Category Archives: Fatherhood

To Know Love When We See Love – Part 1

January 9, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

In the winter of 1969, a California professor began an experimental class.  “I did not want it to become an encounter group.  I was an educator, not a psychotherapist.  I wanted this class to be a unique experience in learning.  I wanted it to have a definite, yet loose, framework and be of broad interest and import to the student.  I wanted it to be related to his immediate experience.  Students with whom I was relating were, more than ever, concerned with life, living, sex, growth, responsibility, death, hope, the future.  It was obvious that the only subject which encompassed, and was at the core of all these concerns and more, was love.”

Few will dispute Leo Buscaglia’s claim that love is at the core of human concerns.  Yet, his Love Class “raised a few eyebrows.”  In the Faculty Center, one professor “called love—and anyone who purported to teach it—‘irrelevant!’”  He wasn’t alone.  “Others asked mockingly and with a wild leer, if the class had a lab requirement….”

Love Class met on Tuesday evenings.  Enrollment grew quickly within a year to 100 students of all ages, experiences and sophistication.  Buscaglia taught it without salary and on top of his regular teaching load.  Students earned no credit.

Their first major lesson about love was learning how little love matters to people who study the things that matter.  “Love has really been ignored by the scientists.  It’s amazing.  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.”

Drawing from three years of teaching Love Class, Buscaglia began writing and speaking about love.  He lectured often.  When asked for the title of his presentation, he was characteristically direct.  “Love.”

“Well, you know,” event planners said, “this is a professional meeting, and it may not be understood.  What will the press say?”  Tactfully and professionally, Buscaglia resolved their problem.  How about Affect as a Behavior Modifier?  Perfect.  Acceptable.  Scientific.  Everyone was happy.

Love…learning love…Buscaglia never felt comfortable reducing consideration of love to a simple definition.  Doing the next best thing, he wrote his 1972 book, LOVE.  But in the practical sense, if we are to look for and talk about love, we need something shorter than a book, something easy to think about, something we can carry with us through each day.

Searching for agreement on what love is, there’s no better place to look than to the most quoted passage read at weddings around the country.  A profession of love on the most important day for two people, it has spoken to the heart of man across the ages.

Love

 1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.  

 4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

 

 8Love never fails. [1Cor 13:1-8, NIV]

If this is love, we should be able to know it when we see it.

If this is love, and if we know what we see…what does it say about the things we DO see?

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Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.  

The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

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 January 23, 2006 –  To Know Love When We See Love, Part 2

September 12, 2005 –  Kiss, Kiss, I Love You

See Archives for more past editorials.

2006: A Year of Love

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

January 2, 2006

2006:  A Year of LOVE

Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

Sex, sex, everywhere, and not a speck of love.

Entering a new year, taking time to reflect back and hope forward, I am struck by a growing and persistent awareness.  After forty years of national focus on developing the perfect sex education programs for our children, we are still missing the key element.  Each year, we teach through the sex manual, all 800 pages of it, and ignore the footnote on page 772 that contains the essential truth.

Sex education today revolves around “medically accurate facts” updated hourly with new research findings.  We teach kids the long list of sexually transmitted diseases, along with their causes and symptoms.  We post failure rates of condoms and devise easy-to-understand lessons to help a twelve-year-old comprehend the meaning of a 14% failure rate for condoms in preventing pregnancies.

We pass laws and increase funding to make sure students get the medical facts.  We host conferences where the latest in research findings is relayed to educators.  And we write and film new hip-hop videos, dressing up the facts in the latest version of “cool” so that teens might stop, listen and heed.

This is all important work.  For many kids this information is reinforcement of their personal commitment to sexual abstinence until marriage, and for other kids it is the catalyst for making major life-saving changes in their sexual behavior, even to the point of returning to sexual abstinence.

But we are teaching our children with only half an answer.  We are teaching them to preserve their physical health.  Kids are making the connection between physical health and the ability to chase their future goals…education, career, and financial security.

As far as it goes, it is a good education.  But it is lacking.  And it is lacking the most important message.  We know this.  But we still fail to seriously address the missing ingredient.

Teri, an Education Director for city-wide sex education programs, states it plainly.  The more I’m in this business of sex education, the more I’m convinced it’s not about sex.  It’s about relationships.  Love.  Intimacy.

Dr. Diggs, a physician who can spout the statistical probability of catching any one of the most common twenty-five STDs when using a condom, agrees with Teri.  Kids are not looking for sex.  They are looking for relationships.  They are looking for somebody to whom they can be known and who they can know at the same time.  They are not looking for sex.

Sex, sex, everywhere, but who can teach our children about love?  It’s the one thing we adults, like our children, long for most in our lives, yet it is one subject that cannot be boiled down into a 30-minute power point presentation.

We can teach love.  But we must teach it through example.  And that is not so easy in a world now rocked with divorce and family breakup and in a culture tempted by a media profiting from all acts of non-love that we can imagine.

A new year presents itself.  New opportunities and new choices.  At FROM THE HOME FRONT, we are charting a new course for our columns.  It is a path dimly lit, but it is a path we must follow.  It goes where our children most want to go, and where we would want them to end up, if we knew how to make it happen.

As writer, I know no more than you, the reader.  I am beset behind and beset before with my own human weaknesses, my own frailties, and my own temptations.

But this I know, any goal so desired of mankind, must certainly merit the attention.  Your insights, your experiences, your questions are all invited in a weekly consideration of love.  At FROM THE HOME FRONT, in 2006, we dedicate ourselves to the consideration of what makes life…and sex…worth having.  It is a year devoted to love.

September 12, 2005 – Kiss, Kiss, I Love You

Small Acts of Courage

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 26, 2005

It was last package under the tree…DVDs…the full first year of the hit television series 24.  The store clerk warned me.  “Once you begin,” he said, “you won’t be able to get away from the television.”  He was right.

The past 12 hours have been heart-stopping.  Jack’s family has been kidnapped.  Janet was hit by a car, saved by hospital emergency workers and then murdered.  Torn by conflicting advice from every corner, Palmer, presidential candidate of supreme integrity, has to choose between sending his son to prison or saving an enemy from murder.

This show has it all.  Intrigue, love, deception, honor, betrayal, sabotage and chaos.  But above all, it has courage.  Jack fighting to find his family, Kim pleading with her kidnappers to rescue Janet, Rick digging a grave for his friend while plotting escape from captors, and Teri offering to be the rapist’s victim in place of her own daughter.

Action is intense.  Finally, worn out from danger and tension, we manage to turn off the television just as Jack runs after Teri and Kim into the woods, chased by men firing automatic weapons.  Will CTU helicopters arrive in time?

Modern drama, amplified by special effects, has given courage a new persona.  Back when courage was young, in the old black and white westerns of the 50s, it never had to outlast the last bullet in the six-shooter.

Today, courage must be teamed with the ability to speed down the freeway firing back at your pursuers while decrypting the ransom note on a palm pilot before satellite signals set on a 60-second timer fire an ICBM from Antarctica to obliterate the sold-out World Series crowd at Houston Astros Ballpark precisely at the moment the President of the United States throws out the first pitch.

But that’s movie courage.  Real courage is more simple.

The world may indeed explode with one single blast of an ICBM.  For a disaster of that magnitude, we need action heroes like Jack and their type of courage.

However, the world is ever more likely to dissolve in the poison accumulated over decades of human indifference to eternal truths that have been discarded in order to pursue our own momentary desires.  We can turn the tide on such a disaster.  But it will also take courage.

It takes courage to return to truth.  Like the mythical sirens who sang to sailors, modern culture lures us with promises that we can have everything we want without a price.  By far, the easiest path laid out for us today is the road of sexual permissiveness that has led to unwed teen pregnancies, an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, a breakdown in marriages and destruction of families.

Truths set aside, we have been persuaded that fidelity, honor, reverence, monogamy, and family no longer matter.  We must resist the easy path before us.  Only courage can help us restore the natural order of human life and dignity.

Declaring truth is an act of courage.  Sex for humans is more than the animal sex act that produces a litter of puppies.  In a world where promiscuity is excused as “natural” human conduct, we must have the courage to speak the truth.

Restoring truth in our homes is an act of courage.  Setting standards for our own behavior as adults, becoming role models for our children, may force us to give up our own bad habits first.  If we are to speak the truth, we must live it, too.

Upholding truth in our relationships is an act of courage.  Seeking counseling to restore a marriage is a gift to ourselves and to our children, a decision that will challenge us to be better people at the cost of our own personal accountability and sacrificial love.

Standing apart for truth is an act of courage.  Being the only parents who object to handing out free condoms at the local high school may set us up as targets for those who teach children that abstaining from sex is unrealistic and unnecessary.  We must be willing to stand for truth, even if we are standing alone.

The world is in danger.  The script for saving the world is already written in the eternal truths about human love.  But it’s not enough to know the truth.

We have the power to save the world…one simple courageous act at a time.  Real courage…in real life…is exercised in the simple decisions and actions each of us make during every ordinary day.

We may know the truth.  But, courage is required to live the truth.

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December 27, 2004 –  New Year’s Resolution:  Another Kind of Diet

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The Best Christmas Present Under the Tree

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 12, 2005

In the 1940s, it was a Red Ryder BB gun…in the 1960s, a GI Joe.

In the 1980s, when my own children ran through the house, it was a Cabbage Patch Doll.  Over the past hundred years, several hundreds of toys have made the “most popular Christmas present” list:  Crayolas, Raggedy Ann dolls, View-master 3-D Viewer, Rubik’s cube, Mr. Potato Head, Beanie Babies, Razor Scooter and more.

Who remembers the must-have toy of 1996?  On a web site where comments (most of them) extol the virtues of this stuffed creature, one web writer tells about the “loons who went to the stores at the crack of dawn to fight the crowds to have a chance to buy a Tickle Me Elmo.”

A lot has changed in the past hundred years.  Only in America have toys taken on a new personality indicative of our wealth.  Mr. Potato Head, 8-1/2 inches tall and 8 inches wide, is now offered encrusted with gems and priced at $8,000.  If you want your Monopoly set in tooled leather, be prepared to fork over $5,840.

If money is absolutely no problem this year, parents can splurge on Microsoft’s new Xbox 350 costing around $300…or an original Teddy Bear available at Christie’s auction for $17,000 to $26,000….all the way up to a $300,000 3-D motion simulator from the “Rolls-Royce of toy stores” FAO Schwarz.

Advertised as a replacement for friends, you can buy your child Hammacher Schlemmer’s 7-foot, remote-controlled Robby the Robot…that is…if you have a spare $50,000.  Makes a parent long for a return to 1975 and the Pet Rock craze.  Like most fads, it never totally died.  There is even a web site titled, Pet Rock Sanitarium, where you might find a cheaper-than-cheap abandoned “pet” looking for a new home.

So…what’s hot this year?  You can bet merchandisers know.  Base on one survey, thirty-eight percent of U.S. teens would prefer cash for Christmas this year, followed by cell phones or portable electronics.  Other in-demand holiday gifts include clothing and a car, according to a survey of 700 U.S. teens conducted by Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

Engrossed as we are at this time of year in looking for all those special ways of bringing joy to our children, it seems fitting to look to the type of joy that lasts beyond Christmas.  That’s exactly what Otis and Elaine Dickerson of Duluth, Georgia, did over fifty years ago.

“On December 18, 1953, on the first birthday of their baby boy Eric,” writes Benin Dakar, “the young and determined African-American couple were married in the modest home of Otis’ mother in a working-class Baltimore neighborhood.”  Today in their 70s, the Dickersons talk about their commitment to marriage as a way of providing joy and security for their four children.

Dakar notes that their story is worth telling in an age when “fewer and fewer young black couples who find themselves in a ‘family way’ are following their lead to the altar.”  Indeed, statistics from the Brookings Institute show that 70 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock.

For the country at large, 24 million children (34 percent) live absent their biological father, and 40 percent of children living absent their father have never set foot in their father’s home.  The Dickersons wanted better for their children.

Their lifelong commitment to each other in marriage helped them through the rough waters that all married couples will face.  Dakar notes, “their partnership enabled them to succeed in the workplace, to become homeowners and to rear stable and productive children.”  We can learn from Otis and Elaine.  Their experience is confirmed through many important studies on the welfare of children.

In a report issued by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), important details outline the challenges facing single parent families.  “When an unwed couple has a child, the resulting family faces heightened vulnerability to a variety of economic and social problems affecting the couple, the parents as individuals, and the child.  In particular, there is a high risk they will be unsuccessful in forming a sustained and close family unit.  Because of these well documented risks and the consequences of nonmarital childbearing for parents and children, these families are now commonly called ‘fragile families.’”

This same report goes on to say, “research shows that children who grow p with married, biological parents have better outcomes than children raised in a different family structure.  On average, the former are more likely to be healthy, to complete high school, and to become economically self-sufficient adults; and in turn, they are less likely to be involved in drug and alcohol abuse or juvenile delinquency, or to be come teen parents.”

At Christmas, when we focus our eyes on what will bring joy to our children, the best present we can give is right within reach.  This is the perfect time to recommit to our marriages.  Married couples, attending marriage seminars, kissing under the mistletoe and holding hands in front of the hearth are building the perfect gift for their children, a secure home today and a vision for their children of what their own future could be.

The best Christmas present under the tree this year will cost the least.  But its value to our children is priceless.

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For a good dose of Christmas Cheer and fun information:

http://mymerrychristmas.com/2005/surveyteens2005.shtml

 

For the Most Popular Toys of the Past 100 Years:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10387831/

 

For the Most Expensive Toys of 2005:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10387451/from/RL.1/

 

For the full story of Otis and Elaine Dickerson:

Benin Dakar, “Drop in black marriages hurts families,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 12, 2005, A13.

 

For Report by Administration for Children and Families: “Helping Unwed Parents Build Strong And Healthy marriages: A Conceptual Framework For Interventions”

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/strengthen/strengthfam/reports/conceptual_framework/framework_toc.html

See Archives for more past editorials.

Public Policy Never Mended a Broken Heart

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

November 7, 2005

Maybe Anthony is a good father.

Maybe we need more fathers like Anthony.

And maybe we need more sports heroes to be the kinds of fathers and husbands, like Anthony, who step up to the line of scrimmage and run a touchdown when it comes to being the best kind of dad a kid could want.

Maybe.  But Marleen doesn’t think so.

Marleen read the story about Anthony and how he turned down a pro-football contract to fulfill his responsibility to an unborn child who became his son.  She read how he built a strong, healthy marriage with his teen girlfriend.  She acknowledges that Anthony took responsibility as a husband and father.  And while she finds his example…well…exemplary …she wrote me to complain.

“The problem is not with fathers abandoning their children,” says Marleen, “it is with bad public policy forcing them out of their children’s lives.”  She goes on to list the laws we have on the books to try to provide for America’s children:  child custody, child support, visitation requirements, and shared custody agreements.

Marleen chides me.  She claims the number of “bad men who truly do abandon their children” are “statistically insignificant.”  Citing fathers who are “forced” to pay child support and those who are “jailed for non-payment,” Marleen aims her final shot at me.  “The problem is not with fathers, it’s with the father-unfriendly policies in the U.S.”

While I can agree with Marleen that solutions to father absence are imperfect, she misses the most obvious solution at hand.  She misses the entire point of telling Anthony’s story.  She sees the trees…every oak and pine and aspen…but she misses the forest.

Every one of the 1.5 million births in 2004 to unmarried women produced a child in danger of growing up without a father.  More than 4 in 5 births to teens were to unmarried girls.  In 2004, more than 35 percent of births were to unmarried women.

This is not the kind of problem that is “statistically insignificant.”  Nor is it a problem that can be met by public policy “fixes.”  No child was ever hugged by public policy.

The fix to the problem facing our children and grandchildren lies in the hearts of the adults today, their parents and grandparents, who must face some hard truths.  We must look in the mirror and ask what we could be doing differently.

What would the future look like if children were encouraged to see sex as the behavior belonging to adults who committed to each other in marriage?  What would marriage look like if we taught teens and young adults effective tools to keep relationships healthy and positive?  What would divorce look like if we had a culture that encouraged couples through the hard times with counseling and support?

This is not an impossible dream.  This is the set of expectations that ruled the world for thousands of years.  These expectations succeeded not because they were public policy, but because individual people understood and accepted the importance of sacrificing personal momentary pleasure for the long-term benefit of mutual happiness.

When we teach young men and women to value intimate relationships as a sacred trust, and when we teach them that sex is the ultimate gift of this trust to be fulfilled inside of marriage, we will set the stage for them to care enough to abstain from unmarried sex.  This is the foundation of reversing statistics on unmarried births.  It is the beginning of bringing fathers back home again.

Will life be perfect?  Is life perfect now?  If we use the imperfections of today to disqualify any attempt to teach our children a better way, we are justifying failure.

Yes, Marleen, we can treat failure with public policy.  But we will never overcome failure with public policy.

No child will sleep better tonight, hugging a public policy manual.  Public policy has never mended a broken heart.  And most importantly for the children we love, no public policy will ever make a vow to love, honor and cherish them till death us do part.

 

The Story of Anthony and Mary Ann

October 17, 2005 – Fatherhood Is More than a Paycheck

 April 23, 2004 – m…m…Married?

 See Archives for more past editorials.