All My Children

What Does It Mean to Be a Protestant?

If you’re Protestant you are probably well aware of a religious tradition that includes the earliest settlers of our country, and you may have passed that on to your child.

Awareness of Protestant history can help a child better understand the common qualities Protestant denominations share.

Perhaps with the aid of a story or picture book, explain to your child that Protestantism is the name for several religious groups which were formed during the Great Reformation of the early sixteenth century. Continue Reading »

Your child needs to feel the love and support of you and of God. For most children, parental involvement is the ultimate way to develop spiritually and to feel good about themselves. Talk with your child face-to-face, not with condescension or distance. You should laugh and play with your child when discussing religion as well as other aspects of his or her life. And be there for serious talks too, because that is what parents are for. Teach your child about a God who is versatile too—a Being that is a Parent to all of us.

Be sure that you include “everyday” situations when you discuss how God participates in our lives so that the concept can be meaningful to your child. God is to be found in songs, laughter, play, work, hurts, celebrations, and so on. Most important, no matter what your religion or your child’s may be, God is at work in your child’s life, and he or she should have a sense of that. 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »