When parents are willing to take a “nonnegotiating posture” on the word “no,” to be strict on curfews and appropriate discipline, children are less likely to be confused about the choices they confront.
At a recent gathering of journalists who cover family and children’s issues, a reporter asked me how I felt, as the mother of a teenager, about sex education in the schools.
I said it would be great if we could get kids to postpone any decision about sex until they are over twenty-one, which provoked a round of nervous laughter from my listeners. In a culture that shouts sex from every billboard, movie screen, radio station, television set, and magazine (and now even computer monitors), they—and I—know that kids are confronted with sex every time they turn around, and they have to decide about it, early and often.
After many years of working with and listening to American adolescents, I don’t believe they are ready for sex or its potential consequences—parenthood, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases—and I think we need to do everything in our power to discourage sexual activity and encourage abstinence. Young people can learn to value the intimacy of friendships with the opposite sex as well as their own, can enjoy being in groups as well as couples. Those kinds of relationships need adult support, including the time it takes to organize gatherings for kids, instead of turning them loose in malls, video arcades, or the streets. Homes, schools, churches, and communities should provide havens for kids who want an alternative.
These same entities have to pitch in when it comes to educating kids about sex. The Institute of Medicine, the health policy advisory arm of the National Academy of Sciences, recently published a scientific review of what is currently known about unintended pregnancy in our country. It concluded that families, schools, and religious and community institutions are all responsible for educating young people about sex, and it recommended that schools continue to develop comprehensive, age-appropriate programs of sex education, which emphasize teaching abstinence. The available evidence does not support fears that direct discussion of sexual behavior increases sexual activity; rather, it suggests many adolescents become sexually active without having had any formal sex education at all.
No matter how great an effort adults make, however, there will be some adolescents who are determined to embark on sexual experience. They, too, need straight talk about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases to help them deal responsibly with the consequences of their decisions.
As anyone who has studied the incidence of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases can tell you, many adolescents are woefully ignorant about the physical and emotional aspects of sexuality. I have interviewed pregnant teenagers who, impossible as it seems, could not explain exactly what they and their partner had done to cause the pregnancy, despite all the half-clad bodies and heavy breathing they have seen on television.
The result is tragic, especially for teenagers who are in difficult circumstances to begin with. Girls who become pregnant are usually a grade or two behind in their academic work. Frequently they come from disorganized families they would like to escape. Such girls often see little future for themselves, and a baby can look like a way out, or at least something they can call their own. Where sex is a quid pro quo for social status and security in the surrounding culture, these girls get little help from the village in persuading them that they have other options.
Many teenage boys are in a comparable bind. Lagging in school and frustrated by what they perceive as a lack of opportunity, they see in sex and fatherhood a route to tangible power and accomplishment. It is a primitive proof of manhood, but it is achievable.
When I talk with girls in their teens who have a baby or who are about to have one, they often say that they expect the child’s father, who is usually older, to marry them. If I ask why he has not yet done so, they come up with a variety of excuses: he has to join the army or get a job or end a relationship with another girl first. There is always a reason, and however dubious it sounds, it does not prevent these girls from fantasizing about being loved and cared for. Girls pregnant with a second baby tend to be more cynical about marriage, but the sense of being unconditionally needed by an infant remains a powerful lure.
Girls with more advantages in life may decide to take chances with sex because “everybody else” is, or because they want to be popular with a certain boy or clique. They may forgo contraception and protection against sexually transmitted diseases because such planning requires that they acknowledge the choice they are making, and it doesn’t mesh with the fantasy of being “swept away.”
I wish we would all take a deep breath and remember that sex has been around for a long, long time and we are all here because of it. It is an important part of who we are and how we live, and there should be no shame in our children’s curiosity about it. If we could accept that, we could begin talking to children, as soon as they could understand what we were saying, about the importance of honoring their bodies and entering into relationships responsibly. As children grow older, we could explain that there are stages in each human being’s life, and that sex is an appropriate part of an adult’s life, something that comes with maturity and readiness for commitment.
WHY DO some kids try risky behaviors when others don’t? How can we create conditions in both our homes and our society that increase the odds that they won’t? How are we to equip kids with the character and the skills they will need to make it safely to adulthood?
When it comes to substance abuse, the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University is providing some answers. Under the direction of its chairman and president, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., it has begun an annual survey of the attitudes of American adults and adolescents toward cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and other illegal drugs, with the aim of alerting adults to what can be done to protect children. Califano spells out what is at stake: “Make no mistake about it. If our children get through the adolescent years, ages ten to twenty, without using drugs, without smoking, without abusing alcohol, they are virtually certain never to do so.”
Some of the factors that increase the risk of substance abuse in those years deserve emphasis. Casual attitudes toward marijuana and minors’ access to cigarettes raise the likelihood that teenagers will make a sad progression from cigarettes to marijuana to more serious drug use and earlier sexual activity. Dropping out of school puts the child at greater risk, as does having a parent who is an abuser of alcohol or drugs.
If this knowledge had been available years ago, Bill and his mother might have been aware that Roger, who for years witnessed his father’s alcoholism and experienced its destructive consequences, was a prime candidate for alcohol and drug abuse. One reason my husband is adamant about curbing smoking among teens—and adults, for that matter—is the fact that he learned firsthand, in his own family, about the slippery slope that begins with the use of one addictive substance and leads to other destructive behaviors and attitudes.
Teens who participate in at least one after-school activity other than sports use drugs less often than those who don’t. Ironically, adolescents with part-time jobs are more likely to use drugs—owing, perhaps, to their disposable income and early independence. Those who regularly attend religious services, however, use drugs less frequently than teens who attend rarely or never.
The CASA survey recommends steps we can take—if we have the will—to protect children: vigorously enforcing laws that prohibit the sale of cigarettes and alcohol to minors; establishing “drug-free” schools; paying for research about and treatment of addiction; halting the glamorization of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs in advertising and the entertainment media.
The characteristics that keep kids from using drugs are harder to quantify but not to understand. Children who truly grasp that they have a choice to make in the matter are more likely to make a responsible one. So are children with high self-esteem. Most influential of all is the optimism and awareness that comes fro
m knowing their parents are interested in and involved in their lives. As the report noted: “What matters is not so much parents’ work situation, or even their marital status. What really counts is their involvement in their children’s lives. What really counts, finally, is firm guidance…or, as one parent put it, ‘watching my kid like a hawk.’”
SOMETIMES, THOUGH, the tools families have at hand—discipline, watchful guidance, and love—just aren’t up to the task. A teenage girl I know of killed herself at the age of fourteen, leaving a note that said, “I don’t think I’m strong enough to be a teenager in today’s world.” More than anything it says about “today’s world,” that statement is testimony to the presence of severe depression and despair, which requires the intervention of sensitive, well-trained experts. As I and others have learned painfully through the suicides of friends and loved ones, too often individuals and families are reluctant or ashamed to reach out to the village for assistance. And too often, when they do, the village doesn’t reach back. We need to see to it that such help is not only available but readily offered, without stigma, to those in need.
One way of offering help is to provide teenagers with variations of what societies in the past have always given them—powerful, creative, challenging, and life-affirming ways of moving from childhood to adulthood. Among Native American peoples, these have often taken the form of a spiritual journey mentored by a wise elder, from which the young people return strengthened and filled with a vision of their higher purpose. Young Jewish boys and girls study sacred texts and traditions to prepare for a bar or bat mitzvah, in celebration of their new maturity.
It is no coincidence that these movements into maturity are marked by a public affirmation. Our own culture is in need of such powerful rites. Teenagers need more than a driver’s license to herald the passage from childhood to adulthood.
Great Transitions, a new report by the Carnegie Corporation on preparing adolescents for the upcoming century, recognizes that we have left kids adrift at this critical stage of transition. It recommends that our nation offer more youth-supporting events and activities. It should be no surprise that teenage gangs have flourished in their absence. Teenagers need a sense of belonging and want to be engaged in constructive activity. Community service for young people offers the combination of challenge and involvement that so many desperately need to stay on course in life.
However we go about it, we must recognize that the years of adolescence have traditionally been the times of greatest opportunity and greatest danger. Added to this is the indisputable fact that these are the most complex times in human history. Whether children are swept away in the undertow of confusion or reach maturity safely depends on how strongly and creatively we affirm our faith in their promise.
In the end, though, our children will reach a point of independence when we can’t watch over them or counsel them or see that others do. That is when character takes over—and when they need their shovels. Few of us will ever be tested like Nelson Mandela, but challenges, crises, failures, and disappointments, will come. Developing the “iron will and necessary skills” to shovel our way out from under whatever life piles on is a lifelong task for us all. And doing what we can to see that all our children are similarly equipped is our lifelong responsibility to them and to the village.
Children Are Born Believers
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet
discouraged with Mankind.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Some of the best theologians I have ever met were five-year-olds.
As children, my friends and I had long, serious discussions about what heaven would be like. One day a boy named David, who had bright-red hair and freckles, announced that he wouldn’t go to heaven if he couldn’t have peanut butter. We all argued over whether angels (which we all hoped to become) ever ate anything, let alone peanut butter. As the debate raged on, each of us sought guidance from a higher authority—our parents. When we compared answers the next day, we found that grown-ups could not agree on this critical theological point, either.
I sympathized with our parents years later, when Chelsea and her friends came to Bill and me with even weightier inquiries. By first grade, they were asking: “Where is heaven, and who gets to go there?” “Does God ever make a mistake?” “What does God look like?” “Why does God let people do bad things?” “Do angels have real bodies?” “Does God care if I squash a bug?” “Is the Devil a person inside or outside of us?”
Bill and I were struck by these questions, even as we struggled to provide thoughtful answers within the scope of a child’s understanding. They reflected a much deeper spirituality than we generally give children credit for. And they strengthened my belief that children are born with the capacity for faith, hope, and love, and with a deep intuition into God’s creative, intelligent, and unifying force. As child psychiatrist Robert Coles observes in his book The Spiritual Life of Children, “How young we are when we start wondering about it all, the nature of the journey and of the final destination.”
PEANUTS® reprinted by permission of United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
Like the potential to walk or to read, the potential for spirituality seems to be there from the beginning. A wonderful little book, Children’s Letters to God, contains messages that are filled with hope and trust, humor and sensitivity, and an awesome sense of familiarity. “Dear God,” writes one young child, “I bet it is very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in our family, and I can never do it.” Another asks, “How did you know you were God?”
The inclination toward spirituality does not need to be planted in children, but it does need to be nurtured and encouraged to bloom. One way we do this is by teaching children to translate the spiritual impulse into the shared form of expression, in words and rituals, that religion provides.
Religion figures in my earliest memories of my family. My father came from a long line of Methodists, while my mother, who had not been raised in any church, taught Sunday school. During a recent visit, she joked that she had begun doing so in order to keep Hugh from sneaking out of his class. When a friend of mine asked her what the essence of her spiritual teaching was, she replied, simply and sincerely, “A sense of the good.”
We attended a big church with an active congregation, the First United Methodist Church in Park Ridge. The church was a center for preaching and practicing the social gospel, so important to our Methodist traditions. Our spiritual life as a family was spirited and constant. We talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied, and argued with God. Each night, we knelt by our beds to pray before we went to sleep. We said grace at dinner, thanking God for all the blessings bestowed. My brother Hugh had his own characteristic renditions, along the lines of “Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat!” But despite our occasional irreverence, God was always present to us, a much-esteemed, much-addressed member of the family.
Bill is a Southern Baptist who feels as close to his denomination as I do to mine. Over the years, we have attended each other’s churches often, and Chelsea spent time in both until she was ready to decide, at age ten, to be confirmed as a Methodist. The particular choice was not as important to her father and me as was her commitment to being part of the fellowship and framework for spiritual development that church offers.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead felt that exposure to religion in childhood was important, because prayer and wonder are not so easy to learn in adulthood. She was also concerned that adults who had lacked spiritual models in childhood might be vulnerable as adults to the appeals of intolerant or unduly rigid belief. My own experiences confirm Mead’s conviction. I have known parents who were not themselves religious but who conscientiously ensured that their children were exposed to at least one religious faith for these reasons. I have also met people who had turned away from the teachings or structure of the faith in which they had been raised but were inspired to return by their own ch
ildren.
At a formal dinner recently, I sat next to a distinguished businessman who told me he had started reading the Hebrew Bible from the beginning. Even though he had been bar mitzvahed decades before, he had not thought of himself as a religious or spiritual man. But one day, while holding his daughter, he had pointed at the sunset and said, “Look at the beautiful painting God gave us tonight.” His little girl asked, “Who is God?” He decided that he owed it to her to introduce her to religious faith, just as his parents had introduced him. There is no substitute for this. If more parents introduced their children to faith and prayer at home, whether or not they participated in organized religious activity, I am sure there would be fewer calls for prayer in schools.
CHURCHES, SYNAGOGUES, mosques, and other religious institutions not only give children a grounding in spiritual matters but offer them experience in leadership and service roles where they can learn valuable social skills. A friend, reflecting on the role of formal religion in her childhood, remarked one day, “My church was my finishing school.” She recalled the first time she spoke in public, a one-line recitation as part of an Easter morning program when she was four. Each successive Easter, her part in the program grew larger. Her church leader showed her how to speak clearly and loudly. With every public performance, she gained greater self-confidence.
I knew what she meant. In my own church, I took my turn at cleaning the altar on Saturdays and reading Scripture lessons on Sundays. I participated in the Christmas and Easter pageants (learning a lesson in recovering poise the time I fainted in my angel costume in the overheated sanctuary) and read my confirmation essay on “What Jesus Means to Me” before the whole congregation.
It Takes a Village Page 15
