Category Archives: Parenting

A Failure to Love – Part 2

March 20, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

For over forty years, the murder of Catherine Genovese under the windows of her Queens, New York, neighbors has stood as a defining example of the tragedy of human indifference.  Her attacker had over twenty minutes to assault and stab “Kitty.”  When police were finally summoned, they determined that over 38 people had heard the attack, ignoring her cries and pleas for help…and had done nothing.

Indifference, the failure to be moved by the needs of a fellow human being, in this case, had immediate and devastating consequences.  We are able to see the result of indifference in the haunting photo of Kitty and point our fingers at 38 people.

But today in America, we are facing a crisis of indifference that is just as tragic.  Entrusted as guardians of the welfare of our children, we have let a culture of indifference develop, turning a corporate blind eye to assaults on our children on a daily basis.

Consider this brief sampling of events over the past decade:

  • In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled against the Communications Decency Act, removing the legal tool needed to prosecute those knowingly sending sexually explicit materials to minors.
  • A Kaiser Family Foundation report states that 70% of teenagers (ages 15-17) “have accidentally come across pornography on the Web.” Adolescent males make up one of the largest consumer groups of pornography, and their access on the Internet is largely unrestricted.
  • In a college sex survey this year, 87% of university students polled have virtual sex mainly using Instant Messenger, webcam, and telephone.
  • The average age of first exposure to Internet porn is 11.
  • Approximately 20% of all Internet pornography involves children.  According to a National Children’s Homes report, the number of Internet child pornography images has increased 1500% since 1988.

These events signal a change in our culture that cries out for our attention.  In the name of love for our children, we cannot be indifferent.

Replicated studies on pornography are virtually unanimous in their conclusions: When male subjects were exposed to as little as six weeks’ worth of standard hard-core pornography, they:

  • developed an increased sexual callousness toward women;
  • began to trivialize rape as a criminal offense or no longer considered it a crime at all;
  • developed distorted perceptions about sexuality;
  • developed an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent types of pornography (normal sex no longer seemed to do the job);
  • devalued the importance of monogamy and lacked confidence in marriage as either a viable or lasting institution; and
  • viewed nonmonogamous relationships as normal and natural behavior.

Thankfully, the FCC has begin to tackle the problem of nudity and sex on television.  Weeding through roughly 300,000 complaints, it recently proposed almost $4 million worth of fines for television programming deemed indecent by the commission.  Of this total, $3.6 million in proposed fines were for the Dec. 31, 2004, episode of CBS’s “Without a Trace” which depicted teen girls and boys participating in an orgy.

Parents must do their part, too.  A Kaiser Family Foundation report released in March, 2005, reported that “about half (53%) of all 8- to 18-year-olds say their families have no rules about TV watching.  Forty-six percent (46%) say their families do have some rules, including 20% who say the rules are enforced most of the time, while the rest say the rules are enforced either some of the time, a little of the time, or never.”

Indifference is killing our children.  The graphic sexual imagery assaulting our children at every turn is not harmless. It is poisoning their view of normal human relationships, teaching them that sex is a commodity even in the most casual of encounters.

Love for our children demands more than words and hugs.  If we want our children to grow and mature with healthy attitudes about love, sex and marriage, we must fight the tendency to ignore what is right in front of our eyes.  We must get involved.

If we love our children, we cannot be indifferent.

 _____________

For more information visit:  www.protectkids.com

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The Science of Wisdom

February 27, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

It’s a strange memory, but a vivid memory.  Christmas afternoon 1964, my sister, 11, and I, 13, sat in the family room watching news.  Not because we wanted to watch the news.  But it was the only show my father would let us watch on our new Christmas color television set.  It was the only show in color.

Color television had been available since 1953.  The first commercial television program on color film was an episode of Dragnet, followed by such milestones as a live telecast of the Tournament of Roses parade the following month.  As with all firsts, history tracks the first color broadcast of a president (Dwight Eisenhower in June, 1955), the first color coverage of the World Series (Dodgers vs. Yankees in September, 1955), and the first colorcast cartoons (the Flintstones and the Jetsons in fall, 1962).

Yet, my family along with most other American families continued to watch television in black and white.  The first RCA color sets cost $995, the equivalent of over $6,500 today. In 1954, it was enough to buy a car, and nearly enough to buy a modest house.

By the mid-1950s, every company with the exception of RCA stopped manufacturing color televisions, and few produced color programming. Yet, losing some $65 million over a decade, RCA persisted in developing and marketing the technology.

 

The premier of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in September, 1961, was a turning point.  It was a magical experience to see the peacock’s tail unfold in red, orange, green and yellow.

 

Finally, in 1964, the tide turned, and RCA began to profit handsomely from its investment in color television.  It had taken 25 years for color television to go from its earliest prototypes to mass acceptance. According to Alex Magoun, director of the Sarnoff library holding RCA history, this is about the time every new technology takes to really catch on.

Today, a teenager is probably unable to conceive of a world where we would not be  able to watch live color coverage of downhill skiing at the Turin Olympic Games from 20 different camera angles.  In a child’s mind, television has always been here.  Like snowflakes, pine trees, and sledding, color television is and was and always has been.

In the short span of one human life, it is hard to maintain the long view.  Technology is easy to follow, with every detail recorded many times over in tech manuals and corporate profit and loss statements.

But televisions, computers, and air travel are not the only “new fangled” inventions of modern man.  Even our ways of thinking are marked by radical shifts that we have lost track of.

One mental shift has made an impact every bit as dramatic on modern life as color television.  It is hard to conceive of a university without a department of sociology, but in fact, no sociologists even existed to set sail and land on Plymouth Rock with the Pilgrims in 1620.

Sociology is actually a relatively new academic discipline which evolved in the early 19th century. It usually concerns itself with the social rules and processes that bind and separate people not only as individuals, but as members of associations, groups, and institutions.

Motivated by an interest in our behavior as social beings, sociologists began to quantify any number of human actions, allowing these academicians to perform their intricate analysis of short contacts between anonymous individuals on the street and to expand their theories to the broad study of global social processes.

A related trend in sociology, emerging since the late 1970s, attempted to make it a more “applied” discipline, applicable in areas such as non-profit organizations and nursing homes.  The results of sociological research have been used by educators, lawmakers, administrators, and others interested in resolving social problems and formulating public policy, through areas such as survey research, evaluation research, methodological assessment, and public sociology.

In other words, if we want to know what’s wrong…and if we want to know how to fix what’s wrong…ask a sociologist.

So, what was the world like before sociologists began to engineer and quantify human behavior?  How did humans seek solutions to human problems?  How did we organize life?

This is not idle speculation.  As a nation, we have nearly stopped thinking and acting unless we can open our briefcase and pull out a 3-inch file of social statistics and research to support our views.  Consider the following.

Solomon’s wisdom is often cited in a famous incident in which two women came before him with a baby, each claiming to the the mother.  Solomon ordered the child be cut in half, and by observing each woman’s reaction, determined the true mother.  Today, we have case workers, MSWs for sure, who interview the entire family and neighborhood, cite studies on mother love and bonding, and make their final report in triplicate.

Or in September, 2004, behavioral research on 1,792 adolescents proved that teenagers who watch a lot of television with sexual content are twice as likely to engage in intercourse than those who watch few such programs.  Katie Couric’s reaction was a brief, “Duh?”

King Solomon was a bit more expressive.  Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.  Put away perversity from your mouth; keep corrupt talk far from your lips.  Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you. (Prov 4:23-25 NIV)

For all of our numbers and studies and statistics and analysis, have we really advanced beyond the centuries-old wisdom that informed men’s hearts and guided their steps?  And is it just possible that social scientists have found ways to add and subtract research that would justify why a lemming should follow his brother over the cliff?

Sociology has not always existed.  Thankfully, great minds and human wisdom are not modern inventions.  They are, they were, they always have been.  Even before sociology.

October 29, 2004 – Food for the Brain

September 10, 2004 – Duh

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Teaching the Value of Love

February 20, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

“We don’t teach values.”  Sex educators fond of promoting condoms and birth control to teenagers are also fond of making this claim.  “We are values-neutral!”

It’s never been really clear to me just why they take such pride in these claims.  It seems to be a sideways admission that one has lived on the face of the earth for nearly forty years and has been unable to come to any conclusions about what really matters.

This prideful admission that no values are important enough to single out for passing on to our children was birthed in the 60s.  Bored with tradition, and encouraged by our relationship with science and the brave new world of space flights and men on the moon, America launched into an artistic love affair with hopelessness.

I distinctly remember crashing into this dark fantasy in 1969 as a freshman at Arizona State University.  A group of us freshmen on the sixth floor of Manzanita dorm packed into a car one Friday night and headed for the drive-in to see Midnight Cowboy.

From beginning to end, watching the movie, I couldn’t understand why this film had won the heart of America.  While viewers found it elevating to see the naive male prostitute Joe Buck and his sickly friend Ratso struggle to survive on the streets of New York City, they had to overlook the fact that Joe Buck and Ratso were lying, thieving thugs.

Their story could have been more cheaply and honestly told by standing a camera in the middle of the worst, dark New York crime infested streets and filming the muggings, beatings and killings that hurt people and landed perpetrators in jail.

In one case, real-life criminals were given cells and prisoner numbers.  Their attitudes and behaviors were considered hostile to civilized society, and they were expected to reform.

In the other case, celluloid criminals wore fancy duds paid for by wardrobe, showed up in Hollywood limos for a red-carpet walk down the aisle between the rich and famous, and walked away with an Oscar.

Our love affair with the crass and dark and hopeless and brutal and profane is also a love affair with failure.  We are failing to stake a claim on what our responsibility is for raising the next generation of Americans…our children.

The latest episode of focusing on failure is taking place at Orono High School in Maine.  Out of the hundreds of thousands of books available for educating freshman, the English department settled on “Girl, Interrupted.”  The school is defending their choice as “real.”  These memoirs of author Suzanna Kaysen’s hospitalization in a mental institution at age 18 contain graphic descriptions of sexual acts and suicide.

Is this the best picture of the “real” we can offer our children in a literature class?

Then, after freshman English, do we send our children to sex education for a lesson on how to put on a “real” condom because we tell them “real” children in the “real world” are going to have sex anyway.

And, finally, when parents come to school to demand answers and a change in the message of what “real” is and should be, do we tell them they are pushing their values on a school system where values should never exist?

Values?  Is there anything we do or say or think in our entire life that doesn’t involve making a value choice?  Values-neutral?  Who are they kidding?

If love makes the world go round, when are we going to elect this value as worth consideration in our movies, our songs, our English classes…and, most importantly…our sex education classes?

If you live in Orono, Maine, or in any other city where you care about the values we are teaching our young people, there is a great book to recommend to your high school English teachers.  The Art of Loving Well is a new and novel idea for many educators.  It is a book that knows the values that matter and takes the time to make them matter to young people.

This 340-page anthology of ethnically diverse selections, includes short stories, poems, essays, drama folk tales and myths that elevate the values that matter most for the happiness and future of our young people.

Values-neutral?  Impossible!  The Art of Loving Well lays claim to its responsibility for passing on worthwhile values to our children, helping adolescents learn responsible sexual and social values through good literature which reveals the complexity of life and love relationships.

English teachers…teachers of all kinds…are always teaching values.  “Reality” is a poor excuse for defending the kinds of books and movies we offer our children.  We offer it because it is real?

Love is real.  And if we want our children to be successful in love, then it’s about time we started teaching the values that matter most…the art of loving well.

October 10, 2005 – Wonder Love

February 21, 2005 – Sex Without Value

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The Gift of Kindness

February 13, 2006

Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.                                                                       —Mother Teresa

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

A string of pink and red balloons waves high in the air, visible from the road a mile away.  They fly, tied to the top of a 15 x 15 ft. open air tent, calling attention to the temporary marketplace in the parking lot, just outside the grocery’s main entrance.

It’s Valentine’s Day.  Churches were decorated for Sweetheart Dinners last Sunday.  Today, flowers and balloon bouquets were loaded early in the morning onto delivery trucks.  Kids all around the country drop valentines into decorated shoeboxes for their classmates.  And, on their way home, last minute shoppers can pull up to the white tent and grab a potted red geranium, a box of chocolates, and a bottle of champagne.

Nothing is too good for a sweetheart.  In the age of the Internet, there are endless ideas for that perfect gift to communicate your amore.  At Amore’ on the Net you can find it all in one spot.  Two chubby cherubs drop little hearts down the page, dragging visitors below to a pulsing heart and a list of perfect Valentine’s Day ideas.

Even Chef Emeril Lagase isn’t afraid to “kick it up a notch” with his “special treats for your loved ones.”  Who wouldn’t feel loved being served banana chocolate bread pudding with mint créme anglaise?

I’m a great fan of food, and I must admit, banana chocolate bread pudding with mint créme anglaise prepared a la Chef Emeril wins the day over such extravaganzas like the giant human-sized stuffed red teddy bear I saw a man carry to his car.

Valentine’s Day is a great reminder of just how important it is to tell people we love just how important they are to us.  And, in a year where we have dedicated ourselves at FROM THE HOME FRONT to a consideration of love, it seems appropriate to ask…

Why can’t every day be Valentine’s Day?

Imagine buying the perfect Valentine’s Day gift, worth a million dollars, but costing you only a moment of thoughtfulness.  A renewable gift.  No shopping required.  Handy at every moment, just when you need it, in unlimited quantities…every day of the year.

Give the gift of kindness.

Love is patient, Love is kind.1 

Love is a choice…a choice to be patient and kind.  Who can’t afford such a luxury in a modern world where we are supposed to have everything?

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.2

How nice it is to be greeted in the morning with a kiss and a Good Morning, I Love You.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love. 2

Smile.  How wonderful to be greeted by the smiles, even of perfect strangers, during the day when the daily battle has worn us down!

Look in their eyes.

Pause…stop…listen.  Listen.

Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn’t hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.3

Without holding your response in your mouth, waiting for your turn to speak…listen.

Love is kind.

I would give up receiving a dozen, dozen red roses, just to have one person spend a week devoted to kindness in my honor.  You?  How hard it is to listen with an empty mouth!  Yet, motivated by love, I think I just might be able to manage.

We must give what we hope to receive.  Let it begin with us.

Love is kind.

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.   (Mother Teresa)

 

11Cor 13:4 [NIV]

2 Mother Teresa

2 Mother Teresa

3 Hugh Elliott

November 12, 2004 – Old As the Hills

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Love Sick

February 6, 2006

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.                                                                                                                         Mother Teresa

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Born on May 6, 1856, in Moravia, Sigmund Freud was destined to radically alter the understanding of the human heart.  Freud graduated as a doctor in 1881, and his initial professional work involved research on the uses of cocaine.  But over the next fifty years, following his fascination with dream analysis, Freud developed the new field of psychoanalysis and, abandoning his Jewish heritage, embraced atheism.

Since Freud, many new theories of human personality have been constructed.  And the U.S. Department of Labor reports that psychiatry and psychology are the “fastest growing occupations projected to have the largest numerical increases in employment between 2004 and 2014.”

Psychologists study the human mind and human behavior.   So it is more than idle curiosity to wonder what they study of love.  Very little, according to “Love Doctor” Leo Buscaglia.  In 1969, Buscaglia endured professional ridicule in order to begin an experimental class devoted to the study of love at a California university.

His students’ first major lesson about love was unexpected.  “Love has really been ignored by the scientists.  It’s amazing,” wrote Bascaglia.  “My students and I did a study.  We went through books in psychology.  We went through books in sociology.  We went through books in anthropology, and we were hardpressed to find even a reference to the word love.”

So it is today.  Standing in the bookstore of our local state university, reading through psychology textbooks, love is still absent from any professional consideration.

Holding Learning and Behavior, skimming chapter one on the psychology of learning and behavior, I note that students will study the spectrum of influences on human behavior:  external events, classical Pavlovian conditioning, habituation, operant conditioning schedules, punishment, stimulus control, imitation, modeling, choice and self control.  But nary one word about love.  Neither is love listed in the index.

The textbook Science and Human Behavior by B.F. Skinner is only slightly better.  Love appears in the index twice.   On page 162, love is likened to fear and anger…a person “is generally talking about predispositions to act in certain ways….the man ‘in love’ shows an increased tendency to aid, favor, be with, and caress and a lowered tendency to injure.”  On page 310, Skinner teaches that “…love might be analyzed as the mutual tendency of two individuals to reinforce each other, where the reinforcement may or may not be sexual.”

That’s it.  That’s the full consideration of the one emotion forceful enough to make the world go round.

In The Nature of Prejudice, the author actually writes a complete sentence about love.  “Why is it,” he asks, “that we hear so little about love – prejudice – the tendency to overgeneralize our categories of attachment and affection?”  This notion of “love-prejudice” pops up just one more time in his textbook that has six pages referenced in the index for sex and a whole section devoted to sexuality.

Sensing a pattern, I reached for the fourth and final psychology textbook, Psychology of Behavior.  Its eighteen chapters thoroughly cover human behavior: human consciousness, evolution, nervous cells and structure, psychopharmacology, methods of research, ethical issues, vision, audition, chemical senses, control and movement, sleep, reproductive behavior, emotion, memory, ingestive behavior, relational learning, schizophrenia, affective disorder, anxiety disorder, autistic disorder, hyperactivity disorder, stress disorder and drug abuse.

Love?  Not there.  But, checking the book’s index, if you want to know about sex, there is no end in sight: hormones, chromosomes, activational effects, gender development, sexual maturation, arousal, prefrontal cortex, hormonal control, human sex, sex of lab animals, neural control, sexual dimorphism, prenatal androgens, sexually dimorphic nucleus (SDN), orientation, heredity…my fingers wore out just listing all the ways we have to study sex.

Love may make the world go round.  But when the world is sick from lack of love, it is the last thing our love doctors think to check.

If the academics miss the obvious, a humble woman with no desire to reach the pinnacle of professional greatness sees it all.  “Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody,” said Mother Teresa, “I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”

In the midst of plenty, we are a love sick world.

What does it say about the likelihood that we can recover from love sickness, if our most elite educators study more about our sexually dimorphic nucleus than about our ability to love one another?

What does it say about our future, if those who study to fill the exploding market of jobs for psychiatrists and psychology can memorize the psychopharmacology of modern drugs, but have only read two pages in their college text about love as a prejudice?

And what does it say about our children and their love future when we have saturated their world with so much of sexual orientations and so little of love?

“Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody…”  We are love sick.  And we need a cure.

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

It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.                                                     Mother Teresa

 

December 10, 2004 – The Best Part of Snuggling

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