, genotype, phenotype, that's phenotype. That's stuff that happens outwardly, external. We have to get to the root, and the root is always found in the heart. Everything that we do, everything that we say, is founded or rooted in something that we're believing in our heart, and so we have got to, being that we're older, being that we are more mature, we have to help guide our children in recognizing that the actions that they're taking are rooted in something that's going on in their heart.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 10:06

If it's anger and they lashed out and they hit somebody or they, and we've seen this before, they have a hard time sharing their toys. So once they see their friend having their toy, they go, snatch their toy and take it back. And it's the easy way to parent. That is to say Johnny, don't do that. That's, you know that that. give that back to him, let it, you know, share your toys and you stay on the surface. But really what you have to do is show Johnny that, Johnny, you have, you know you have this toy. This is your toy all day long. Your friend just came. He's only going to be here for an hour. Why wouldn't you share that with them? What's wrong with that? and start delving deeper into why he felt like he needed to take that back and take it away and hopefully you find that rooted in that behavior.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 10:59

Was it's just selfishness or it's just a mark of pride? That's mine, give me that, that's mine, what you know, and then so that give that carnality which we're now, we're speaking in spiritual terms, is really what hinders us from fully maturing in Christ, spiritually. And so we have to shepherd them into understanding and recognizing that about themselves. So we also shepherd our child's thoughts. We teach him as shepherds, as parents, to learn to discern, to learn wisdom. He even says of Jesus that He grew in wisdom and in stature in favor with God and man. He had to grow into that and our children have to grow into that. Okay, and then he also talked about how we as parents must invest our lives in them.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 12:00

And I think what hit me the most, because a lot of times when you think about parenting, you think about the fact that you have to discipline, and disciplining is not something that maybe a lot of people feel comfortable with, although some do and others don't.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 12:15

But this really hit me because I guess in my thoughts, even though I might have not been raised that way, I thought parenting was about, ya know, disciplining the child.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 12:25

But one of the things that Tedd Tripp focuses on is that when we invest our life in them, it's not just merely as get them in line, give the discipline, give them the time out, give them whatever consequence, but no, it's through open, this is how he relates it, open and honest communication. And when you establish that dialogue with your child from very early on and it continues to last and progress over the lifetime, they begin to understand the meaning and the purpose of their own life. What was it? Was it through the consequences? No. Was it through the disciplinings? No. Was it through the time out? No, it was through the open and honest communication that a mother or father has with their child and helping them understand things about themselves that they're not aware of. And so, if either of you can read me a particular scripture Proverbs 13, verse 20, and this is one biblical example of what I'm trying to describe here, go ahead.

Lydia: 13:38

He who walks with wise men will be wise.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 13:42

But Oh, it's not on the document. Go ahead, read the next one. It's not on here. Oh, it's not on the document. It's not on the document. Okay, then I'll read, I'll finish it.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 13:51

But a companion of fools shall be destroyed. So parenting is shepherding your child's heart in the ways of God's wisdom. That's what's been delegated to us to do. No one else can do that. No one else in the scriptures has been given that authority.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 14:10

It wasn't, you know, written in the scriptures that the teachers have to teach that to the children, that the bosses have to teach that to the, to, you know, their, their employees. It, it wasn't given to the church. Really, it was really first and foremost the parents, not that the church can't help and and support, but really that the main responsibility and accountability falls with the parents. So you know, then we move on into this idea of the totality of God's words, or God's word the central focus of our parenting. What does it need to be on? It needs to be focusing on God's word. We're not trying to impart into them our bright ideas we're fallible, we're human.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 15:05

We may have been raised in a certain way that was not correct and we think that just because we were raised that way, that well, that's what I have to teach my children because that's the way it was done with me and that's the way I know. But if you're apprehended by the Lord, if you are captured by the Lord, if you're rescued by the Lord and you realize that you've been translated from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light, that that kingdom of light has laws, has procedures, has protocols, has ways that the king wants things to be done in order to rule in peace or in order to rule in order. And so again, as parents, we tend to focus on the behavior, about what they did, what was their sin. But that's all exterior, that's all stuff that's outward, and we need to redirect the focus to applying God's word, to the attitudes of their hearts, which is interior. It cannot be focused solely on the outward, it must go to the interior. You know, there's a saying I think we learned it in Psychology and both my wife and I took Psychology.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 16:22

We got our bachelor's in it. We ended up getting our master's in special education as well. But when we were in Psychology do you remember what they taught us about motivation? There's two kinds... Right, you want to have the intrinsic motivation, uh, huh,

Patricia: 16:39

Wh y? Intrinsic meaning internal because external. If you're always like giving rewards, you know candy, whatever to get a child to perform, it doesn't. It's not coming from within them. So it's not, it won't, it won't be permanent, it won't be long term.

Lydia: 16:55

Okay.

Patricia: 16:56

Whereas if you can guide them to intrinsic reward, it's something that's important to them and it stays with them. It's not just a momentary oh, I got a piece of candy, but more like, oh, I really want to do well, and that becomes part of their motivation.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 17:10

Yeah, and do we see a lot of that in parenting today?

Patricia: 17:14

Yes.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 17:15

Yeah, how go ahead, give some examples. How do you see that in parenting today, this external motivation is emphasized rather than internal?

Patricia: 17:23

That's a big controversy that we've talked around around the table.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 17:27

Are we going to get canceled?

Patricia: 17:28

Well, the kids. We just let the kids have phones to kind of get them. It serves as two purposes. It's a reward to them, but it's also a way to get them focused and quiet. But we're opening up another can of worms with that and a lot of parents just give in to whatever a child is. I see this in the stores, I see this with some saints, and it saddens me that if a child gets upset about something, then right away you promise them oh, when we get home I'm going to make you something or you're going to get something special, and then you're kind of rewarding the, you're creating something, you're creating the skinner's behaviorism of the Pavlov dog you get the treat, and it becomes that and so that Classical conditioning.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 18:21

Yeah, i don't remember all the terms. Pavlovian, no, and all those people in psychology that you don't want that.

Patricia: 18:29

You don't want that to be. It's just like if you do this, I do that conditional. I guess it's conditional, because then their behavior, their response, their reaction to things is always conditional on something that they're going to, a reward that they're going to get. And not just a intrinsic of if I act right, my parents are going to be happy with me. If we act right, our heavenly father Or it's going to satisfy my soul Right.

Patricia: 18:55

You're going to have a sense of peace and he creates us to be, to walk in obedience, although we live in a world that's not obedient.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 19:03

So Well, I think there was a something you said just as you started. When you started describing what external motivation does, you said the word performance.

Patricia: 19:14

Yeah, it puts you on a performance trap.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 19:17

And that's, that's what we don't want. I mean, we know what performance does to us. When we're in the church, when we're trying to walk with Christ, we carry that with us and we feel like we need to perform for our Lord Jesus and we don't recognize that our Lord Jesus loves us in spite of our sin. He's not condoning our sin, but, man, He He loves us and he is not there trying to get us to perform like some seal who wants to get a fish, you know, and do some trick. He's not interested in that, He's interested in the heart, and the heart is intrinsic. Now you brought up the cell phone. The cell phone is something that we've talked about. We've been talking about it for probably weeks and months. Now that we just see it so often. We know, we see. I shared it in January. I said you know, I see parents, they have their young children and I cringe because what they do to get their child under control is they give them a cell phone or something that looks like a cell phone, like a switch or an iPad or a mini, and they just get them involved in a game, get them involved in watching some cartoon, some animation thing, and that's what settles them down and they didn't realize the unintended consequences of doing that. Now I bring that up because you brought it up. But I bring it up because recently I posted it on social media through Our Father's Heart on Facebook and on Twitter and some other ones.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 20:55

The surgeon general just came out with advisory about the adverse effects of social media. He actually did it. I was very surprised under this regime that we have. He came out and he talked about what are some of the growing concerns of social media on children and I just want to read a few of them. I've posted this. You guys can find it. It's the surgeon general. His name is Vivek, I think Totally forgot his last name. I think it's Vivek Murthy, I think it is. But anyways, he came out recently with a report. It's called social media and youth mental health the US surgeons generals advisories. There's an executive summary which is only a two-page and you'll just get all the bullet points that you need as a parent to realize.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 21:47

Oh my gosh, I really need to reconsider whether I need to allow my children to be involved in social media. But some of the things that he listed here social media may perpetuate body dissatisfaction, disordered eating behaviors, social comparison and low self-esteem, especially among adolescent girls. Now let me tell you something, when he came out with this report, I didn't need to know this. It's like I didn't need to have a report from the surgeon general to let me know that that was true. I've seen that. I've lived that as a teacher in the public school setting. I've lived that with my children in my own home. Not that we've experienced all of these things, but I've realized. Yeah, I knew that already, but I'm just glad that he put it out there. Kind of like a few years ago we were glad that finally the surgeon general put out that smoking causes cancer, unabashedly, you know.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 22:48

But the next thing it says when asked about the impact of social media on their body image, 46% of adolescents ages 13 through 17 said that social media makes them feel worse. That's nearly 50% of the adolescents. 40% made it feel like neither better nor worse and only 14% said it makes them feel better. So it's more on the negative side that these effects are happening. Roughly two thirds of adolescents are often or sometimes exposed to hate-based content.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 23:24

Now you gotta figure. What does that mean? How do you define hate-based concept? You know? could it be when a Christian just says I love the Lord Jesus and we, we're not gonna walk in that particular lifestyle that you've chosen. They might say, oh, that's hate-based content. I don't know what they meant by that, but this is one I think we can all relate to, because it's actually happened in our high school. You know, we've had graduates that have come into our high school and within a year they committed suicide, and that's been unfortunate. It says some social media platforms show suicide and self-harm-related content, including even live depictions of self-harm acts, content which, in certain tragic cases, has been linked to childhood deaths. Now, we've seen that, we've known that. But to actually put it in a report and say that, hey, there is a correlation that you need to be aware of and you probably need to do something about it. Lydia, what do you wanna share?

Lydia: 24:27

Yeah, for me I can speak a little bit on social media, since I lived it as a student, but also looking back now as someone who's about to be an educator and being quite worried because I saw it starting. It wasn't that it wasn't there, but things like, for example, when I came into high school and high school was my first year of public school.

Lydia: 24:47

For those of you who've been listening to podcasts, you guys know that we were homeschooled up until high school. So my first year of public school they introduced technology for all students iPads in our case and the first year they didn't have restrictions, So everybody was on Snapchat. That was the thing for my ninth grade year and a lot of people are on it. I eventually did get off of it I think my first or second year of college, just because I realized I didn't necessarily- So it took you four years.

Lydia: 25:17

Yes, because you talk every day.

Lydia: 25:19

You just snap It's stories. So what Facebook and all these other platforms have done is they've all kind of taken from each other to market to a bigger audience. But Snapchat originally you could send little pictures, funny little filters. Some people take pictures of the floor or the ceiling in class and just type little messages I'm bored and just go back and forth in class, kind of like texting. But also you could look at someone's stories and see what they were up to, if they were doing something fun or whatever.

Lydia: 25:49

And I think the limit was 10 seconds. I also know Twitter was big in high school for a lot of people my age That being said, I was not allowed to have Twitter. So I never was on it, but I heard about repercussions. So, going back to what you said about situations where you've seen the harm of it, I actually saw the harm of it, not necessarily just for kids. I saw the harm of it on adults by kids on social media.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 26:17

So in my case, I can think of two specific instances.

Lydia: 26:20

There was one where there was something that was tweeted as started as a joke and the person who put it did not intend for it to blow up as it did, but it ended up blowing up and it ended up hurting a staff on one of my soccer team, and it was to the point where not only did she see it, because she wasn't even really active on her Twitter, her mother saw it and her little brother saw it, and so that affected her whole family. I remember it cost so much tension and eventually, this led to this coach being let go in my team. There was a lot of politics around that.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 27:03

That wasn't the reason, but that was part of the multiple varying factors.

Lydia: 27:07

That Exactly It wasn't the reason, but there were many factors And this was one major one where I think it started that downhill snowball for this particular individual. Another instance I can think of is I wasn't even at the school but I heard about it because, again, this was in the athlete realm in the school but it was a school wide thing was there was an incident in the community with a staff member regarding an accident.

Lydia: 27:36

And this particular individual coached one of the athletic teams. And not only did this person get a lot of online hate for what had happened, but all the girls, all the individuals she coached, a lot of people were targeting them, asking them how could you in good conscience play for such a person? Just a lot of online bullying to people as low as eighth grade.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 28:03

You reminded me that was very early on. Social media could be vicious. That's a great word. Yes, and we saw it early on. You're right, Because there's always been in the public school setting some sort of drama between kids And maybe you weren't aware of it or something like that. But when you get it on social media it amplifies and makes what might have been just the small ant hill. It makes it this huge, bolder hill mountain type of thing that it never needed to be. But social media always seems to amplify these extreme emotions and cause a lot of collateral damage. So something that might have happened in school between kids and whatever, But then it gets on social media. Now the mom knows about it, now the aunt knows about it, now the cousin knows about it, and then everybody wants to get together and say, hey, what's going on at that school People in the community.

Lydia: 29:03

it's a mob. It's not even just limited to a community anymore. What social media has done, for better, for worse, has opened the world up to people. The world is literally at your fingertips, so anyone associated with your social media account can see anything, and they don't even have to live in your community.

Lydia: 29:20

And sometimes that's even how news outlets might catch wind of things and show up wanting answers and whatnot, and so we've seen that within our own community happen a few times. But in terms of my experience as a student, I know for me, yes, there's the feeling of being left out, which might pressure a lot of people to have social media, and that's where it is so vital that parents do step in and have those boundaries set in place and be there for your children and definitely explain the why, because they're not going to get it. I can say for myself I didn't see the harm necessarily in Snapchat, I did see the harm in Twitter, just because of these experiences. But someone who may have not had a negative experience could think no, there's no way, I don't conduct myself that way and you may not, but maybe your peers do and God knows, if you make just one mistake, that could be blown up for them to see.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 30:18

And if you remember, in our particular high school we had been instructing our kids and this came from the top down. If you remember our principal constantly telling us and telling our kids the things that you do on social media will never go away and it will come back to haunt you later. Now, if you've been paying attention the last five or six years, that's really come to pass and it's really hit the right in a major way. Major way. Things that they said in the past thing. I mean you didn't realize it was going to get to that. You just thought, oh, it's going to be. Maybe your future job is not going to like it, that they saw you at a party or blah, blah, blah, but man it when it's one of the reasons why social media should, ahhh,

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 31:05

You need to really think about how you share your private life. There's a reason why you have a private life. It's supposed to be private for you, your family private. It's not supposed to be built. You know what do you call it exposed to the whole world. It's that's none of their business. Why are we giving our private lives out to the whole world? There's really no need for that.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 31:30

So now back to this surgeon general warning and I'm glad you brought that up. That's that's did great bringing that up in that in that report, it says on a typical weekday, nearly one in three adolescents report using screens until midnight or later. Studies have shown that there is a relationship between excessive social media use and poor sleep quality, reduced sleep duration, sleep difficulties and depression among youth. One-third or more of girls age 11 to 15 say they feel addicted to certain social media platforms and over half of teenagers report that it would be hard to give up social media. I just heard recently I don't know if you heard this There was a survey or some sort of report that said that young Americans would forgo or forsake their voting privileges in order to keep TikTok. Who gets to vote? not 16 year olds, not 15 year olds. 18 year olds right, that's when we start to vote 18 9th. They said that they would rather keep their TikTok and forsake their voting privileges in America. Oh wow.

Patricia: 32:56

It's not surprising because we've seen the explosion. Is that a good word of the use of TikTok in our school? You know, just watching kids do TikTok videos and you know some adults admitting that they spend their time, all their time, doing that and then so then tying it back to shepherding a child's heart, which I know we're going to talk about. But if a child is watching their parents do that, what

Patricia: 33:25

do we think they're going to do. You know what kind of messages are we sending to our children if we're always on our phones and inevitably, even the best of us, I can be found guilty of that at times. We're so engrossed in the phone we're not tuning into something that's going on around us in a situation the Lord has us in. So you know, it's a, it's a discipline to set it, to set it aside and it's definitely something that I believe the Lord is is calling us out of it.

Patricia: 33:57

And in previous generations because we want to talk about phones and social media in previous generations it was TV, that was the, that was the box, that was the bad box that so many educators, your homeschooling families or you know Christian there's even Christian denominations that say it's evil and nobody should have a TV in their house. So it just the phones and and computers sort of started substituting and creating a little bit more or a diversion, or or you know something that we get engaged in because it's at our fingertips all the time where the TV was in a set place. Now we've got our phones where we could, we could tap into, not to social media, Netflix. There's just, it's, it's constant bombardment of information that comes to us through the phone and again, our children are watching what we're doing the little little guys, and for the men, most parts, social media usage is unsupervised, whereas with the TV, that was pretty supervised.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 35:03

Y'all are at home, we're gonna watch the news at seven o'clock, you know we're gonna watch this and the parents were there. But on social media, that child has it and who knows what they're seeing, what they're going to, and so we also need to think about the fact that you brought up the TV. The TV was more for entertainment purposes. Why are we watching TV? why do we want to be entertained? why? well, maybe we want to escape. We want to escape from our real world, reality. We want to, you know, lose ourselves. Instead of reading a book, we'll lose ourselves in the movie, we'll lose ourselves in the TV show, in the sitcom, and we'll get entertained and we'll laugh, and. But in social media it ramps it up because the child, why does the child want to be on social media? why do they want to record themselves? why do they want to promote themselves, flaunt themselves out like that? my gosh, there's a, there's a myriad of why's.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 35:56

They want attention, they're crying out for help everybody else is doing it everybody else is doing it, so they're just learning how to succumb to the peer pressure the group think. That's what's really social media. Another adverse reaction you can easily get involved in group think a lot easier. You know you have children that are kind of confused about, about their, their you know their gender identity or whatever. And then they get on the, the social media and bam, they get caught, they get glued to a certain you know little group that that wants to flaunt about.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 36:38

Oh yeah, you got to have, you know, a mastectomy. You got to have your drugs, you got to have your got to pump yourself with estrogen, you got to pump yourself with testosterone, depending on which sex you weren't trying to change to and you're not. And then all of a sudden you went down something that is incredibly regrettable for many, many people that have now detransitioned and come out of it, and one of the thing, the major thing that they, many of them, say is that what led me down the path was early getting on social media. That's what they've said themselves and then they met this person who was all about flaunting and doing this and that and the other, and it's unfortunate, but these are the things that we are dealing with today, and social media is a major major component, and that's why, if we establish from early on in children's lives, the why are you doing this? not just that you did it, why are you doing this? that's going to hopefully help you be able to engage in these other, more adult conversations regarding social media when they get to that age.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 37:47

We have to address the why, because it they must understand why they have sinned and recognize their own internal processes, processes for leading to engaging in that sin, because if they never do, they're more likely going to commit it again because they didn't recognize where they fell, and so that's important for us to to uh, to for, to help them understand so in this book.

j - Jesus M. Ruiz: 38:15

Thus is the ministry of our father's heart through us. Our utmost desire is to be in the father's heart, to know the father's heart and express the father's heart to you. If you appreciate listening to this podcast and we're blessed pass it along to someone else by text, email, or word of mouth, in the hopes that they might be positively impacted, as you were. If you are interested in supporting our efforts, we would ask you to consider the following one, pray for us. Two, leave a positive rating, or review with whomever you listen to our podcast with, and three if you desire to contribute monetarily, you can do so at paypal. me/ jben jesus or cash app $jben jesus or venmo jben jesus. That's j-b en- j e s u s. God bless!