All My Children

Lastly, God wants our children to wait until marriage for sex to protect them from relational problems. The first of these is a breakdown in communication. One young person said, “Like many others, I have learned that if there is too much touching in a relationship, it can cause uneasy feelings which lead to lack of communication.”

Wrote another, “Spending this time on sex takes away from time which could be spent getting to know each other more. Just at the time when the two need to talk most about their deepening feelings, problems they have, and so on, the verbal communication is stopped.” Continue Reading »

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 »

Through talks with Catholic children, I have found a few themes which come up again and again. Issues of papal authority, marriage, the Trinity, sexuality, the gender of God, and the Christmas spirit are evident in many Catholic children. To offer a few ideas and some support, I want to present some observations concerning Catholic child-rearing. 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 »

While we are talking about the experimental, physical kind of sexual affair which fairly often goes on to intercourse nowadays, without any real love, I want to speak of illegitimate pregnancy. Many people assume, now that there are `the pill’ and other efficient forms of contraception, that unwanted pregnancies don’t occur. This is not so. In fact illegitimate pregnancies have tripled in the United States in the past twenty years. You wonder why it happens. In one type of case the boy and girl say it was because ‘one thing led to another’, without the young couple’s ever having planned it that way or taken any precautions. They may firmly decide that it was all a mistake, that they won’t let themselves do it again and so won’t have the need for any contraceptive. Yet they may succumb repeatedly. Such people are quite immature. Those with a sense of responsibility manage to control their feelings. Or if they make the very serious decision to carry on an affair, they carefully take the precautions. 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 »

In past times there have always been a small number of young lovers who for economic, educational, family or ideological reasons were not married but lived together more or less secretly. An American domestic relations court judge shocked most people by recommending ‘Companionate Marriage’, trial marriages without children, as a way of attempting to reduce the number of later divorces that are so hard on the children of the family 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 »

If you are in love and are perhaps talking of marriage, better not let yourself be persuaded to reveal previous love affairs or sexual experiences. Your beloved may say, and it sounds plausible, ‘We shouldn’t have any secrets from each other.’ But most people in love don’t want to tell and don’t want to hear about previous romances—they were mistakes in one way or another. The person who is eager to tell about his past romances is usually someone who gets unconscious pleasure from making his beloved jealous. And the person who wants to know about his beloved’s past has, in most cases, an over-jealous personality : it will only make him resentful and miserable to hear the story. Continue Reading »

Varieties of Love

There are at least half a dozen quite different varieties of love, all of which go by the same label. In infancy and early childhood love is principally dependent : the small child is tied tightly to his mother, turns to her for all his wants, feels anxious if she is away for long, is elated when she returns. Though dependent love decreases throughout childhood, there is, of course, still an attachment to parents in adulthood. Even married love has a dependent element in it. Love of God is, in part, like the dependent love of parents, though it usually has other spiritual and mystical qualities as well.

By about the age of three, a child begins to be able to love other children companionably and generously, loves his parent of the same sex with intense admiration and develops a romantic and sexual and possessive love for the other parent. These all come under the heading of spontaneous, outgoing love. Continue Reading »