Roger Marsh: The following program is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
Welcome to Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh. And whether you're joining us for the first time or if you've been listening to Dr. Dobson for decades, we are so glad to have you with us today. On today's broadcast, we're bringing you the conclusion of Dr. Dobson's important conversation with is Drs. Joe McIlhaney and Freda McKissic Bush. Joe and Freda are the co-authors of the book, Girls Uncovered: New Research on What America's Sexual Culture Does to Young Women. Their book presents scientific research on the development of young girls in today's promiscuous landscape. On yesterday's program, Dr. Dobson and his guests talked about the prevalence of sex outside of marriage in today's culture. They pointed out the dangers that this lack of propriety and self-control poses for young people, especially girls. For instance, did you know that an estimated 55% of teens have had sex by the age of 18? Or that 50% of sexually transmitted infections occur in people age is 25 and younger?
Well, these numbers are truly shocking. It is imperative then that we as parents teach our kids the truth about biblical sexuality. Now, before we dive back into this conversation, let me reintroduce you to Dr. Dobson's guests for today's broadcast. Dr. Joe McIlhaney is a board certified OB/GYN and infertility specialist. He is the founder of the Medical Institute for Sexual Health and previously served on the presidential advisory council on HIV AIDS. Dr. Freda McKissic Bush is a retired board certified obstetrician gynecologist. She previously served as a medical advisor for Heartbeat International, CareNet and the Center for Pregnancy Choices, Metro Jackson. Drs. McIlhaney and Bush have much more to share with Dr. Dobson today. They'll be discussing some of the ramifications of STIs as well as God's design for sexuality. That's what we have for you today, right here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. Let's listen in right now.
Dr. James Dobson: It turns out that God knew what he was doing and he gave guidelines for us and commandments to us in the Scripture. I'm looking at First Thessalonians 4:3 to 8, "It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality, that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother take advantage of him. The Lord will punish men for such sins, as we have already told you and warned you. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject men but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit." That's pretty clear.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: It is.
Dr. James Dobson: Isn't it. That ought to be taught to every teenager. And that's not an isolated Scripture that I've chosen here that's kind of proof text. It is all through the Scriptures. 1 Corinthians 6:18 and 20, "Flee from sexual immorality. All of the sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. You're not your own, you are bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your body." It's pretty clear what the Lord had in mind here.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Well, Christian parents really want their kids to understand that I think in general. And I think Christian parents particularly need to understand that the kids when they're asked, who gives them the most guidance as far as their behavior goes, not just sexual behavior but behavior in general are parents. And I think a lot of Christian parents and other parents too, don't really believe that the kids are listening to them. I think that the encouragement that we would give parents, all parents, not just Christian parents but all parents is that the kids are listening. When you're talking to them and they give you that dumb, stupid look like I already know that, they still are hearing and they still are often following the guidelines that parents give them even into college. The data shows that even in college, the parents are often the ones that the kids are listening to for their behavior.
Dr. James Dobson: I have mentioned before a critically important night in my childhood when I was riding in the car with my mom and dad and I was in the backseat and my mom and dad. Obviously my dad was driving and my mom in the passenger seat and we began talking, I was 11 years old and began talking about things that I needed to know as I grew older. And one of them was with reference to sexual activity, sexual behavior. And I didn't understand much about what it was. I learned a lot that night but my dad said to me, I can remember the conversation as though were happening today. He said, "I want you to know something. There will come a time when a girl will offer herself to you and I want you to be ready for that moment when it comes. I don't want it to take you by surprise because you need to decide right now what you're going to do when you're confronted with that situation and what God would have you do." And he talked me through that whole thing. I was 11 years old.
Here I am at this stage of my life and it is still with me and I heard it and it influenced me. And I can tell you that as I grew older and began dating and had access to the car and went off to college too, I was keenly aware that I was not alone in that car with a girl. That my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was in there too. And it was not my mom and dad that kept me moral and Shirley and I were both virgins when we got married. And that is the most precious thing in our relationship. It is an exclusive act between us, something that bonded us together because I learned to control my own passions in that regard.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: You were covered.
Dr. Freda McKissic Bush: And I would like to add how important that conversation was with your father and how important father's conversations are with their daughters. They need to hear it from a man who cares what it is that they expect of them and the type of young woman that he expects them to be. He needs to also touch and hug them in ways even as they begin to fill out, ways that let them know, "I've got you covered and that I'm here for you" because girls don't have to then search for that with another man outside who may not have the same care for them.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: There's a book by a well-known author called Bringing Up Girls that talks about that so well. Dr. Dobson, you really hit that nail on the head in that book. Boy, I would encourage parents, particularly dads to read that book.
Dr. James Dobson: One of the pieces of research that I saw repeatedly, the study was done on many occasions that depression is directly related to this sexual behavior as well. It's not just physical disease. Those who are sleeping around, they have a disdain toward themselves.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: There's a researcher at Notre Dame and there's a researcher at the University of Texas, both of whom have shown that relationship between sexual involvement and depression. And depression is rampant among college kids. And you think about a kid who's depressed then taking the MCAT, the test for going to medical school or the tests for going into law school and how competitive all that is and how this depression can affect their performance on those and they never get into law school, are able to accomplish what they wanted to because their sexual involvement cause depression. It's really a downhill fall.
Dr. James Dobson: It touches every dimension of life, doesn't it?
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: It does.
Dr. Freda McKissic Bush: And one of the things I do want the listeners to understand is in the book, we don't just give statistics that are doom and gloom but we also give them hope. And we give information specifically what parents can do, what our society can do and what the girls themselves can do in order to increase their opportunities for reaching their goals and their dreams. And there's hope in this book as well. And we can help the young ladies to say with a different decision you can set in place those behaviors that will help you to reach that. It starts with a decision. It starts with a plan even if you have to write out yourself a contract and just as the brain can be retrained and rewired, so can your behavior. We talk to the young ladies about things that they can do and one of the things is establishing behaviors that you will and you will not do.
And even if you have to get an accountability partner, which can be a parent but can be another caring adult, then you can establish that different behavior and get accurate information that you can say, "I heard what the media said but I've got this information from the Medical Institute for Sexual Health. I've got this information that I know will help me to be informed about what the real risk are." And part of the decision is don't let yourself try to please the young man more than you are wanting to control your future. Put yourself in the driver's seat as far as making decisions about what you will do and make sure you are responsible for protecting yourself not just physically but emotionally and spiritually and you avoid those situations that will put you in a place where you even have to say no.
Dr. James Dobson: Dr. Bush, let's suppose that there's an 18-year-old girl in your office and she comes in and you're trying to counsel her and give her a lot of information very quickly. And she just says, "Doctor, you don't understand. I love this guy. I want to spend my whole life with him. I want to give myself to him." And you are going to try to warn her that those feelings might be temporary and probably are and that she had better be careful about the physical contact, the intimacy that she has with this guy. Are you able to bring along a kid who has a lot of oxytocin going on?
Dr. Freda McKissic Bush: Well, it sounds like they've already been having some sexual foreplay that is going on. And one of the first things I try to do when I have this opportunity is find out what are your dreams and your goals for yourself? And then let's talk about what if and how that behavior plays into you reaching your goals and your dreams. And then once you see what their goal or their destination is, then you start working backwards as to how this behavior will affect that and setting up boundaries. When you were talking with the young lady who has not started sexual activity, you can give her some of these examples as well.
But mainly you're saying to her, "What is it that you want for your life? And how can you be in the driver's seat or less and establish that?" Include the young man in the conversation because often he's hormonal and he's not really aware of the consequences because the media doesn't talk about it, haven't had the conversation with their parents. And so you are giving them information to arm them and give them power to make decisions about their lives for the future. It is amazing how actively the young people will participate when you have it, conversation.
Dr. James Dobson: Well, one of the things that I wish every young woman knew is that the notion that power in a relationship with a guy can only be had by giving him what he wants sexually.
Dr. Freda McKissic Bush: That's a lie.
Dr. James Dobson: It is a lie and yet girls believe it. And what happens is that he walks away having gotten what he wants and she is left in the lurch. He frequently is not interested in her anymore. And so instead of gaining power, she loses power in the relationship.
Dr. Freda McKissic Bush: Absolutely. And that's part of the lie too, about cohabitation being smart. It is certainly not something that you want to do. Not only are we talking about contraceptive failures but also your opportunities for marrying are lessened. And if you do marry, studies show that you're more likely to get divorced so it's not going to be a long-term relationship.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: And that your marriage is more likely to be troubled, unhappy and with really a lot of pain, if you've cohabited before you got married.
Dr. James Dobson: There's some very interesting, good news in this book too. Let's talk a little bit about it. One of them is an absolutely wonderful hormone, a powerful hormone called oxytocin. And I would like you all to talk about that.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Oxytocin is a phenomenal hormone. Ladies who've had a pregnancy and been in the hospital and needed to have something to make their contraction stronger, have been given oxytocin to make their contractions stronger. Women who breastfeed their babies, it's oxytocin that makes that milk let down happen. But oxytocin does a bunch of other things that are just phenomenal. One is that when two people are skin to skin and that can be the mother and the baby, the oxytocin causes them to emotionally bond with each other. I often say that the women will die for that baby not just because it's cute but because they've been holding that baby and loving that baby and their oxytocin has been pouring out and they are bonded to that baby. Well, the same thing happens with a man and a woman. When they're close with each other, hugging each other, having sex with each other, the oxytocin just pour worse out in that woman's body and brain and it bonds her of that guy. Freda was saying this.
Dr. James Dobson: That scares every father in the nation.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Matter of fact, there's a doctor at UC San Francisco that did some research on a neuropsychiatrist. And in her book about oxytocin, she says, "In our studies, we found that if a woman hugged a man for more than 20 seconds, she trusted him." Oxytocin actually increased trust in a man. Dr. Bush, you talked about this earlier and that is that there's something beautiful about the way God has made us and oxytocin is one of those incredible things that if a man and a woman marry each other, oxytocin bonds them together in that relationship. As they then are sexually involved and then do get pregnant, then the oxytocin helps hold them together as a husband and wife for years, for the benefit of raising that child with a father and a mother.
Dr. James Dobson: But it can be abused too.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Absolutely.
Dr. James Dobson: If a person has multiple sexual partners, they begin to lose the power of oxytocin to bond them with a particular person.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: That's right. And apparently that is one of the problems when people have multiple partners that they have the oxytocin bond and they break it, then they go with another guy and they break that. And that pattern actually then will make the oxytocin ineffective in holding them together later on then when they do get married.
Dr. Freda McKissic Bush: And I want to throw in another hormone that affects that and that is the dopamine, which gives you the reward for the sexual behavior. But when you have multiple partners, after a while, you are chasing the high of the dopamine. And so you can become addicted to sex without being concerned about the person with whom you're having sex.
Dr. James Dobson: Yeah. I wrote in my book an illustration there that I read someplace that really interested me and there was a woman who was giving birth to a baby and as the baby was about to be born, she was obviously flooded with oxytocin. And she looked over in the corner of the room and there was a nurse who was standing there just leaning against the doorframe. And she felt such an attraction, not sexual, an emotional attraction to that nurse and just felt so loved by that person and so supported by that person. It was all hormones that were going on. What was bonding her to her baby also bonded her to a stranger in the room.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: And that is a great example. It felt so real to her and yet she had no earthly idea that was a result of a chemical in her body and her brain that was doing that. And if we could just get across to young women that these hormones are there, they're dramatic and dynamic. And if she starts playing around with these hormones by becoming real physical and even sexually involved, that it's like a fire that she's set. There's one study that shows if a girl had sex and often they do with someone they think they're in love with as an adolescent, within one year, 75% of them will have had sex with just some other guy that's not necessarily even a romantic interest.
Dr. James Dobson: Because of the hormonal influence.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: The hormonal influence and probably a breakdown in a barrier. But they're playing with fire when they got involved. And so the best thing clearly is that they just not become involved and set these boundaries that Freda was talking about a while ago.
Dr. James Dobson: Yeah. One more comment about oxytocin. My wife Shirley has been a fantastic mother. She is just a wonderful mother and has been from the beginning. But when she was pregnant, she would say to me, "How do I know I'm going to love this baby? I don't even know him or her. I don't know what sex the child is. I know nothing about that child. How do I know how I'm going to react to this baby?" And I said, "I think the Lord's taken care of that." I didn't know about oxytocin but I knew that there was a mechanism. And of course, the moment that baby was laid in her arms, when Danae was born, she was on fire for that baby.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Haven't we seen that, Freda?
Dr. Freda McKissic Bush: Absolutely.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: With our moms after we've delivered those babies and see them plopped up on the mama's belly and breastfeeding. It's just, it's a phenomenal thing to watch that bonding.
Dr. James Dobson: There's a right way and a wrong way to use these powerful forces. We are sexual creatures. We're made this way.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: It's good.
Dr. James Dobson: Yeah, it is good but it is designed to function in a certain way. And if you abuse it and chase it just as a form of recreation, there are consequences that the scripture talks about.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: That's right. All of the different gifts God's given us like an appetite for food or the ability to sleep or even the ability to worship, all of these things we can distort them and destroy our lives. The truth is that the Medical Institute is a scientific organization and our focus has been really be honest about science as much as we can but we have never found one single thing that conflicts with what scripture says about sexual behavior.
Dr. James Dobson: Isn't that amazing? I think the Lord for you and other godly physicians who are out there doing what you can to get this message across the young people who are getting such misinformation from other sources. And I worry too about all the kids who don't have fathers and girls desperately need their dads as the first male representative to put his arm around her, to love her, to kiss her and to teach her what it means to fall in love. To demonstrate that with his own wife and model it for her. And without that to you, you got an uphill climb, don't you?
Dr. Freda McKissic Bush: Yeah. And I would encourage modeling that behavior for both the mom and the dad. Because it's important for them to see what it is that you're wanting them to do. One of the reviews of this book that I read, talked about, they suspected this book was written to Christians and it was more of the same preaching to the choir. And I reflected on that and my thought was, even the choir has to have rehearsal. It's not a Christian book but it is definitely based, as we said earlier, on the word of God. Science supports it because God also created science.
Dr. James Dobson: I hate that phrase, "you're just talking to the choir" because church people need the information they do as much as other people do. And they get into many of the same problems.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: They really do. You did introduce something a minute ago in your scenario about the young woman who was in love with a guy and that young woman's fortunate that she would've talked to Dr. Bush because Dr. Bush would give her accurate information, good guidance away from being sexually involved and the benefits of sexual abstinence until marriage. Many young women and many parents will take their children to doctors who do not have that perspective. Who honestly do not know the data about the failure of condoms, the failure of contraceptives. They'll actually say, "Well, you can use contraceptives if you do decide to become sexually involved and you can be safe that way." I would strongly encourage any parent who takes their child to a doctor who doesn't back up their philosophy about sexual abstinence until marriage to change doctors and to take their child to someone who will support their values about sexual behavior.
Roger Marsh: Well, what a fascinating, helpful conversation today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. Dr. Joe McIlhaney and Dr. Freda McKissic Bush have been Dr. Dobson's guests. Joe and Freda are the co-authors of the book, Girls Uncovered: New Research on What America's Sexual Culture Does to Young Women. Toward the beginning of today's broadcast, dr. Bush emphasized the fact that parents have an unmatched influence on their children's lives. Even if it doesn't seem like it, mom and dad, your kids listen to you and they're watching you. We as parents must take seriously the responsibility to teach our kids to have a biblical perspective of sexuality.
Now, to learn more about Dr. Mcllhaney or Dr. Bush, please visit our broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org/broadcast. That's D-R jamesdobson.org/broadcast. Or give us a call at (877) 732-6825. We're happy to answer any questions you might have about the broadcast, about Family Talk or the JDFI. We're also here for you 24/7 to take your prayer requests and pray with you as well. Again, that ministry phone number is (877) 732-6825.
Well, that's all for this week's programming here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. If you've been blessed by Family Talk, would you please consider making a gift of any amount to help us continue to encourage and strengthen families? For more information about how you can give online, go to drjamesdobson.org or for information on how to give a gift over the phone, call us at (877) 732-6825. I'm Roger Marsh and from all of us here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, God's richest blessings to you and your family.
Announcer: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.