Raising boys for fun and profit

There are things parents can do to help their sons make the leap from stumbling boyhood to manhood.

Okay, I was kidding about the fun. And, I was lying about the profit. There are, however, a few things parents can do to help their sons make the leap from stumbling boyhood to manhood.

In a recent article I commented on the numerous reports of boys’ poor academic and employment performance compared with girls, and the growing concern that so many young males are trapped in what appears to be a permanent adolescent world of porn, sports and video games. Somehow, the societal landscape has shifted and the young men who tamed the West and built the nation’s robust economy are now sitting numbly in classrooms and office cubicles. The male needs to achieve, to become independent is not slaked by Fantasy Football and watching American Idol. And while it may be too late for your beer-and-bong addicted brother-in-law, there is much that can be done to save our boys.

First, however, I need to confess my modified adherence to the "Bad Seed" theory. The Bad Seed is a 1950s novel, later a movie, about a child who stops at nothing, even murder, to get her way. While the child of loving and sober parents, she appears as evil incarnate. I bring this up because while I have never encountered an evil child, I’ve known a few smart and loving parents who have borderline monster kids who seem to possess a teflon ability to reject the good influences surrounding them. In their quest for freedom or whatever, they seem to have defined their parents as the enemies they must conquer. While a few of these teenaged fiends have grown up to be self-centred ogres, a surprising number of them in their 20s and 30s make a caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis that is quite astounding. In the meantime, though, their parents have been dragged through various circles of Dante’s Inferno. All of which is to say, there are no universal, guaranteed rules in child raising. Suggestions, yes. Ironclad rules, no.

New baby, new priority

First, then (and it may be an obvious point) raising a child has to be the numero uno priority -- especially in the case of a boy in today’s world. Whether the "package from Heaven" was carefully planned -- or was or an upsetting surprise -- isn’t the issue. When Junior arrives, he (like all his siblings) needs to go to the top of the list. His upbringing must leapfrog over parental career, romance, friendships and, certainly, over sport, recreation and leisure. It is not that these lesser priorities are abandoned, but that they are recast or rearranged in the face of new responsibilities.

In bygone eras, when most moms and pops were farmers or small shop owners, the total training and education of their sons was in their hands and this child-raising priority had real teeth to it. And the incentives were high. Their sons were part of their survival system and they were, de facto, the insurance policy of their old age. The stakes were high for making Junior a loyal and upright guy. In the modern world, parents have outsourced much of the education and training to schools, and camps and professional youth workers. Few children are going to pursue the vocations of their parents. Few parents can help with algebra or compete with their 13-year-olds in computer literacy.

The one area to which the schools and youth workers give a wide berth is moral training. One of the mixed blessings of a democratic and diverse society is that, in principle, "imposing ethical values", let alone a moral compass, is a social no-no. However, in the absence of a strong moral training from home, these "secondary parents" will take over.

Article by: Kevin Ryan
tags : boys, character, parenting, temperament

The spiritual world of children

News that the spiritual welfare of young children is being neglected somewhere will not surprise anyone, but the evidence adduced by a British researcher produced an eye-catching headline in the London Telegraph. “Angel sightings ‘should not be dismissed’”, it read.

Kate Adams, who lectures at an Anglican university college, interviewed 94 children who believed they had a dream with a religious connection but one third never confided in anyone. Exploring children’s belief in the unseen, Dr Adams was told by a seven-year-old girl that her parents paid no attention when she told them she saw an angel at her bedside every night.

Dr Adams said such testimonies were a saddening indictment of adults’ misunderstanding of children. She was presenting her findings to an educational research conference in the hope of encouraging teachers to take more interest in the spiritual life of children.

(It is one of the charming things about Britain that, despite being the home of atheist poster-boy Richard Dawkins, it still has legislation requiring schools to give religious education and to attend to children’s spiritual development.)

Another study to be presented to the conference, based on interview with 166 trainee teachers at eight English universities, showed that 44 per cent felt their course barely covered spiritual development.

No doubt some Britons would like to see an end to religion in schools, and yet growing numbers of religious (faith) schools are being opened across the country and more students are opting to take senior exams in religious studies.

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: children, religion, United Kingdom

Parenting pathways

If your parents were negative and harsh with you growing up, that’s the way you will be with your kids. And if they were positive and affectionate, well, lucky for your kids. That’s the assumption behind a popular theory of parenting, but researchers who have done long-term studies say it’s wrong.

Parenting styles have their effect much earlier, says David Kerr of Oregon State University, by allowing good or bad behaviour to take hold in adolescence. And this happens in two ways: by modelling good/bad ways of dealing with people, and by monitoring/not monitoring what they learn from other people.

"For instance, if you try to control your child with anger and threats, he learns to deal in this way with peers, teachers, and eventually his own children.

“If you do not track where your child is, others will take over your job of teaching him about the world. But those lessons may involve delinquency and a lifestyle that is not compatible with becoming a positive parent," Kerr pointed out.

So, the “pathway” from one generation to another is not a matter of remembering back to how your parents did it, but through the habits you have already formed. The good news is that it works in a positive sense as well.

"We knew that these negative pathways can be very strong," Kerr said. "What surprised us is how strong positive parenting pathways are as well. Positive parenting is not just the absence of negative influences, but involves taking an active role in a child's life."

The researchers found that children who had parents who monitored their behavior, were consistent with rules and were warm and affectionate were more likely to have close relationships with their peers, be more engaged in school, and have better self-esteem.

"So part of what good parenting does is not only protect you against negative behaviors but instill positive connections with others during adolescence that then impact how you relate with your partner and your own child as an adult," Kerr said

The study, by the way, was done with 206 boys considered at risk for delinquency, from the age of 9 to 33. Whatever those risks were (and the full study is to be published in the journal Developmental Psychology this month) they were clearly less critical than what the parents actually did. And that seems to be another argument for parent education.

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: adolescence, habits, parenting

The UN’s sex-ed plan for kids

Some years ago I saw a cartoon whose subject becomes more real by the day. It showed a Brave-New-Wold nursery in which newborns were being instructed via a loudspeaker: “Today you will be going home, but before you go, here is your first sex education lesson...” I was reminded of it by a Fox News report of a new universal sex-ed curriculum from UNESCO.

The UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation has decided that, “in a world affected by HIV and AIDS”, it is “imperative” to teach children as young as 5 about masturbation as well as “gender roles, stereotypes and gender-based violence”.

By the time they're 9 years old, they'll learn about "positive and negative effects of 'aphrodisiacs," and wrestle with the ideas of "homophobia, transphobia and abuse of power."

At 12, they'll learn the "reasons for" abortions — but they'll already have known about their safety for three years. When they're 15, they'll be exposed to direct "advocacy to promote the right to and access to safe abortion."

Not sure what’s left for 15 to 18-year-olds: maybe they’ll be getting work experience in a clinic.

The scheme, with its surrounding material – including long lists of experts consulted, studies “rigorously reviewed” and footnoted, and various rationalisations -- runs to 98 pages. The authors are Douglas Kirby, the elder statesman of comprehensive sex-ed research and advocacy in the United States, and Nanette Ecker, employed at the time by SIECUS – the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the US.

Mark Richmond, director of UNESCO’s Division for the Co-ordination of UN Priorities for Education (wonder how many staff he has...), was asked to justify the curriculum (which it is up to governments to accept or not):

Richmond defended teaching about masturbation as "age-appropriate" because even in early childhood, "children are known to be curious about their bodies." Their lessons, he added, would hopefully help kids "develop a more complex understanding of sexual behaviour" as they grow into adults.

For "complex" read "perverted". One doesn’t like to bash the UN, but really, doesn’t this sort of thing illustrate that it is trying to do far too much and that its brief should be severely curtailed?

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: abortion, AIDS, sex education, United Nations

Calling all monogamous men

Family scholar Patrick Fagan has come up with an elegant schema contrasting “monogamous” culture with other kinds of sexual culture which he calls, collectively, “polyamorous”. Speaking at the World Congress of Families recently in Amsterdam, he highlighted the gulf that exists between the two cultures in terms of values and practical consequences. And he proposed a solution.

Fagan, who is with the Family Research Council, argued that these cultures can only co-exist in once society if parents in both are given control over the programs that cause conflict: education, adolescent health and sex education.

At present, he said, the polyamorous culture is expanding through its control of these three areas by means of the public bureaucracy, snatching children away from their parents by drawing them into sexual activity. Each time this happens, the polyamorists have won several “victories”:

* The adolescent has been initiated into the polyamorous culture (albeit without knowledge of what is at stake) by having his first sexual experience outside of marriage;

* With the out of wedlock births or abortions that follow they have broken the family before it has started, solidifying the polyamorous stature of the adolescent or young adult;

* And, especially, they have pulled the young person away from participating in the sacred because formerly religious teenagers who begin to engage regularly in sex outside of marriage tend to stop worshipping God.

They -- the polys -- even fight any attempt by monos to defend their kids, through abstinence education, for example, or home schooling. And all this while the poly culture is being subsidised by the mono through tax funded welfare. As Fagan says, it’s simply unjust; the polys should have to pay their own way.

One way to progress in this direction and to make the behavioral bureaucracy to serve both cultures is to give all parents, parents of both cultures, and control over the program money set aside for their children. That is giving parents vouchers, in one form or another for all three program areas

The social welfare safety net will still be in place but the parents (be they monogamous or polyamorous) will choose who holds the net in place for their children.

Fagan admits it will require a huge political effort. And this is where the monogamous men come in. It’s their job, above all, to protect the family, he says.

Monogamy men will be expected to fight for control over is what is his and his family’s just due, what his taxes fund, and what he can use in raising his children: control over the three big programs of childhood education, sex education and adolescent health programs, so that they can be carried out in a way that supports the norms of monogamy culture. In this rearrangement polyamory parents have the same control to do as they wish for their children.

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: education, family, men, monogamy,

Ted Kennedy’s ambiguous legacy

 

For America’s most famous Catholic, morality and politics had little to do with each other.

Today Massachusetts mourns its Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy. At Dunkin Donuts, the flags are flying at half mast. Boston's famously snarled traffic has come to a standstill because of "Kennedy events". The casket of Camelot's last survivor made a final tour of its shrines – Hyannis Port, his family's summer residence, St Stephen's, his mother’s church in Boston’s North End, and Faneuil Hall, where he had announced his unsuccessful bid for the presidential 1980 nomination. The Massachusetts royal family waved through tinted car windows at the crowds. Thousands passed through the Presidential Library at Harvard dedicated to his brother to view the casket and sign the condolences books.

For Boston, it is a Diana moment.

Edward M. Kennedy died of a brain tumour on Tuesday at the age of 77. He had been in the Senate since he was 30 and stayed there for 47 years, the third longest-serving Senator in American history. Some wits quipped that while most politicians grow up and then enter politics, Kennedys enter politics and grow up later.

But Massachusetts voters doted on Ted Kennedy and patiently gave him time to mature. There was his expulsion from Harvard for cheating; there were rumours about drinking and womanizing; there was Chappaquiddick; there was his 1982 divorce, his 1992 remarriage (after an annulment from the Catholic Church). He was a Kennedy – Joe and Rose's son, Jack and Bobby's brother – and nothing stuck. He had a scare in the 1994 election when he faced Mitt Romney -- and won with only 58 percent of the vote. Other politicians can only dream of that kind of support.

But Ted Kennedy was not a seat-warmer. Politicians from both sides of politics praised him as an accomplished lawmaker. With the years, the lion-maned Bostonian became a consummate deal-broker who worked both sides of the aisle to get what he believed in. In 2001 he worked with President George W. Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind Act. He was a liberal, the very Aslan of American liberalism, a consistent champion of government spending to right wrongs and remedy disadvantage. Health care was the cause of his life, although he died without seeing victory for the Democrats' plans to reform it. In the words of President Obama, “He became not only one of the greatest senators of our time, but one of the most accomplished Americans ever to serve our democracy.”

But one of Ted Kennedy's most important legacies to American politics has hardly been mentioned in the acres of newsprint – how he shaped the debate about faith and politics.

For Ted Kennedy was a Catholic. He had the Massachusetts Catholic vote in his pocket. His mother was a saintly woman. His brother was the first Catholic president. He was married in the Catholic Church, received communion in the Catholic Church, saw a priest before he died, is being buried in the Catholic Church.

But he was a peculiar kind of Catholic. On the one hand, he always supported big-spending social policies for the last, least, lost and most vulnerable. It was his interpretation of Catholic social teaching. On the other hand, he was a strong supporter of abortion and human embryonic stem cell research. There was no ambiguity about this. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood gave Kennedy ratings of 100 percent as a champion of abortion rights. He ignored criticism from the bishops of his Church.

Through his role as the spokesman for America's leading Catholic family, Teddy helped to entrench the feeling that Catholicism is a tribal loyalty, not a divine light shining on religious and human truths. The doctrine of separation of Church and State meant that morality and politics had little to do with each other. In fact, political expediency should trump moral truths.

For politicians anywhere, this is a disastrous starting point for debate. It means that it is impossible for them to argue rationally about moral positions. On the issue of abortion, for instance, the Catholic bishops' opposition was based less on the Bible than on science, which tells us that the foetus is human. On this issue, at least, Kennedy's self-serving rationalisations turned his politics into expediency and his religion into sentimentality.

“I hope for an America where neither 'fundamentalist' nor 'humanist' will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of goodwill look at life and into their own souls,” he said in an influential 1983 speech at Liberty University before Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. Twenty-six years later, President Obama would make a similar speech at Notre Dame University, gracefully acknowledging differences on abortion, and obstinately refusing to change.

Shortly after his death, Mr Obama declared that Ted Kennedy's “ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws and reflected in millions of lives.” Including his own. In particular, when he addresses issues like abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage, perhaps the President will be using the dark art of charming without changing which he learned from America's most famous Catholic.

By: Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. He is currently in Boston.

tags : Catholicism, Edward Kennedy, politics, United States

The Democrats after Kennedy

 

What Obama must now do is to articulate a clear, distinct course of policy.

The first time I met him, on a boat trip along the coast in Florida at Easter 1962, just before he was manoeuvred into the Senate by family clout, arguably before he had reached the qualifying age, he and his first wife, Joan, were as beautiful as young gods. They were tanned and toned in seersucker, the very image of the American rich on vacation.

The last time I saw him, at a fundraising lunch in Boston in the late 1990s, he was ravaged - face brick-red, boozer's nose and eye, grossly overweight, but still charged with rare charm and formidable energy. This was the image that characterised his later years, until his death on 25 August 2009 at the age of 77.

In a Newsweek article he wrote after he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, called "The Cause of My Life", Kennedy listed just some of the medical and psychological disasters he and his family had survived, among them the plane crash that broke his back and several ribs, a son's leg amputated for one cancer, and a daughter treated for another.

He might have mentioned a sister's crippling by a (possibly unnecessary) frontal lobotomy, the death of a brother, a sister-in-law and a nephew in separate plane crashes, and the murder of his two brothers.

His point in the article was that he and his family survived in part because of his congressional insurance, in part because of his family's great wealth. He understood that many other Americans less fortunate than him, were wiped out financially by healthcare costs, or simply died miserably for lack of the money to pay for care. That was why, he was saying, healthcare was, of all his liberal causes, the one that meant most to him, and it is true that in his forty-seven years in the Senate reform of the American healthcare system was his absolute top priority.

By: Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University

tags : Edward Kennedy, Obama, United States