Category Archives: Parenting

Worst-Case Scenario

August 21, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

This is the time of year when students head off to school.  From kindergarten through college, anxious parents wave goodbye to their children as they relinquish the ever watchful parent control and trust the fate of their children to outside forces.

The newspaper reporter called me.  She was writing a story to help parents of college students…to give them help and reassurance.  How could parents guide young men and women in dealing with the sexual pressures of the college campus?

We spoke about the precautions, the sex talks, the fears, and the boundaries.  We considered the coed dorms, the student health centers, the drinking, the parties.  And we strategized.  Parents had tools to open dialogue with their students, even if these college freshmen were breaking loose from the day-to-day oversight that had guided their first 18 years of life.

Hopes were balanced with fears.  Precautions were checked with risks.  Good and bad possibilities were in a battle for influence over their students.  The obvious question had to be asked.

“Yes, parents can do a lot,” the reporter said.  “But what happens, in the worst-case scenario?”

The worst case scenario.  Her words spoke volumes to me.  After ten years of working in the field of preventing adolescent sex, I was fully aware of the worst case scenario.  Like the mythical head of Medusa, it was a simple phrase that erupts into many tentacles of bad consequences.

Worst case scenario?  Was the reporter thinking of the student who calls mom and dad to tell them they tested positive for AIDS?

Perhaps the reporter was thinking of the one in five adults who are now infected with genital herpes.  Even with a lifelong prescription for Famvir, this infection will control the lives of millions of people with regular outbreaks that can only be treated, not cured.

Maybe the reporter, as I have, has spoken with ob-gyns who have treated women as young as eighteen for cervical cancer.  A new vaccine Gardasil has been introduced to the market that prevents HPV infections, a sexually transmitted disease (STD) responsible for over 97 percent of cervical cancer.  What do parents tell their  daughters?

Or maybe the reporter had personal experience with someone close to them who had undergone an abortion in college.  My own friend was overcome with regret and depression, amplified by the boyfriend who “loved” her during sex and promptly abandoned her after the abortion he wanted.

These stories are just the tip of the iceberg.  So many stories of worst case scenarios, personalized to the individual who has to live out the scenario.  I am friends with a pregnancy counselor who prevented a post-abortion suicide.  I attended the trial of an abortion doctor who walked away from a woman patient and let her bleed to death.

Speaking with the reporter, an unexpected pause let a flood of worst case scenarios fill my mind.  I told the reporter, “I’m trying to figure out what would actually be the worst-case scenario.”

She joined me in brief silence.  “Gee, I guess there are a number of possibilities, aren’t there?”

Of course, I knew from experience that the worst case she most likely had been referring to was a phone call from college, “Mom, I’m pregnant.”  But considering this question and the many people I know who have dealt with this scenario, I could see only life and hope.

“I am old enough,” I told her, “to remember the college housing for married students and families.  Children and marriage at one time were not hostile barriers to future happiness.  Maybe discipline and patience were required.   But life was big enough for it all.”

One dear friend gave birth to her unplanned baby and chose adoption to bless the lives of a mother and father who could only wait for her generous gift.  Today, she is much more at peace with her “scenario” than those I have spoken to who regret their hasty abortion decisions made under pressure and isolation.

When did babies become the enemy?  When did they define the “worst-case scenario” for American culture?

As our children leave home, and as we continue to parent them from afar, perhaps the best gift we can give them is an understanding of the wonderful joys that come from sex that produces life.

Four years in college is a slice of their life, a time when they set the stage for their future…not just careers…but lives as mothers, fathers, parents.  The best-case scenario is a dream they can catch, if we take the time to build it.

Our fears and our hopes both have the ability to capture our mind.  Which will it be for our children?  The best-case scenario…or the worst?

 

July 11, 2005 – Medically Accurate Cowards

April 2, 2004 –  Sex Education: Spinning the Truth

 See Archives for past editorials.

Hey, Everybody, Let’s Give Up!

August 7, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Fifteen people sat around the conference table. Fourteen were educators teaching junior and senior high students about sexual abstinence until marriage. One person, Mr. Boss Man, at the head of the table, was a state leader in charge of setting the educational focus for programs in the public schools.

Fourteen voices told about the high school students who wanted educators to return to their classrooms next year. These students, even the juniors and seniors, want to hear the truth about sex. They want to receive encouragement to be abstinent as a way of fulfilling their personal goals and securing their good health.

At the conference table, from the front of the room, Mr. Boss Man with his one voice answered fourteen. “Isn’t that too late? Aren’t they already having sex?”

He might as well have said, “Hey, everybody, let’s give up!”

Maybe Mr. Boss Man hadn’t heard that over 50 percent of high school students persevere under considerable pressure from a society that pushes sex at every turn. These students haven’t given up. They are sexually abstinent.

Mr. Boss Man’s name isn’t important. He is not alone. He is only one of many community and national leaders who are heading the parade to give in to failure.

Yes, they concede. Sexual abstinence until marriage would indeed prevent untold negative personal and social consequences of adolescent sex. But before they can take one deep breath, they raise their flags of failure and begin chanting.

On the left, they cry, “Teens can’t be abstinent. They can’t, they can’t. Rah, rah, shish boom bant!”

On the right, they answer back. “Teens don’t need to be abstinent. Sex is natural. Rah, rah, bish boom pow!”

Imagine. What if this mentality had ruled the coaching staff for the San Francisco 49ers? From 1979 to 1992, they were led by one of the top quarterbacks of all time. Joe Montana earned the nicknames “Joe Cool” and “Comeback Kid” due to his ability to rally his teams from late game deficits, including 31 fourth quarter comebacks.

Montana made his career proving that losing is not inevitable … no matter how many minutes … or seconds … are left in the game. His comeback from a 28-point halftime deficit to a 38-35 overtime victory against the New Orleans Saints still stands (as of 2006) as the most points ever overcome to win a regular season NFL game. It was the first of Montana’s 26 fourth-quarter comebacks with the 49ers.

Imagine. Montana could have had a coach tell him, “Relax. You’re losing. Don’t worry. Save your energy. We’ll try again next week.” But he didn’t. Winning was the point of playing the game. And he played until the last second on the clock.

Imagine, instead, the coaches of the losers, the teams that played against Montana, the Saints, Bengals, Lions, and Dolphins … maybe they should have saved all the blood, sweat, and tears of coming in second. If they had known the 49ers would come back and win, maybe they would have given up earlier in the game and saved a lot of strained muscles and broken bones.

Imagine if Mr. Boss Man coached football with the same confidence he coaches teenagers. “Chance are you’re gonna lose. Give up now.”

Give up does not make winning teams in football. And it does not build winning lives for people either. In the famous Oak School experiment, Harvard professor Robert Rosenthal’s research into the “Pygmalion phenomenon” showed the impact on students of a teacher’s expectations.

“Simply put,” as reported in The National Teaching and Learning Forum, “when teachers expect students to do well and show intellectual growth, they do; when teachers do not have such expectations, performance and growth are not so encouraged and may in fact be discouraged in a variety of ways.”

Regarding our youth and sex, success is closer at hand than what many would have us believe. Parents want their children to understand the benefits … the physical, emotional, social, educational, and economic benefits … of saving sex for marriage.

Students increasingly want to be encouraged to succeed in their relational and educational goals by adults who help them maintain their commitment to sexual abstinence.

For those adolescents aged 12-19 who have had sex, 63 percent of them wished they had waited. They are prime candidates for hearing that they can return to a sexually abstinent lifestyle. Change is possible.

And for all of these parents and students, there are many dedicated educators who are able to undergird these personal desires and goals with medically accurate information and lessons that build student confidence and give students the skills to maintain their personal commitment to abstinence until marriage.

The parade is ready. They are ready to march. The only thing holding them back from success is Mr. Boss Man and his fellow leaders at the front.

“Sure, we can start marching toward success,” the leaders tell the group. “But why bother? You’re never going to make it.”

 

September 5, 2005 – Succeeding at Failure

 See Archives for past editorials.

Remembering Dad

June 12, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

My father has been gone for over ten years.  It seems like yesterday…I miss him still.

He was a father from the “old school,” an outdoorsman who took me out one freezing morning on a duck hunting trip.  At twelve years of age, I felt honored that he trusted me enough to know I would be quiet and still along the river bank.

As Father’s Day nears, memories build of little things with big consequences.  Daddy loved order and strategy.  An electrical engineer, he had a system for ordering 1000 pieces by their bumps and slots, an assembly-line method for putting puzzles together.  Today, my color coded filing system owes everything to Dad.

Perfectionists to a fault, both of us, we had our fair share of rows.  Particularly vivid is one battle where we locked in an argument over how to slice Mother’s homemade bread without leaving any breadcrumbs on the wooden board.  The battle turned into a war, complete with slamming doors and morning apologies.  Funny, today…fiercely serious, back then.

Poor Daddy.  He often joked about being the only man in the house surrounded by women.  When my mother took a college class on semantics and discovered an additional set of connotations and denotations for every word in the English language, she tripled the words at her disposal for overwhelming him in conversation.  It was the ultimate Mars/Venus communication gap before John Gray was around to explain it.

Remembering Dad, I wish every kid had a father close at hand to create good memories.

Today, statisticians are explaining why we need fathers.  The value of dads is computed in statistics of crime, risky adolescent behaviors, and economic well-being.  Researchers are trying to appeal to our logic, arguing that families benefit from fathers…dads.

Why?  What do numbers have to do with explaining the longing of the human spirit?  The value of my dad is more personal than that, impossible to quantify as a statistic.

  • Today psychologists and educators create classroom lessons teaching children how to be nice to each other.  They are working to teach the very things my father taught me in the everyday details of living together as family for over twenty years.
  • Therapists help women develop self-confidence in their abilities to problem-solve and be self-reliant.  I learned this from a father who let me watch and help him fix my sewing machine.
  • Spiritual leaders preach forgiveness.  I learned this from a father who knocked quietly on my bedroom door and entered to tell me he was sorry.  He wanted to show me his technique for slicing bread without crumbs…but it wasn’t worth fighting.  And we forgave each other.
  • Special funding for special programs is directed to the promotion of careers in science for women.  My father showed me how to shape a wooden peg on the lathe, he taught me his system for tracking the prices of stocks and bonds, and he let me show him what I learned in an auto mechanics class…how to change the rotor and adjust the timing on my VW bug.
  • Self-help gurus write books and appear on Dr. Phil, preaching the techniques for building healthy marriages.  I saw this in the daily highs and lows of married life between my parents where words spoken in anger were covered over with apologies, forgiveness, and tenderness.

If I have had any success in being a parent, I can look to my dad and the sacrifices he made to be a husband and father.  When family life is tough, I hang in there because my Dad gave me a vision of tenacity and hope.  When I look for strength inside, I find it because my father put it there through his affirmation of me as his daughter…worthy, capable, and loved.

Dad’s encouragement…his example…his love can never be replicated by social programs and tax dollars.  No number of psychologists, teachers, or federally funded initiatives would ever have filled the shoes of the man who loved my mother and spent a lifetime building a picture of that love in the daily details of life.

I need no research to prove the value of fathers for raising daughters and sons.  The proof is written on my heart. It is honored in passing on the gift of marriage to our own children.

He’s been gone all these many years.  But he’s never left me.  My Dad.

Happy Father’s Day!

 

June 13, 2005 – A Recipe for Families

June 18, 2004  – Me Jane, You Tarzan

October 22, 2004  – Bringing Poppa Home

 See Archives for past editorials.

Why Condoms Will Not Save us

May 29, 2006

The Washington Times reported last week on a consensus report on sexual health just issued by “wildly divergent political organizations.”  Yet, in spite of this much-heralded consensus, no agreement was reached on “what constitutes sexual abstinence, responsible sexual behavior, sexual orientation and ‘medical accuracy,’ such as condom efficacy.”

So just what does consensus mean?  In truth, it seems we are left with the same splits, divides and disagreements.  Consider condoms.  Long heralded as the KEY to solving problems associated with teen sex, you would think a national agreement on at least that one issue would exist by now.

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Why Condoms Will Not Save Us

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Teen parents Dan and Christy[1] are just two people. I love them.  They are personal, they live in my world. But their two lives speak of the millions of children and parents in our country today.

Dan’s parents love him.  That has never been in doubt.  It’s just that they couldn’t remain in love with each other.  As Dan was maturing, he watched his parents argue, separate, reunite and then begin the cycle again–over and over again. Until one day, his mother sent divorce papers to his father.  And it ended.

Dan’s mother was determined to make a good life for herself and her two children.  She enrolled in a university, gained government assistance, and worked any part time job she could find.  She supported him in his school work, rented movies to watch late at night with Dan and his older sister, and went to all of his basketball games.

Yet, the strain of the family breakup was too much.  Dan missed his father, and his sister became ensnared in a cycle of drugs, truancy, and running away.  His mother, working hard to deal with each emergency as it happened, was glad Dan seemed to be motivated at school and surrounded by good friends.  She just didn’t have time to do everything.

Without a father at home, and with a mother and sister caught in a battle of teenage rebellion, Dan took solace in his friendships.  And he sought affection in the arms of his high school sweetheart.  Dan and Christy only had sex once.  But that was enough to create a new life, Allyson.

Today, Allyson is being raised most of the time by her great-grandmother, Christy’s grandmother.  Christy takes care of Allyson when she is at home.  She and Dan broke up right after she knew she was pregnant, and Christy has had a steady string of boyfriends since then moving in and moving out of her life.  And she is pregnant again.

After a paternity test proved Dan to be Allyson’s father, the court assigned him a support payment of $100 per month.  He felt a sense of duty to meet this payment and began a pizza delivery job, but with his basketball practices and the demands on him as senior class treasurer, Dan finally quit work, and his mom took over the monthly payments.

Dan has just entered college on a basketball scholarship, and he tries to drive home on weekends to spend time with Allyson.  He and Christy end up in court periodically to argue over custody arrangements that involve both sets of Allyson’s grandparents and her great-grandmother.  Dan’s parents, both mother and father, along with a sister who has finally settled down, and aunts and uncles who love him, support him in his role as Allyson’s father.  But it’s not easy.  Dan’s grades last semester were low enough to threaten his scholarship.

And what about Allyson?  She just celebrated her first birthday as a bright-eyed toddler.

In only twelve more years, Allyson will herself be a teenager.  Meanwhile, who will be the adults in her life to guide her and love her?  Will she grow up to seek love in the arms of a high school sweetheart?  Will she ever know what it means to have two parents at home, a mother and a father who love and hug each other at night in the kitchen?

When she enters high school, will a teen pregnancy and a baby create a problem for Allyson?  Or might they solve a problem for her?  Might a teen pregnancy give Allyson’s life a focus, a meaning–a glimpse of the love and affection that seemed just out of reach in the few short years she had for learning what love and parenting are all about?

Yes, what about Allyson?

[1] Names have been changed to protect the privacy of these individuals.

    

April 30, 2004 –Condoms: A Failure to Protect

January 3, 2005 – Teen Sex: What’s the Problem?

 See Archives for past editorials.

How’s It Working for You?

April 3, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

America, how’s it working for you?

Who wants to know?  Dr. Phil.  That’s who.

Over twenty shows a month, twelve months a year, three and a half years…you can purchase transcripts of over 840 Dr. Phil shows where America gets psychoanalyzed, diagnosed, challenged, prodded, pushed, and changed.

Nasty Custody Battles

“I’m a Slave to My Spouse”

Infidelity Aftermath

Family Chaos

Love, Lies and the Law

Cheaters…and more…

MUCH more!  Each night on public television Americans reveal troubled relationships, enduring exposure of laundry lists of personal secrets, faults, and blemishes.  Why?

Because, after the show wraps up, and everyone goes home, we all cherish the hope that we will find what the human heart hungers for.  Enduring, honoring, forgiving love.

There is a tragic irony in all of this.  We have just traveled through a forty-year time warp of promises sold to us by feminists, humanists, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, and sexologists…all of these “professionals” cultivated and nurtured by the “higher learning” institutions of our country.  If we just listen to them, liberate ourselves from the bondage of biological and cultural traps, and enter into a new age of self-fulfillment…we will be…well…fulfilled.

Then why are so many of us showing up on Dr. Phil?  America, how’s it working for you?

All this social re-engineering?  Replacing husbands and wives, fathers married to mothers, replacing all of these with cohabitors?  Sexualizing every human transaction?  Fulfilling every fantasy, dragging each bizarre behavior onto a new “reality show”?  Are we having fun yet?

Watching Dr. Phil for even one week, it is clear that the cultural reconstructionists of the past four decades have more work ahead of them.  Because in spite of their best efforts to convince us that we can restructure life to exclude marriage and embrace diversity of every imaginable…and unimaginable…combination…Americans are having a hard time of it.  How’s it working for us?

Single parent homes are on the financial edge.  Children go to bed at night without a hug from their father.  And sex offered to the latest “object of my affection” results in babies, abortions, and STDs that cause Mr. Right to vanish in a puff of smoke faster than magician Lance Burton can snap his fingers.

We don’t need to have “higher education” gurus to research us.  We don’t need reassurances that re-engineering the culture will work if we just give it more time.  We don’t need feminists to fix men, sociologists to fix families, or humanists to convince us we are happy in spite of what ails us.

How’s it working for us, America?  We are searching for love.  And we are ending up on Dr. Phil’s psycho-drama.

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 November 7, 2005 – Public Policy Never Mended a Broken Heart

 See Archives for more past editorials.