parenting

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Why Is Birth Control Still a Hot Topic?


Four of the hottest topics in the history of America have all involved individual rights, slavery, rights of blacks, right of women to vote, and birth control.  Three of those are no longer hot topics but all can find their roots in the early to mid-19th Century.  Why then have we been unable to make the basic tenants of birth control something that is widely accepted so that any discussion of it has a baseline of accepted principles?  The only reason is because there are those who want it to be a part of morality.

Our country realized when it repealed the 21st Amendment, alcohol prohibition, that it could not legislate morality as was done with this amendment.  We clearly recognized that at least where drinking was concerned, whatever morals were attached to it were an entirely personal thing that governments have no business legislating.

In the early 20th Century a woman named Margaret Sanger, of poor Irish Catholic parents from Corning New York, moved to the lower east side of New York City where she set up a woman’s clinic.  As a trained nurse, and one who had aspired to be a physician, she found that the health of poor women was poorly attended to, and worse, there was no forum for the woman to be educated relative to her own body.  Such discussions were considered taboo at the time.  She had found the urban poor to suffer from an extremely high infant mortality rate.  But it was at that time she also found that many of these women desired to find a way to forestall unwanted pregnancies.  And it was on this point in particular that Sanger lead the charge.  He efforts were both criticized and condemned by early 20th century society.  When she tried to inform a larger number of women by sending sex education materials through the mail, she was prosecuted and found guilty of distributing pornography.  That was in 1917 and at the time she received a large amount of her support from the suffragettes.  But when, in 1920, women got the vote, the suffrage movement ceased and with it Sanger’s best support.  And worse for her, she had earlier allied herself with the Socialist movement in the U.S. and alienated even more people because of that.

Sanger died in 1966 failing to see what would certainly have been her greatest victory, the 1973 US Supreme Court decision on Roe vs. Wade.  The SJC decided that it was an issue of privacy and that abortion was the moral decision of a woman in conjunction with her doctor.  That should have made the issue resolved and given the American public a starting place to move on from.  Unfortunately that has not been the case.

Sanger’s inspiration was the idea of giving women the information necessary about her body to make educated decisions with regard to it.  Key to the discussion was always the word “education.”  And it is on this point which America is failing.  Our high teen birth rate, high abortion rate, and high undesired birth rate.

I find abortion to be absolutely abhorrent.  But my solution is not to ban abortion, but to better educate those who have abortions and unwanted pregnancies, teens in particular.  My challenge to the anti-abortion crowd, who euphemistically call themselves “Pro-life,” is to come up with a solution that reduces a woman’s need and/or desire to get an abortion.  It is troubling that these anti-abortion people also seem to be anti-sex education where adolescents and teens are concerned.  Their magical thinking allows that all the sex education they need they can find at home.  Ideally that would be true, but the real world tells an entirely different story.  It is not coincidental that the highest teen birth rates happens to the poorest educated.  It is also not coincidental that unwanted pregnancies happen most frequently not just to teens, but to the poor who do not have access to good medical support.

I was astonished that within the US Congress there is a movement to cease public funding of Planned Parenthood.  While the organization certainly advises women with regard to abortion, its services do not stop there.  They also deal with all aspects of women’s health and education, such as cervical cancer screening, breast cancer screening, STDs and so forth.  How can anyone in their right mind think that public funding for such a group is a bad thing?

America first has to come to terms with the fact that it needs to educate their children with what is happening to their bodies as they enter puberty.  And that education needs to continue, in the public forum, for as long as they are in school.  It is far less expensive, in all respects, to educate our children with regard to sex than it is to have them pregnant when they have not yet stopped being children.  To do this Americans must stop thinking of sex, where education is concerned, as being private, taboo, or too embarrassing.  And also because sexually transmitted diseases, to include AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, etc. put us all at risk.

To anti-abortionists I say, support those things that help women from getting pregnant in the first place.  Make it a given that all young girls and women will have equal and unobstructed access to birth control methods.  Make a part of that education the actual costs, both financial and psychological, of bringing a child into the world.  Make a world where abortion is only a last resort, not a convenience, or measure of desperation.  There is no substitute for a well-educated and well-informed public.

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Require All High Schoolers Take a Class in Parenting


The incidence of teen pregnancy is far too high.  Children having children.  High schools having to devote precious resources to helping teen parents care for their child while they get an education.  How does that happen?  One of the greatest benefits of such a class would be getting teens to reconsider sexual activity once they realized how difficult bringing up a child is, particularly for someone their age.  At the very least they may practice safe sex, and more likely, more would refrain from sexual activity altogether.

I did not get married until I was 25 and my first child arrived when I was 26.  To say I was unprepared is a huge understatement.  I was virtually clueless.  While I was financially capable of caring for a child, I was not in the least educated in parenting.

Nationally, high schoolers are required to take four years of English, three years of science, and two years of math.  Why not also require one year of parenting?  Even better, require that all students take the class even before they are allowed to drop out of high school, and maybe especially so.

Such a class would in no way, shape, or form be a sex education class.  It would start out with what expecting parents go through, their responsibilities to themselves, and to the unborn child.  Then they would learn the basics for caring for a new-born, home care, doctor’s visits, sick child, and what a day in the life of a new parent is like for any 24-hour period.   It would also teach them about the economics involved in child-care, what the costs of proper child-care look like.  It would also take up the task of what to do with a child when something goes wrong.  It would also make them aware of children born with defects and how that impacts the new parent.

One last thing, I would make it a requirement for every student to get a grade of “B” or better to pass the course.  Parenting education is far too important to allow for mediocre grades.  But the upside of this, such exposure will ultimately be helpful to all students, even the most responsible, as they go through life.  There is nothing better than good preparation for anything you enter into.

 

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How We Mess Up Our Children’s Minds Everyday


You do not have to be a parent for this post to be relevent.  Just be a member of the human race necessarily means you as an adult contribute to what children learn.  Parents, of course, are who a child models himself after. But children see everything around them and notice a lot more than many people give them credit for.  One way a child learns is through imitation.  They also form the value system through things they see, things they hear, and what any group of people they come in contact with are doing.

I wrote earlier about how we are failing our children in education.  What I did not include in that article is the education a child receives outside school.  Every human on earth learns from his environment, his experiences.  A simple example of this is how we refer to people having “street smarts.”  Anyone who grows up in an urban environment is intimate with that education while someone who grows up in rural America does not have it.  This may seem like simply a matter of where you grow up, which it is of course, but it is a great example of exactly how we learn.

In probably every country on Earth people discuss their future when they are looking towards their children.  But most of such discussions revolve almost exclusively around two things, formal education, and religious education.  I will not comment of religious education but I believe formal education to be an extremely large portion of any person’s ability to succeed in the world.  For argument’s sake I will put that portion at 51%.  But leaves another 49% to be accounted for.

From my experience in the primary education classroom, I can tell you there are informal activities that hugely affect every person’s life experience.  First among these is socialization.  In any group of kids you will find the full spectrum from the social butterfly to the wall flower.  But be warned, the social butterfly may not be any more self-confident than the wall flower.  Sometimes children act in one particular way as a means to cover up their fears.  The wall flower is afraid of rejection but it is possible the social butterfly acts as such because she fears not having friends.  One thing I know for certain, children always give clues as to why they are acting as such.  As much as we need to reassure the wall flower we need to ensure that the social butterfly is  simply having fun and not play acting to cover up a fear.

When I was a boy my mother caught me reading a girly magazine of some sort.  For an instant I thought I was in serious trouble.  My mother was a true disciplinarian.  But to my great surprise, and of course her credit, she told me the pictures of naked women were not in themselves bad things.  It was my reaction to those pictures, or as I think she put it, what  I did with those pictures that made the difference.  The message for me was, enjoy the beauty of the naked body but always respect women in person and in my actions.  I bring this up because as a society we have this predilection of hiding nudity from our children.  But most parent do nothing to hide all sorts of violence from children.  Children are bombarded with images of wonton killing but protected from nudity.  I find that absurd.  Worse,  children take violence as the norm and nudity as “bad.”  A teacher who happened to show young children a picture of Michelangelo’s “David” would chance firing but that same teacher showing a picture of one person engaged in killing another would probably not even be spoken to.  This shows a basic lack of good definition of right and wrong in our society.

What children need the most of are models and depictions of caring and love, of friendship, of good citizenship, of heroes.  These things are woefully lacking, in my opinion, in the lives of too many children.

In school yards today the rule is a child cannot in any respect put his hands on another child.  Boys rough-housing, wrestling, and other such activities are often outright banned.  Someone seems to have forgotten that this is exactly what boys do and it is usually very healthy.  When I oversee children at play I allow for a certain amount of rough-housing.  Even more, when a child comes to me crying about having fallen and hurt themselves I comfort them a little but I do not allow them to go running to the nurse.  I reassure them by noting that they are not bleeding but they are feeling the pain of having bumped themselves.  I send them off by promising them that if they are still hurting a lot after 5 minutes I will allow them to see the nurse.  Not a single child has ever gone to the nurse after that.  What I am teaching them is that you are going to fall, you are going to hurt, but you will be all right if you give things just a little time.  I always allow them their pain but always have them take some time with it just so they can see they will be all right.

What I have seen is too many parents at one end of the spectrum or the other.  There are, unfortunately, parents who protect their children from little or nothing.  These children become adults with bad attitudes, who are very defensive and worse who strike out at others, who are maladjusted and headed for a life of frustration and failure.  At the other end are the overprotective parent.  They will have a boy who wants to play football but the parent will not allow it because they think football too violent.  They are the parents who attempt to control who their children play with.  They are the parents who fawn over their child when the child is hurt and goes out of their way to end the hurt as quickly as possible.  They seem to have forgotten that living through hurtful things is a good thing when the child involved fully appreciates how they will be all right afterward.  They will not have such an experience if the parent takes it from them.

Some of the things no child needs to see are his parents have long verb altercations, or any physical altercations.  They need to see their parents hugging one another, and kissing.  They need to be disciplined.  There has never been a child who does not try to find and push boundaries.  It is a normal learning activity.  But when such boundaries do not exist, what do they learn?  They need to hear their parents apologise to them.  They need to know that telling the truth when they have been wrong is not a bad thing.  That is, they have to experience reward through truthfulness.  Parents should never, ever, lie to their children.  When the child walks in on the parents having sex, definitely do not chase the child out but tell him mommy and daddy were loving each other.  Then tell them it is private time and ask the child to leave.  Children need a healthy response to their missteps.  Most mistakes children make are innocent but they learn better when they are given gentle but firm correction and not being yelled at or worse.

The bottom line is, if we want our children to act responsibly we have to act responsibly.  We must acknowledge our mistakes in full view of our children.  We must never make hollow threats.  We must gently guide.  We cannot condemn failure as failure is a part of life.  We have to remind our children that frequently great success comes after a long series of failures.  We have to make it all right to be less than perfect.  We cannot afford to allow our children to be enamoured with physical beauty over inner beauty.  It is our duty to give good example as that gives our children the greatest chance of success.