Category Archives: Parenting

All the Condoms in the World

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

February 14, 2005

How many condoms would it take to end the AIDS crisis?

In 1998, Sharon Stone urged parents worldwide to set out a basket of condoms for their children…as many as 200…encourage your children to play with them, take them, give them to their friends…condoms and more condoms for our children, she pleaded, because we love them.

You can’t really blame Ms. Stone.  After all, condoms had been the centerpiece of our response to AIDS since news stories in 1982 first announced the arrival of HIV in America.

Immediately, the deadly virus sent us into a panic.  School children wanted to know if they could get HIV from mosquitoes.  Mothers wanted to know if public pools were safe for their children.  Grown men quit going to the gym and bought weight machines for the garage.

Worst of all, liberated sex, once a promise of unrestrained pleasure born on the wings of the birth control pill and coed college dorms, became a risky adventure.  Scientists scrambled in their labs to put definition to the virus while health officials struggled to suggest ways to avoid contracting it.

Americans needed answers in a crisis where precious few answers were available.  And so we grasped at the closest thing we could find…the condom.

We could have ended coed dorms on college campuses.  Instead we enlightened students with the ten-step method of putting on a condom.

The Centers for Disease Control could have closed the gay bath houses so prominent in San Francisco and New York.  Instead, the CDC preached condoms.

We could have come together as a society to reject sexual promiscuity.  Instead we set out baskets of condoms in high school guidance offices.

A wake-up call arrived this week.  The New York Times reports, “A rare strain of HIV that is highly resistant to virtually all anti-retroviral drugs and appears to lead to the rapid onset of AIDS was detected in a New York City man last week.”  Health officials are said to be alarmed.  But they shouldn’t be surprised.

Four years earlier, The Arizona Republic reported, “People who catch HIV are increasingly likely to encounter mutant forms of the virus that are able to resist some of the drugs commonly used to treat the infection.  Drug-resistant strains have been a major problem since the start of treatment in the early years of the AIDS epidemic.”

Drug resistant strains of virus have long been known to scientists.  The CDC could have predicted this would happen.  Instead, they plowed ahead, with the help of science superstars like Sharon Stone, to put a basket of condoms in every home.

America didn’t stop with handing out condoms to our own kids.  From 1989 to 2000, over 232,000,000 condoms were sent annually to eleven African nations.  While that’s not even close to all the condoms in the world, that’s a heck of a lot of condoms.

In Zambabwe, their allowance provided the highest number of condoms per male for this group of nations.  Zimbabwe also had the highest HIV prevalence rate.  More condoms…and more AIDS.

It takes a courageous leader to set aside the popular mantra and evaluate the AIDS epidemic with a clear mind.  Ugandan President and Mrs. Museveni are just such leaders.  They were able to look past the mountains of condoms and see the obvious.  Lack of condoms doesn’t cause AIDS.  Sex with infected people causes AIDS.

Uganda chose a different path.  One of its governmental booklets published in 1989 stated with assurance, “The government does not recommend using condoms as a way to fight AIDS.”  Condoms gave users “a false impression that they were safe from AIDS.”

Choosing to support a return to their traditional cultural values, Ugandans educated and supported one another in saving sex for marriage and in honoring their marriage with fidelity.  Because they believed it could be done, they did it.  And today, experts from the world are traveling to Uganda to study their great sexual experiment…self-control.

Meanwhile, in the United States, as we contemplate how to face this latest AIDS scare, the old condom battle heats up once again.  This time, however, “a radical idea, born of desperation,” is taking hold in some quarters.  AIDS workers dismayed over a new battle against a stronger virus are considering a novel idea…novel that is, for Americans.  They are calling for an end to promiscuous sex.

How many condoms will it take to end the AIDS epidemic?  Zero.

Yes, that’s right.  Zero.

Confronting people with their personal responsibility for curbing sexual behavior is beginning to sound more reasonable all the time.  Even the CDC has turned the corner on its website, “The surest way to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases is to abstain from sexual intercourse, or to be in a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and you know is uninfected.”

And what do you know…that doesn’t take a single condom.  Not one.

April 30, 2004:  Condoms: A Failure to Protect

June 4, 2004:   AIDS: Importing the Cure

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Abstaining from Failure

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

February 7, 2005

There’s no better time of the year to look at what makes a winner than at SuperBowl time.  New England made it look easy. But Philadelphia gave no easy ground, and to the very last second on the field, and in the minutes following in the locker room, both teams showed us the character of champions.

We can take a lesson from the big league winners when it comes to teaching our kids about life and success.  Players like Bruschi, Owens, Branch, McNabb and Brady don’t rise to the top by accident.

1.  Game Plan for Winning.

Any good game plan is based on the fact that you want to win.  You don’t build success on a plan that says you plan to lose gracefully.

You make a plan to win.  You study the plan.  You analyze and revise and execute and analyze and revise and execute…according to the plan!  Winning is not an accident.

2.  A Coach for Winning.

Winning teams are made of people who want to win.  Top on this list is the Coach who inspires with leadership, encouragement, correction, and celebration.  Sportswriter Vic Carucci gives them proper credit, “Bill Belichick and Reid are two of the finest football strategists to ever don a headset.”

3.  A Respect of the Rules for Winning.

Belichick and Reid plan their strategies around the rules of the game.  They know football backwards and forwards.  They earn the “highest respect for their depth of football knowledge.”

4.  Heart on Fire for Winning.

Winning is the goal.  It is not a suggestion.  It is not something that happens because you hope it will happen.  Quarterback, lineman, receiver, defender or kicker…your heart is on fire for winning.

5.  A Team United for Winning.

Every winner stands on the shoulders of people who made it possible.  In three years, the trophy for Most Valuable Player has passed from Jackson, Brady, to Branch.  Each MVP stands on the shoulders of unmentioned yet dedicated players who blocked, received and kicked.  They play as a team. They win as a team. They celebrate as a team.

6.  Practice Unending for Winning.

Winning teams are built with players who show up for practice…on time…ready to work…day after day after day.

7.  Imagination for Winning.

Practice on the field is not enough to win.  Tom Brady is reported to call in the middle of the night, “Can you come up to my room? I’ve got a couple of things I want to go over with you.”

“I promise you while everyone else is enjoying Super Bowl week,” said outgoing Patriots offensive coordinator Charlie Weis before the game, “two nights I’ve been sitting in my room between 10 and 11 going over the game plan per his request.”

Good players exercise the body.  Winning players exercise the mind.

8.  Accepting Personal Responsibility for Winning.

Brady is being compared to the great quarterbacks.  “He’s poised. He’s accurate. He responds to pressure. He deflects praise in victory as eagerly as he absorbs responsibility in defeat.”

9.  Regrouping from Failure for Winning.

A good team doesn’t always win.  But it knows what to do with losing.  When asked about their slow first half in SuperBowl XXXIX, Deion Branch said. “We went inside and regrouped, and figured out what we were doing wrong and had to capitalize on a lot of things.”

Winning comes from knowing what makes you lose. Winning teams learn and grow from each defeat.

10.  Accepting the Hard Work of Winning.

The Patriots are being billed as a Dynasty.  But they know they cannot rest on past success.  Sportswriter Pete Prisco sums it up.  “[Y]ou can bet the Patriots will forget any mention of [dynasty] by the time they report for offseason work in March…. Remember, this is a team to a man that doesn’t allow itself to look back.”

Football…or life…winning requires more than a game plan and practice.  Winning is a team affair, a plan to win, fueled by a burning desire to win, supported to the max by every single person:  player, coach, trainer, wife, and friend.

If we want our kids to succeed, we need to take a lesson from the pros.  Whether it’s drugs, tobacco, alcohol or sex, we need to create a society that takes winning at life seriously.  Our game plan must be fixed on a plan to win.

Winning in life is also a team affair.  It’s long past time we built a culture of support for our kids where the media, teachers, and parents are unified as part of the solution and not part of the problem.

The rules for winning make one thing crystal clear.  Our kids fail…because we fail to lead.

July 30, 2004  James Bond in Danger…For Real 

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New Year’s Resolution: Another Kind of Diet

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 27, 2004

Is there anything we haven’t eaten in the past week: ham, tamales, potatoes, chocolate, brandy, wine…and…

On the way to eating, there is tasting, munching, nibbling and sipping.  Whatever you call it, the food goes in…and settles in for a long winter’s nap…right around the waist.

One week later, stuffed to the gills, we must face the truth.  A diet is in order.  The belt is tight, and we are too bottom-heavy to lift out of the recliner.  Eating may be natural, but it certainly has its limits.

Guided by New Year’s Resolutions, millions of Americans begin to set boundaries on what we put in our mouth.  We post calorie counts on the refrigerator door, we empty the kitchen of temptation and we carry boxed chocolates to the office.

Indulging at the banquet table comes at a cost.  Anyone laboring to shed a few “holiday pounds” knows the painful and difficult process of “paying for our pleasure.”  Food is only one item on a long list of indulgences…each with a cost.

For the past thirty years, we have winked at sexual indulgences, and our children are paying the price.  An epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases and thousands of children raised by single moms are testimony to the need for a diet of a different kind.

Abstinence education is about more than sex.  It is a diet for the soul.  It is about making the connections for our children between the indulgence and the consequence.  It offers children hope because it tells them they don’t have to pay a price if they can learn restraint.

Abstinence education is about the dreams of our children, about the quality of their lives both now and forever.  It works to give young people the imagination, confidence and tools to fulfill their dreams.  Sex is a part of the dream.  And so is restraint.

Debates over sex education continue to rage.  Millions of dollars are being poured into campaigns to paint abstinence educators as fear-filled, shame-based fools.  After all, one condom-friendly sexpert lectured her audience…sex is natural…like eating.

This was the major point she wanted to make?  A woman with over twenty years experience in teaching our children about sex?

She turned to face an abstinence teacher and lashed out in her most indignant voice.  “We want our children to celebrate sex.  We don’t need them to be fearful and filled with shame.  We want them to feel at home with their sexuality.  After all, sex is perfectly natural.”

She smiled…smugly.  She had trumped any challenge to acting on a sexual urge.  Well…after thirty years of reassuring our children that sex is natural, these sexperts have achieved their goal…and more.

No fear and no shame…this goes a long way to explain Superbowl XXXVIII and its international show of bumping and grinding center stage…pelvic thrusts set to music…complete with one naked breast.  Not to mention MTV.  And this sexpert wants us to believe the most pressing thing to teach our children is that sex is natural?

Eating is natural.  But it is only healthy when it is managed, limited, and held inside the bounds of medical realities by exercising self control.  Eating is not to be feared.  But it is to be restrained.  If not, why bother with New Year’s Resolutions?

Sex, just like dining at a banquet table filled with delectable dishes, is a passion best enjoyed when boundaries are observed.  Natural desires have natural consequences.  This is the truth from which we build New Year’s Resolutions…both for the kitchen and for the bedroom.

No fear.  No shame.  Teaching our children restraint is not about teaching shame.  Restraint is their ultimate liberation from the very real fear of paying a consequence more severe than a few extra holiday pounds around the waist.

Our children need more than the simplistic reassurance that sex is natural.  They need the perfection of nature’s ultimate truth:  Our greatest hopes and dreams are more often than not fulfilled with a simple resolution of self-control made…and kept.

Happy New Year.

April 16, 2004:   One Stop Shopping

April 30, 2004:  Condoms: A Failure to Protect

May 28, 2004:   What If

See Archives for past editorials.

 

The Best Part of Snuggling

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 10, 2004

It is black outside.  Soft pits and pats against the window…rain…and I pull the blanket closer, sinking back into the arm of the recliner.  A hot cup of tea rests at my elbow.  It is my favorite time of the day.

In the darkness, I think back to other special mornings, twenty years ago.  Wrapped in my green plush robe, rocking back and forth, it was many a quiet dark morning when I would slowly sense the presence of another person.  My son, a toddler of three, had padded into the living room, up next to my chair, with his small eyes fixed on me.

Wordlessly, in agreement that the peace of the morning was large enough for both of us, I would open my robe.  Knowing what to do, he climbed onto my lap, and I pulled the robe around us, a snuggling of two.  In many a dark early morning, so many years ago, we kept the peace together.

Snuggling…it’s hard to know the best part.  Is it the dark, the quiet, the soft touch of a hand on the shoulder?  Is it protection, comfort, acknowledgement, relationship?  Safety?  Is it the promised assurance between human beings that what happens to you will happen to me because I share your heartbeat?

I was jarred to attention last week.  I was asked to consider the first time I ever snuggled, my earliest snuggle of life, and the question brought me up short.

Was it inside the warm white blanket wrapped around me as I was laid into the arms of my mother in the hospital?  Or was it later…close against her as she nursed me, her firstborn?  Maybe my father was the first to snuggle me, peering intently, measuring the smallest eyes and lips of a baby…his…held in the crook of his arm.

Maybe…but the magic of science has opened the window on snuggling, and I think it must surely have been weeks, even months before my birth, when I knew I was safe, a knowing of safety available to all living beings even before they can explain it in words.

Surely, weeks before birth, wrapped into a bundle of baby, between my bursts of pushing and kicking against the walls of the womb…surely there were quiet moments shared with my mother where we snuggled and dreamt.  Already at this stage I had fine hair, teeth, and eyelash fringes around eyelids that opened and closed…and opened again…for infant eyes that looked around.  When she spoke, I knew my mother’s voice…outside…serenading me as I waited my time.

Certainly, even weeks earlier, when the womb was large enough for me to swim and stretch and turn somersaults, I took time to rest and sleep and snuggle.  Inside my mother’s quiet belly, worn out from my infant gymnastics, curling my toes, I would have stuck my thumb into my mouth and felt the safety of darkness…protected and safe.

One thing is certain.  I know I snuggled long before I made my first appearance under bright hospital lights.  No matter what some want to claim I was back then…a blob, a mass of cells, an embryo, a fetus…a product of conception…I was, without a doubt, a flourishing child of my parents, thriving and growing.

Today, cloaked in a battle of terminology, creating labels devoid of humanity, there are those who wish us to forget that we once snuggled in the womb.  They will not have their way with me.

I claim my existence, refusing to be dehumanized at any stage of development.  Supported by the miraculous development of four-dimensional ultrasound, doctors and parents can follow the development of babies like me.  At eight weeks, I was fully formed, a human of one inch in length, every organ present, with a strong beating heart.

At nine weeks, my fingerprints were already engraved, and my fingers were ready to grasp an object placed in my palm.

At ten weeks, my body was sensitive to touch. I squinted and swallowed. I puckered my brow and frowned.

And then I smiled…at eleven weeks.  And if I could smile, it is certain that I smiled because I felt safe, snuggled inside, nurtured and protected…my life ahead to be enjoyed and cherished.

So many years later, watching the dawn break on the mountains outside the window, I follow the beads of rain that trickle down the glass.  Another beautiful day outside, crisp and damp.  The garden will sparkle when the sun breaks through the clouds.  I take a sip of tea and pull the blanket up under my chin.

My son is grown now, and I must snuggle alone.  It’s enough, but it’s not the best there is.

If there really is a best thing to snuggling, this would have to be it…revived by thoughts of long ago…a bundle wrapped together, two of us sharing the morning…the best thing of all surely being the promised assurance between human beings that what happens to you will happen to me…because I share your heartbeat.

 *************************************

DEDICATION 

This column is dedicated to the many committed educators who are not afraid to teach our children about their earliest days of life inside the womb.  May these faithful teachers be encouraged in their work.

 

See Archives for past editorials.

 June 25, 2004:  Unplanned Joy

Kicking the Tires

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

November 5, 2004

Kelly and Dane spent the day in furniture stores picking out the perfect leather couch for their new apartment.  They are in love.   They are moving in together.  And they are not married.

“It’s not that we’re against marriage, but we’re just not ready for it,” says Dane.  “It’s a big commitment.”

Kelly nods in agreement.  “We saw both of our parents get divorced.  We love each other, and we’re talking about getting married.  But we don’t want to go through the pain of a divorce.”

Even as Americans are voting to affirm the special estate of marriage between a man and a woman, our children are having a hard time saying “I do.” Instead, like Kelly and Dane, many are taking their “love” for a “test drive,” trying to find out if it is the “marriage kind of love.”  They are kicking the tires before they buy.

The theory is that if they live together, they will be able to test their relationship before they make the serious lifelong commitment of marriage.  If everything works out, if they get along, then they can always get married.  If not, then they can just divide the furniture, decide who keeps the apartment, and go their separate ways.  No harm done.

According to the National Marriage Project, about 60 percent of young adults in America say they plan to live together before marriage.  These high levels of cohabitation have given researchers a solid base of data to compare cohabitation with marriage.  The results of their studies should give Kelly and Dane reason to pause before signing the lease on their apartment.

Dr. Bill Maier sums up the findings.  “Research indicates that couples who cohabit before marriage have a 50 percent higher divorce rate than those who don’t. These couples also have higher rates of domestic violence and are more likely to be involved in sexual affairs. If a cohabiting couple gets pregnant, there is a high probability that the man will leave the relationship within two years, resulting in a single mom raising a fatherless child.”

There are many factors to explain this.  But the most important has to do with the big “C.”  Commitment.

Commitment is more than a feeling.  It is an intentional decision.  It is choosing to love…in good times and bad.  The commitment of marriage is a willingness to step into the future, to face unknown challenges, to give unconditional love, to set one’s personal goals into a joint plan alongside the needs and goals of another person.  If it sounds like a big deal, it is.

Cohabitation, on the other hand, is based almost entirely on feelings.  It is a hope and a dream…with a preplanned exit strategy.  It’s a little deal because the promise exchanged is a little promise.  “I will stay with you until we’re not in love…until it gets hard…until I don’t want to stay with you.”

When couples plan to marry, they must face the big “C”.  They must have a clear understanding of what they are willing and able to give each other….today… tomorrow…for as long as they both shall live.

Cohabitation short circuits the process, fulfilling sexual desires and intermingling finances, allowing the couple to avoid the kind of soul-searching and mutual honesty needed to lay the solid foundation for a marriage.

As quaint as it sounds, traditional old-fashioned dating and courtship was a safe time for couples.  It reserved sex for the future and allowed them to focus on learning about each other.  It was an intentional time of planning for marriage, where the couple sought out advice from friends and counselors.  And if marriage did not result, heartbreak was not compounded with the burden of breaking up a household.

While the initial plan for Kelly and Dane is to “try it out,” it will be a very short time before one of them will begin to long for the safety and security of a permanent commitment.  The big “C”…it always makes its appearance.  And when it does, Kelly and Dane will have a lot at stake.  The surprising experience most couples face in cohabitation is that the pain of “breaking up” can be every bit as intense as divorce.

Please, Dane and Kelly.  Think it over.  Kicking the tires…good strategy for cars.  Bad idea for people.

April 23, 2004:    m…m…m…Married?

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