All My Children

There is a battle raging today for the bodies and souls of America’s teenagers, and like it or not, our children are on the front line. Venereal diseases, unwanted pregnancies, guilt, loss of self-esteem, and breakdown in relationships are just some of the results of premarital sexual involvement.

My desire for you as a parent is that you never hear the following statements; or, if you do, that you might know what to do when you hear them.

If only I had waited. I see now how uncluttered my life would have been, how my mind would have been free from this burden that besets me even years later.

If you want to know what it is really like, get two pieces of paper and glue part of one to the other. After it has dried, pull them apart. What you have in your hand is a vivid picture of two people after a premarital sexual relationship—both torn, both leaving a part of themselves with the other. Continue Reading »

An uncomfortable problem for you as an idealistic young person, especially in the early teens, is the sharp contrast between the physical side of sex and the romantic, tender, spiritual side. By the time you are in your late teens or early twenties, these two aspects will tend to fuse together (sooner in one individual, later in another), giving strength and meaning to each other. But at first they are so opposite that they seem to battle against each other. Continue Reading »

I don’t think that the recent trend to earliness in dating and in going steady and in sexual intimacy means a readiness to share love, in a great majority of cases. In past generations in America, as well as in other Western societies like ours which are committed to advanced education, a great majority of young teenagers with aspirations were satisfied for a couple of years to be in love from a distance most of the time, with only occasional encounters; they did not become heavily involved until their late teens. Continue Reading »

I myself think that the teen years up to sixteen, seventeen or eighteen are generally the time for an informal kind of companionship between boys and girls, mainly in groups.

You get lots of opportunities to learn about the opposite sex and your own sex by being with other young people regularly in school, in Sunday School, in camps, around the neighbourhood, in dropping in and out of other families‘ homes. This kind of sociability allows you to get to know others casually, which is the most comfortable way for most early adolescents. You can talk as much or as little as you feel like doing, instead of having to fill up all the silences, the way you feel you have to do when there are only two people present. You can be on school and youth club committees to carry out projects and social activities. You can participate in the activity clubs that exist in many schools—a Spanish club, a stamp collectors’ club, a nature- study club, etc. Continue Reading »

In the later teens—at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen—a majority of young people will have lost enough of their shyness and gained enough experience so that they can mix socially with pleasure. Those who are in love will be in love on a more realistic basis than when they were younger—in the sense that they will have got to know the beloved before allowing themselves to become infatuated, and in the sense that they are seeing each other fairly regularly in real life situations, not just dreaming of each other at a distance. Others will not be emotionally ready yet to fall seriously in love, but they are drawn to certain members of the opposite sex and are having regular or occasional dates. Continue Reading »

The burning out of an infatuation can be a painful matter at any age for the person who is still in love, but it is particularly so for the young teenager who has not yet developed any protection against such hurts. There is an aching, stinging emptiness. There is a loss of face, a loss of a sense of dignity, with friends and family There may be a scalding jealousy if the romance has been ended by the beloved’s turning his affection to someone else. There may be a sense of disappointment or indignation or outrage against the erstwhile beloved who now seems a fraud. However, it isn’t strictly fair to blame a person for not being able to be what you had imagined him to be. Continue Reading »

When I give you these stage directions, I don’t mean that you can fake your responses, like a ham actor. I mean that to be popular in the best sense you have to be a genuinely sympathetic person. In most cases this can be learned. Of course if you are a thoroughly self-centred individual, you can’t ever be a sympathetic person and you can’t be popular. Most people have enough outgoingness and sympathy to be excellent conversationalists; but they are too thoughtless to make the effort, or they are too self-conscious to let go.

Another similar avenue to popularity is to be willing to share activities. Even if you previously had a dim view of bird watching or carol singing, you can show that you are a good sport and a warm person by being glad to participate because you want to be with the people who are participating. Continue Reading »

Popularity with a large group is useful only to the politician who’s after votes. What you as an individual can use and need is to be appreciated fondly by a small circle of friends for your particular flavour, whether it’s for your generosity or understanding or vivacity or witty tongue. Romantically what you as a teenager need is a chance to get to know and be known by some appropriate members of the opposite sex—a few at a time—in order to reveal your own ideas, to learn to respond to the ideas of others, to let your own qualities of personality come out so that those of the other sex who might cherish them can see them, to find out for yourself what qualities you want and need in a beloved. These things are not at all clear to a young person at first. In order to take advantage of your opportunities to get to know members of the opposite sex, you ought to learn enough easy flirtatiousness to signal interest to them. I don’t mean a heavy seductiveness but a sparkle in the eye, a personal smile, a lightly flattering remark, to show that you think the other person is fun. You should acquire enough facility with light talk so that you can pass ten minutes or an hour with another person while you—and he—decide whether or not there are possibilities in this friendship. Continue Reading »

Protection is usually mentioned as the first purpose of clothes. Modesty is another, but there is little stress on it today. An aim with high priority throughout history has been to conceal or minimise the unattractive features of each person’s body and to call attention to the more appealing ones. When we want to please someone or a group we dress up; and when we don’t give a damn or want to show a subtle scorn, we dress too negligently for the occasion.

Human beings have a wavering attitude in regard to modesty and exhibitionism. (Exhibitionism is the pleasurable impulse to show one’s body—or one’s total self.) They start off in early childhood as frank exhibitionists; they’ll gleefully show their navels or their genitals to anyone who really appeals to them. But by six or seven, they are apt to be bashful about being seen naked or when using the bathroom, at least some of the time. In early adolescence, when a person is made strongly aware of his sexual interests but has not yet become sufficiently used to them to be comfortable with them, modesty tends to be even more accentuated. (A modest person may, at the same time, be having fantasies of exhibitionism.) Continue Reading »

There are a number of venereal diseases in America and Western Europe. Those which most people know about are called syphilis and gonorrhoea. Another of these diseases which has become increasingly common in Britain is known by the rather long name of non-specific urethritis. There are a few other rare venereal diseases and other minor conditions which can be caught by contact between the sexual organs, but which do not have effects on health nearly as serious as those resulting from syphilis and gonorrhoea.

In the old days a lot of people used to think that you caught V.D. just by having sexual intercourse with somebody to whom you were not married. Some people had superstitious ideas that marriage conferred immunity from venereal disease. Until the last few years it was in fact the case that venereal disease was unusual and caught mainly from prostitutes. But now, owing to the changes in sexual practices which have taken place recently, gonorrhoea at least is the second most common infectious disease in Britain, and a person is unlikely in fact to catch it from a prostitute, prostitutes being particularly well aware of how to avoid gonorrhoea. Continue Reading »