Posted on 12/10/2004 11:36:01 AM PST by DBeers
Hey Kids! Want Good Sex? Try Abstinence.
Warren Throckmorton
As a mental health counselor, I am really troubled by the numbers of adolescents that I have counseled who cried for days and hurt for years because they engaged in "safer sex" within dead end, unfulfilling relationships. Sadly, they learned that “safer sex” can be hazardous to their emotional health.
I think the current political debate concerning abstinence vs. contraceptive based sexual education has failed to include an important variable in the discussion of what to teach in school: sexual well being.
In many contemporary sexual education curricula, young boys and girls who listen carefully in health class will be schooled in the virtues of condoms. They may learn the mechanics and become involved in “safer sex” without the result of pregnancy or deadly disease. Sadly, though, such programs rarely inform them that their emotional and sexual adjustment would be enhanced if they would wait for the marital bed. What a disservice to a generation of young people.
I am raising this point because I just finished authoring a report, with colleague David Blakeslee concerning proposed changes in sexual education curriculum in Montgomery County, MD. Among other innovations, these changes offer students a PG-13 experience in watching a condom application demonstration, featuring a female and a cucumber. Further, the curriculum explains to students that it is harmful to have risky sex (meaning sans condom) but says next to nothing about any problems associated with engaging in pre-marital sexual relationships, provided condoms are on board.
In other words, 10th graders, we will tell you that applying condoms may prevent disease and pregnancy but we will not tell you that your long term sexual and emotional satisfaction may be enhanced by saving sex until marriage. The curriculum says in places that the only sure way to prevent disease and pregnancy is through abstaining but there is no mention that one’s overall well being might be enhanced by waiting.
Since you won’t hear this in school, here are a few survey findings from research concerning abstinence. According to 1996 data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, lower sexual activity among adolescents is correlated with higher levels of well being. In fact, sexually active girls are over three times as likely to report depressive symptoms than their abstaining counterparts and sexually active boys are over twice as likely to report depressive symptoms. Amazingly, these two groups report higher incidence of suicide attempts; boys in particular are at 8 times the risk for a suicide attempt if they are sexually active.
Young women are particularly vulnerable. According to the sex survey Social Organization of Sexuality, by Edward Laumann and colleagues, “young women often go along with intercourse the first time, finding little physical pleasure in it…” The report notes that there are “dramatic costs for young women” which are “increasing as young women have intercourse earlier in the life course.” (p.347). Sounds like delaying sexual involvement is a good thing both emotionally and sexually.
Concerning marital sex, the same report indicates that “a monogamous sexual partnership embedded in a formal marriage evidently produces the greatest satisfaction and pleasure.” (p. 364). Further, religious women are more likely to report being sexually satisfied than non-religious counterparts. These are the women who are more likely to have waited until they can follow the teachings of their faith about being “embedded in a formal marriage” before they have sex. However, presumably abstaining works for those of all faiths and those with none.
Why don’t health educators want kids to know these things? Good question. Ask it sometime at school board meeting.
Instead religious people and those who favor abstinence until marriage are usually portrayed as prudish, repressed folks afraid to talk about sex, let alone practice it. Rather it appears those smiles may be more than religious euphoria.
Given the positive health and mental health benefits of abstinence, it looks to me like these research findings should be prominently featured in sex education curricula. That is unless all we want to do is get latex around the problem.
However, often the research results reported above are not even mentioned. Not in the Montgomery County curriculum and almost never in public debate concerning the best form of sexual education.
So kids, want great sex? Now you know what to do. Or should I say: what not to do.
Warren Throckmorton, PhD is Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the College Counseling Services at Grove City College (PA). He is co-author, along with David Blakeslee, Psy.D. of the recent report, Health Education as Social Advocacy, which is available at http://www.drthrockmorton.com/montgomery.pdf. He can be reached at ewthrockmorton@gcc.edu .
You're welcome!
Yes, they might. In fact, most probably do. I mean, that's the most comfortable and facile interpretation.
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But are we lookiing for the most comfortable and facile interpretation? Or should we be looking behind the instructions and beyond our desires and self-focus (and may I say, rebellion) for the deeper meaning governing and instigating commandments, laws, and rules of our authorities?
Did you really read my post above, or are you baiting me? A woman having 4 kids in 8 years, then wanting charity. Guess what, she gets it every week, when the taxes are taken out of my paycheck for her ADC. She's probably making more than I am
I've been a single (divorced) mom as well. Their dad provided child support, PLUS I worked TWO jobs to take care of the 2 children that God gave us. They are now both wonderful, productive citizens. And I never took one dime from the government, or charity, to raise them.
In this day and age, there is no excuse for unwanted pregnancies...unless you have an agenda, and know that the more kids, the more government assistance you rake in every month, courtesy of our tax dollars. This woman DOES need help. She needs to learn how to keep her knees together.
BTTT!
"May God bless your conception efforts and make you very fruitful!"
Lordy, we have five, and one more on the way. I knows all about birthin' babies.
"I know that there are atheists and agnostics who commit to marriages or other relationships and are faithful to their partners no matter what."
I have no personal knowledge of any such relationships of more than two decades standing. That doesn't prove there aren't any, of course, but...
"But for me, it took my Christian faith to give me the standing to bear with my (current and for life) husband through some very tough and on-going challenges to our relationship."
I think that's true of most people, most emphatically including myself. Even in non-Christian societies, faith in an absolute moral code seems to be necessary.
As Will and Ariel Durant wrote, "Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality -- that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes, and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion."
Moral Absolutes Ping.
There was a link to this article in the last one I pinged out. But this is so good I had to ping you all.
Totally right, and unfashionable. It's amazing when you think that in just about 50 years the whole concept of chastity until marriage has gone from the cultural standard to being reviled.
And yet it is the natural human way to be. It is one ingredient in successful, happy marriages, which are the best environment to raise children.
Let me know if anyone wants on/off this pinglist.
"I've been a single (divorced) mom as well. Their dad provided child support, PLUS I worked TWO jobs to take care of the 2 children that God gave us. They are now both wonderful, productive citizens. And I never took one dime from the government, or charity, to raise them."
Hats off to heroic virtue.
"In this day and age, there is no excuse for unwanted pregnancies..."
Ummm...stupidity? Moral idiocy?
Oh, I should have added that I advocate your remedy of learning how to keep the knees together, and not using contraceptives to avoid the consquences of whoring around.
BTTT
No, I wasn't baiting you. I was talking about the role of the body of Christ in society. When I was a single mom, I had AFDC and foodstamps, plus I worked two jobs and went to trade school and then to college so that I could become a productive citizen and provide for my daughter, which I did. Because the church has dropped the ball on social issues, the government has had to step into the breach, although there are some "chicken or the egg" arguments about that one.
I agree that there are many people who take the easy way out of depending on welfare and giving themselves a raise by having another child. But from the way you wrote your post, I gathered that this woman was not the one wanting charity for herself, that someone else suggested that a collection be made.
But I will ask you: How do you know that her children were "unwanted"? Would you have preferred her (and others in her situation) to abort her children so that less taxes are taken out of your paycheck? There are many reasons to have children out of wedlock besides porking out at the government trough. Some women have children to try to cement a shaky relationship. Some women have children because they perceive that the child will love them unconditionally. Sometimes the birth control fails. What gives you the right to judge her?
I agree--this woman DOES need to learn how--but most importantly, why--she should not continue to have sex outside of a committed relationship. If she does not know why, she will not last beyond the next good-looking, sweet-talking man who flashes a smile and a little money at her.
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LOL! One of my favorite lines from Gone With the Wind. Good for you! The average size of the families in my church is 4 children. The most that I know of is 12, and the least is 2 children, unless, of course, they are newly-married. But several of the familes with fewer children have adopted others, or are working on adoption. There is such a need of Christian families who are willing to adopt "special needs" meaning much of the time "no longer a baby" in the U.S., and from other countries that have been devastated by war.
"no longer a baby"
Things are somewhat different here in Japan.
I offered to take a boy in some months back, but his father wouldn't allow it. Said he was going to have the grandmother watch him before and after school, and raise the boy himself (the mother brutally discarded him).
Well, in the end, the father put everything off on the grandmother, hardly ever showed his face, and when it got to be too much for the grandmother, they came and put the boy in a government institution for troubled and discarded kids.
Dern shame. I think that boy could have been straightened out. Don't have much hope for him now.
What gives me the right to judge her? The monies that get taken out of my paycheck every week to support her kids, I guess. She's on MY payroll, so I DO have a say. I do not approve of abortion, especially as a means of birth control, as some are using it. However, I also do not approve of having children who you can't support financially.
Personal responsibility is a concept that you obviously know nothing about. Having children to "cement" a shaky relationship? Are you saying you condone this action?
Birth control methods failing? That dog don't hunt with me. Too many good methods of birth control are out there, and the best one, as I said before, is keeping you knees together.
Don't have children if you can't take care of them, financially and emotionally, PERIOD. I'm sure others agree that we're sick and tired of having our hard earned tax dollars paying for someone's irresponsible romp in the sack. And at the end of the day, the children are the ones who pay for that irresponsibility.
I just posted that quote by the Durants yesterday! Did you get it from me or did you just have it yourself? If you came up with it without reading it from me it's a pretty amazing coincidence!
I have a collection of quotes that I keep adding to that I like or consider relevant or wise. If you find interesting ones, ping me if you think of it.
My personal experience confirms the article's conclusions.
When I read the salacious titles for Cosmo in the check out line, I say to myself "there must be an awful lot of unsatisfied women out there." If being single and sexually active were so great, there wouldn't be such a need for these articles.
My personal experience confirms everything in the article as well. A mis-spent youth (very mis-spent), followed by years of suffering, then a godly marriage that I did not and do not deserve.
Many who lived the type of life I lived have not fared so well.
Sexual misconduct has been the ruin of many lives, not just the ones who chose the misconduct, but their children and relatives. It's really amazing that more people do not see this, and think of promiscuity as modern, liberating, natural, and a source of happiness.
Sex without loving, lifelong commitment is one of the most miserable experiences a human being can have. It may have (and doesn't even always have) a superficial glitter, but it leaves the heart dry, lonely, burning-cold, and bitter.
But it happens, whether because of wrong or immature thinking on the part of the woman, or failure of birth control. There is good birth control out there, but nothing is 100% except abstinence. Condoms and other barrier methods have a very high failure rate, and chemical methods also have a greater failure rate in young women because of their very high fertility.
I am not going to defend this woman's abuse of her freedom of choice and lack of personal responsibility in becoming pregnant with 4 children out of wedlock. I applaud her and praise God for her decision to carry them to term and to not abort them. I will defend vigorously their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And since the church has reneged on this societal responsibility, the government uses the money it extorts from us to fund their right.
If you are upset about the government using your hard-earned tax dollars to pay for "someone's irresponsible romp in the sack" then work on solving the problem from the roots up, don't just rant about a current situation that can no longer be prevented. Take action to ensure that the same situation does not happen to your children, or the children of your friends, or their friends.
None of us have the right to judge this woman, or each other. Only God knows the motives and intentions of the heart. And to reiterate--the only place this woman is going to get the gumption to be abstinent and avoid having future children out of wedlock is to know WHY abstinence is the best policy, not just for herself but for her children.
Bleeding heart liberals like you don't have a clue. All you want to do is make excuses for their irresponsibility.
Take action to ensure that the same situation does not happen to your children, or the children of your friends, or their friends.
You see, my children were raised with the concept of a little thing called "personal responsibility", so there is no need for me to "take action". My daughter and son in law are waiting until they are financially secure before they bring my grandchild into this world. They will not depend on hard working people's tax dollars to support their children. Same goes for my son when he marries. In fact, none of my family members have relied on the government to support their children. IMAGINE THAT!
Too bad others don't get this concept.
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