Society needs to fix this problem

[JimG]

This. I’ll tell you from personal experience (I was raised the right way), even in the best environment a teen’s hormones are raging and sex is on his mind. It’s natural…I think you just have to teach a child right and pray that God gives them the grace to stay pure. If there’s a huge problem in the whole culture, we have to address it in small amounts by teaching our kids the right way to live.

That, along with this: don’t give them condoms and birth control pills to enable bad behavior, expect them to be responsible for their actions, and don’t leave opposite sexes unsupervised together.

 

[superamazingman]

A sense of shame is necessary for anyone to be able to overcome evil. No shame means no restraint. We see the results of no restraint everywhere.

Indeed. People joke about shame being a Catholic thing, but it’s true!

 

[Elizabeth502]

I’ll tell you from personal experience (I was raised the right way), even in the best environment a teen’s hormones are raging and sex is on his mind. It’s natural…

And there is absolutely no biological evidence that adolescent hormones “are raging” more in 2012 than in 1962 or 1952 or 1942 or 1932 (etc.). But somehow society during those time periods understood that promoting raging sex provided no benefit to society.

 

[JIB]

“Society” can’t fix the problem since it’s not an acting creature.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

 

[Elizabeth502]

“Society” can’t fix the problem since it’s not an acting creature.

Wrong. Society can influence behavior, just as it did in previous generations, when the individual cared about how society reacted to him/her. And the family reflected society’s values. Time for the family to reflect those values again, and for society to reinforce those genuine family values, instead of the individual taking his or her cue from a disordered set of social priorities, which is what is happening now.

It is schizophrenic and untenable to ask the individual to model good behavior, while society permits something thoroughly opposite as the model and norm.

 

[JIB]

You’re anthropomorphizing “society”.

 

[SgtSchultz]

Unfortunately, Roe governs, federally; therefore the “right of privacy” decided in Roe (which was really seized, says Scalia, from Griswold, inapporpriately) could be hijacked for any State policy, if challenged. But if people began to see a different paradigm working in a corner of the country (before that reached a federal challenge), and in a way that improved the economy and reduced social ills, other States might want to follow.

Except I don’t see how that would apply to Canada, England, France, etc. (Unless other governments see positive results and try to implement them at home – if that’s what you were trying to say.)

What’s needed is a culture-wide “counter-revolution”, for lack of a better term. The Sexual Revolution started as an international (yet intra-Western) phenomenon and the response must also be international.

Shaming people isn’t going to accomplish anything. You can’t shame a person into being a good parent.

Why not? There is a reason I can leave a bicycle unlocked on the street overnight in Kyoto but not in Toronto. It’s because a bicycle thief would bring shame and dishonour to his entire family. It’s unheard of. The Japanese, of course, take this too far. But there’s no reason we couldn’t use social pressure to mould positive behaviour. That’s what a civilised society does. Fear of the law never accomplished what fear of the community did. Indeed, the law exists to punish extreme cases – ideally social mores would have prevented many smaller things that happen today from happening in the past.

“Society” can’t fix the problem since it’s not an acting creature.

Irrelevant. One could say that “Torontonians are not an acting creature”, yet it is Torontonians (or rather a plurality of them) who elect their mayor.

You think social customs and mores aren’t formed by the very people living in a society? Do things just randomly happen? Did Japan just magic up some nice trains?

The concept of society has existed in political philosophy for millennia. It’s not a random smattering of events that just happen to work better in some places than others.

 

[mangy_dog]

At the risk of sounding like a stickler for tradition…

The root cause of our problems comes from not having a life of prayer and a life of the spirit, nurtured by the Sacraments of Confession and Communion.

We marry by the church and then forget our promise to God and spouse and keep divorce in the back of our polluted mind as a viable escape from the Sacrament of Marriage.

We baptize our children and allow them to choose their own beliefs along their growing years so as not to curtail their decision making process. Parents and godparents forget their responsibilities of baptism to “bring this child up in the faith of the catholic church that we have professed.”

We are desensitized to the need of the Sacrament of Confirmation. So we don’t push it as much as we do the first 3 Sacraments.

We have to stop and think what those first 3 Sacraments are because we’ve fallen out of the practice of regular Confession and definitely don’t encourage our children to go.

We don’t pray the Rosary. Some of us feel it’s not effective or necessary or antiquated-from a time when the [catholic church had exorcisms and the use of crucifixes over the bed and the use of holy water in the homes].

We get angry when groups of catholics want a Traditional Latin Mass established in their diocese for the same reasons as the Rosary and holy water and crucifixes over the beds.

The list goes on and on. We need to do the basic catholic things really, really well-then we will start to chip away at the problem…lack of reverence, devotion and committment.

 

[Bill_7154]

Shouldn’t society as a whole attack the teen pregnancy problem at the source - the influence? Shouldn’t we go against all the sex-related movies and music that poison the children’s minds? If the kids don’t the ‘the talk’ from their parents, where are they going to turn to find information? Their environment - the internet, music, television shows, movies, etc. Even look at their clothes. EVERYTHING IS SHOWING. There are even Catholic-raised children that wear highly inappropriate clothing. Anyone agree? Sorry if this turned into a mini rant.

This is a very interesting topic for me because of this. I just recently a couple of months ago ‘became’ Catholic again (I was raised Catholic but even as a child was not invested in being a Catholic). I went to confession for the first time in about 17 years just a couple of months ago. I also have a son under 1 yr old. A few months ago, before ‘becoming’ Catholic, before finding my faith and opening my heart to God and Jesus and devoting myself to trying to be a good Catholic I had a conversation with a friend. It was about my son and how he would be raised, more specifically about how he would IMO interact with females when he reaches his teenage years. It seems he has some genetic traits that will make him physically desirable to females (he’s very tall for his young age, dr. says he will be very tall, and his face is such that he will be handsome). During my talk with a friend pre my converstion I was talking, in fact bragging, about how he can and will have sex with many females in his teen years and was feeling good and proud of this.

Now, post my conversion, I desire to raise him to be a gentleman. A protector of women and their virtue. I desire to raise him to court a young lady properly and when dating in his teen years to befrend the female’s parents and family and be liked and respected by any female’s parents he may date. I also desire for him to have female friends who will look up to him and respect him for being a virtuous young man with goals and a close relationship with God. I desire to raise him to have command over his sexual impulses and seek to have emotional connections with females, friendship connections. I wish for him to be popular with his peers, male and female alike, but do not wish for him to be seeking sex partners as a teenager. I wish for him to be focused on his education, on hobbies of interest to him where he can make friends and learn skills that will help him to be an admirable adult man.

I am not concerned about what is on TV or the way that others behave and dress. I am confident that since I have a relationsip with God and Jesus Christ, so long as I continue with that, this path that I am on, my influence on my son will be much stronger than any image on a TV screen or the behaviors of peers. I am confident that my parenting skills are very good, the change now is that I desire for him to prioritize having God in his life and plan to incorporate this into my raising of him, the way I interact with him, the way I behave and talk to and in front of him. I have always had the gift of being great with kids, they tend to gravitate toward me at parties and such, and I love children. It’s sort of a gift/skill I have where kids like me and I love children. I always have. My dream job would be to be a stay at home dad. Unfortunately that does not seem to be in the cards at the present time.

But I believe that our ability to parent, should we choose to apply ourselves, can and does have an extremely powerful impact on the values our children grow up with. My son will trust and feel comfortable bringing any topic of conversation to me. I am his mentor. I’m responsible to raise him. To instil discipline (not punnishment, although I’m not saying punnishment does not have a place) and morals into him. I was confident pre my conversion that I would have a powerful relationsip with my son. The confidence remains and strengthens now that I have faith, now that I have God and Jesus Christ, and the Catholic Church all as priorities in my life. I can not worry about what other people do or say, on TV or in his school, etc. He will be raised to be confident and unashamed of his morals and values. And he will be respected and well liked by his peers.

Temptation has, and will always exist. I can not say for certain he will remain a virgin until he is married. But I can say with confidence that I will have a very powerful influence over him, not because I will demand it, not because I will expect it, but because I will EARN it. I will earn his trust and respect each and every day as he grows from a baby to a teenager. I will be the one he trusts and comes to with help with day to day problems, etc and our bond will be extremely powerful. He will love me and I will love him. I will be there for him no matter what and he will know that down deep in his heart and discuss with me things such and the behavior of other children and we will process those things together as soon as he begins talking. I am sewing the seeds now by giving him a lot of attention and love and gentle guidance that is age appropriate. He is the most important thing on this planet to me.

So I am not worried about external influences. I have my skills, I have the ability to learn more skills, and I have God in my heart, mind, and soul to help me raise my son. And I feel blessed.

 

[AthenaC]

One of the quickest roads to poverty is single motherhood.

I try to correct this misconception whenever I see it. You make it sound as if once single motherhood happens, a woman is a victim of circumstance and will always be poor, when just in your previous post you clearly said that individuals choose whether or not to have sex.

Well, which is it, ed? Are people victims of circumstance or do they make their own choices?

Not only was I a single mom 10 years ago, but I was homeless. Now I am a homeowner and the breadwinner for my family. Forgive me, but I don’t feel particularly poverty-stricken. So to say that “One of the quickest roads to poverty is single motherhood” is bovine manure.