I do understand what you're saying, and I largely agree. I just think that we can't take the command to abstain from sex outside of marriage outside of the command to marry. We can't say that Paul's admonition to marry if you are burning with lust is one we can ignore today because it doesn't fit with our contemporary values while insisting that the command to reserve sex for marriage be followed. Now I absolutely understand that sometimes it doesn't work out that way, and people really want to marry but that's not what life holds for them at the time. I'm not saying that they are doing something wrong, and I'm neither giving them a license to have sex anyway nor condemning them if they do. I'm talking about the attitude I've seen in many Christian parents that their child must both 1) wait until they marry to have sex and 2) be sufficiently "mature" (generally meaning that they want their child to be out of college, secure in a job, financially independent, and at least in their mid-20s) before they marry. That's the attitude I'm objecting to. Is that possible? For some people. Is it reasonable? No, I don't think so. I think it's putting a very unfair burden on young people. I don't think a parent can or should simultaneously expect a child to delay marriage AND to reserve sex for marriage. Can a person abstain from all junk food? Yes. But, is it realistic to expect them to do so if you don't have any healthy food in the house available for them? Probably not. I don't think it's right or fair to tell young people that they can't have sex before marriage and then take marriage off the table as a viable option for them for many years. I also think that the reason we didn't need "abstinence programs" in the past was that people had the best abstinence program: marrying young. It's not that young people today are somehow less moral or more corrupt or more licentious; it's just that we've taken marrying in your teens (and increasingly even in your early 20s) off the table as a culturally-acceptable option. I got married at 22 about 10 years ago, and people thought we were incredibly young and crazy to be marrying. At 22! Honestly, if it had been up to us, we'd have married at 19. But there was so much pressure on us from our families to wait until we finished college to marry. Now, our families really didn't care very much, at that point, about whether or not we waited until we were married for sex; they would have preferred it, but they didn't put pressure on us about it. Could we have abstained from sex from the time we met at 18, through the time we got engaged at 19, all through college, until we married at 22? Probably not. I don't think either one of us has that level of ability to resist temptation. I also think that, if we'd gone to Paul at 19 and said, "Hey, Paul, we're really struggling with temptation right now. How can we continue to resist lust?" he'd have told us to just go get married ASAP, rather than having us sign a pledge that we wouldn't have sex for another 3 years or so, until we married.

I think, though, that Paul was operating on the assumption that, unless you were called to celibacy, you'd be married. Being unmarried and celibate wasn't seen as a long-but-temporary state that people would be in, a kind of limbo you were in for a decade or two between puberty and marriage. Paul's view seems to be that, if you are called to celibacy, accept it and do not seek to marry, but if you are not called to celibacy, go get yourself married. The message of today's abstinence movement is extremely different from Paul's message. For him, celibacy was a lifelong calling. Today, we expect people to remain temporarily celibate during the time in their lives when their sexual desire is most intense, and then marry after. Paul says to marry rather than burn; we say, "Just stop burning!" or "Just resist the burn for the next decade-and-a-half, and then once you've finished your education and established yourself in your career and have the start on a nice retirement fund, you can marry." If people think that's desirable or realistic, that's fine. They can. But I do think we need to recognize that it's completely foreign to the message of Jesus or Paul or the OT writers who set up penalties for premarital sex. This idea of going through puberty at 12 or 13, then not engaging in sexual activity until you are fully mature and established in a career and in your mid-to-late 20s is an entirely different message about sex and marriage than what is expressed in the Bible. ETA: I'm not at all disagreeing with your assessment of Paul. He would certainly not have said, "Well, just sleep around since you aren't married." But, I honestly don't think there's any reason to imagine that, if a young person struggling with lust who was not called to celibacy came to him, he'd say, "Spend another 10 years not having sex. Grow up, get mature, then we can talk about you marrying." He'd say, "Go marry!" We can say that we don't like that today, that it's unrealistic, that it just won't work, but then I think we need to consider that, if marrying young won't work and isn't realistic, then maybe waiting until marriage for sex isn't workable or realistic, either. I just don't think we can have it both ways, and urge people to take seriously Paul's call to sexual purity without also taking seriously Paul's proposal of marriage--not willpower, not purity pledges, not abstinence programs--as the right response to sexual temptation for most people (all those not called to lifelong celibacy).

:banghead: Do we think it's God who decided that, in the 21st century, people shouldn't marry until they are in their late 20s? Yes, some people can and will do it. Some people also remain celibate their entire lives. But the simple fact is that remaining celibate until 30 is an aberration. It has never been the norm, it never will be the norm, and we simply cannot expect it to be the norm. I don't see why people don't want to admit what is obvious: the biblical mandates to wait for sex until marriage come from a time when people married much, much earlier. They married very close to puberty. We are now insisting that people live by the mandate to not have sex before marriage while pushing marriage further and further back. And we see nothing wrong with this! We just say, "Well, God didn't say it would be easy." Actually, he did! Jesus said that his yoke was easy and his burden was light. Paul said to marry rather than burn with lust. But, rather than taking that advice and encouraging young people seeking to wait until marriage to marry early, we are putting an extremely heavy, difficult burden on them; we are saying that it's better to burn with lust for, oh, 15 years and just suck it up and resist, rather than to marry. If a young person doesn't have a problem with sex before marriage, then by all means encourage them to wait to marry if you want. But if a young person expresses a sincere desire to reserve sex for marriage, and we really want to help them, then we should be encouraging them to begin thinking seriously about and entering into marriage much younger than is the norm, or else we are indeed placing a difficult yoke on them.

18yo girls can be and are burning with desire, too. It's not just boys. It's this "control yourself" attitude that I think we need to recognize as historically unique. Historically, nobody would have told an 18yo burning with sexual desire to control themselves (certainly not in the sense of abstaining for another 10 years or so while they become financially stable and somehow emotionally mature); they'd have told them to marry! We can't just say, "Well, the Bible tells people to wait for marriage for sex. Sure, in biblical times people got married shortly after puberty, and today they are getting married 15-20 years after puberty, but that doesn't matter. People today should just remain virgins until they marry at 27 the same way that people in biblical times remained virgins until they married at 14." That is just not viable. And, if we think it's that simple, then we haven't given it much thought. I also think we need to realize that our "mature first, then marry" attitude is historically unique. Marriage and parenthood has been what impels people to maturity in most cases (including ours). Putting off marriage and parenthood is NOT leading to people being more mature; if anything, it's leading to prolonged periods of immaturity. Most people I know stay immature and irresponsible as long as they possibly can, until they have a pressing reason to grow up. And, for most people, marriage and parenthood IS that reason. You can't mature by force of will; you mature because your life experiences mature you. We can't withhold those life experiences from young people and then fault them for not being mature.

The point, though, is that having sex at, say, 16-18 is NOT early. It's not pathological. It's not a sign that something has gone wrong in a person's life. It's not any of those things because, historically, most people have been sexually active at that age. You seem to be saying that the problem is that people are, by having sex at 17/18/19, having sex "too early." I think you would be hard-pressed to support that historically. What I'm saying is that 17/18/19 is NOT "too early" to have sex; it's actually a completely and entirely normal, healthy, and natural age to begin having sex, and historically most people have begun sexual activity at that age or earlier. I'm saying that we're getting married too late. What's changed isn't that people are having sex earlier--because they just aren't, at all, if anything they are having sex later--but that they are marrying much, much later. I'm not a huge proponent of abstinence until marriage; I believe in the level of physical intimacy in a relationship balancing with the level of emotional intimacy and commitment, but I'm not putting any hard and fast rules on my kids. I'll leave it to them to decide where to draw those lines. At the same time, I AM a big proponent of people marrying earlier. If our children come home at 18 and tell us they are planning to marry, we've decided that we will welcome it and be happy to give them any support we can, including living with us (with their spouse, obviously) for a time until they are more financially secure, and continuing to put them through college if that's the path they are on. We bemoan the immaturity of today's young people, then use that as evidence for why they aren't ready to marry. But aren't we putting the cart before the horse? We don't mature first then have experiences that require maturity later; our experiences mature us. Marriage matures us. If we want young people to be more mature, I see few things that would get them there faster than marrying! Most people I know didn't mature, and then once they were mature, marry and have kids. They got married, had kids, and matured during that process. I know that nothing grew me up and gave me a sense of responsibility and matured me faster than marriage and motherhood. I honestly don't think people in the past were somehow abstractly more mature, but that they took on responsibilities like marriage and parenthood earlier, and that matured them.

"Primal urges"? The desire for sex isn't somehow an "animal" desire that is sub-human and we should just transcend; it's a God-given desire. If we want to talk about not getting into situations where the temptation will be strong, then have them marry. It's amazing how many people today just write off what Paul had to say about this, about it being better to marry than to burn. Do you know who burns? People in their teens and twenties? I'd find it much easier to be celibate today, at 33, than I would have had 21. What do we think the early Christian community would have thought of our demand that young people wait until marriage for sex while actively discouraging them from marrying when they are in their late teens and early twenties? It is foolish to believe that young people will wait until they are 25 or 27 or 29 t commence sexuality activity; there's really no other way to think about it. Will some people wait? Sure. A few always have. But, not most. It has NEVER been and never will be the norm in any society, Christian or not, for people to have a decade-and-a-half lag time between puberty and onset of sexual activity. Societies that have highly valued sexual purity have always had marriage close to puberty as the norm. I just don't see why we don't want to admit this. People are going through puberty earlier, and they are marrying later. And somehow we think this will have no real impact on their having sex before marriage? That willpower should be enough to get people through? No way. If we want to value financial independence as highly as we do--because in the past it was much, much more common for newly married couples to live with a family member while they got on their feet, compared to today when people are so eager to kick their kids out at 18 and would NEVER consider supporting a child who chose to marry young and their spouse--then we are going to be making it incredibly difficult for most people to wait for sex until marriage. You can't worship God and money. I do think we need to choose, because we can't have it both ways: either it's more important that people reserve sex for marriage, and so marry closer to puberty, or it's more important that people not marry until they are financially independent, and so marry in their mid-to-late 20s and have sex before marriage. In most cases, those will be the choices, and I think we're being foolish if we think we can have it both ways. Not just foolish, though: we're harming young people, by putting a burden on them that they simply cannot carry. What would Paul tell an 18 year old who was full of lust? Marry! Today, what would we tell them? Go to college, find a job, get established for a few years, then look for a marriage partner. Oh, and don't have sex. Who's offering the easier yoke here?

This is the mindset I'm having trouble with. Is it that our morals have been "in the gutter" or that our societal pressure to delay marriage has made sex before marriage more common? The average female today begins having sex at 17.5. AFAIK, that number has not varied much in the 40 or so years they've been tracking it; it's actually gone up a bit in recent years. It also seems pretty consistent across culture, regardless of their sexual mores. Most people, it seems, begin having sex somewhere around 17 or 18. If anything, that's older than many people started in biblical times. The issue doesn't seem to be that people are commencing sexual activity earlier, but that they are marrying much, much later. If we don't want people people having sex before marriage, we can do two things: we can encourage them to marry earlier, closer to the age at which most people historically have married, or we can encourage them to wait until our current-socially-approved age to marry, which in many cases will mean their mid-to-late 20s, something that no society in history has managed to do on a large scale. It seems to me that we're choosing the route that puts an enormously difficult burden on young people and that dooms most of them to failure. We're talking, after all, about people who are not called to celibacy, but people who want to marry and have sex. The idea that they should just resist sexual temptation for the 15 or so years when their desire is most intense is a recipe for failure and guilt.

I think it's important to realize, though, that these are modern constructs. This whole idea that you should wait until marriage AND not get married until you are emotional mature and/or financially stable is a modern idea. When the biblical mandates to reserve sex for marriage were written, you could expect to get married not long after you hit puberty. Today, many people have a 10-20 year lag between hitting puberty and getting married (which is just growing as people are simultaneously going through puberty earlier and waiting longer and longer to marry). There is a huge difference between waiting until marriage when you will maybe have a couple of years between puberty and marriage (if that long) and waiting when you might have a decade and a half between puberty and marriage. It's not a matter of what you believe; it's a matter of what you can do. It's very easy, at 45 and married (or 33 and married) to believe that people should just wait until they are married for sex. But, when you went through puberty at 12 and are now 27 years old and STILL don't see marriage in your near future, that's a whole different thing. Even if you believe that you should wait until marriage, the reality is that many people will not be able to do that in that situation. I just think it's hard to reconcile our society's contempt for early marriage with our society's belief that women should remain "pure" until marriage. If we want a successful abstinence movement, the message should be that people should, at 15 and 16, be looking for marriage partners, so that at 18 or 19 they'll be getting married. That's really the only possible way it could work on a large scale. And if we really, truly think that it's a terrible idea for people to get married before their mid- to late-20s, then we need to accept that premarital sex is going to be the norm. Again, is there any society anybody can point to, in all of human history, where people routinely waited 15-20 years between puberty and becoming sexually active? I'm not aware of any, and I have no idea why we think we'd be the first.

They aren't promising to wait until they are mature to have sex, though; they are promising to wait until they are married. For many of them, that means promising at 14 that they won't have sex when they are 24. That is just not a promise that it's reasonable for somebody that age to make, because at 14 you can't imagine yourself at 24 or 26 or 28. We're talking, largely, about people who have matured but are still unmarried. The reality is that many people will be entering their mid-20s unmarried. These are people who are mature and indisputably adults. Taking a pledge at 14 to abstain until marriage might make sense if you are going to be marrying at 17 or 18, but if you might not marry until 26 or even later, then you're promising something that I don't think you can have any real understanding of. At 14, I had absolutely no idea who I'd be or what my life would be like when I was 25.

We're not talking about kids, though; we're talking about adults. Do we really think that many unmarried people in their 20s who have not been called to celibacy are going to just not have sex because their parents told them not to? I think these programs don't work because a pledge you signed at 14 or 15 is probably not going to carry you through for the next decade or more, should you not marry until your mid-to-late 20s. Again, I really think that if it's very important for a parent that their child be a virgin when they marry, then they need to do what they can to encourage their child to marry young, including being okay with a child marrying before finishing their education and being financially independent and supporting them in that. It's just not fair or realistic to expect a person to remain a virgin if they don't get married until 31, for most people.

I was really glad to see McKnight say this. I don't know why this isn't something more people are willing to acknowledge. It seems pretty simple to me: if it's really important to you that people remain virgins until they marry, encourage early marriage, at 18 or so. If it's important to you that young people be "established" and financially independent before they marry, then it is, I think, pretty unreasonable to expect them to wait to have sex, because at this point that often takes until their late 20s or even later. I don't think there's ever been or ever will be a society in which it is the norm for people to wait until their mid-20s or later to begin having sex. We are certainly not going to be the first society where that happens. It's putting a terribly unfair burden on young people to expect that. Most people aren't that promiscuous. The average woman has four partners over the course of her entire lifetime. What's funny is how obsessed we are with female promiscuity and female purity when men have significantly more sex partners on average and are far more likely to have many partners. That isn't the norm. The median age for girls to begin having sex is, as of the most recent survey, 17-1/2. That's actually higher than it was twenty years ago. For most of history women that age would have been married. To me, it's not too surprising that young women that age would be having sex, especially when marriage seems so far off in the future to many of them. If you're 17 and can expect to be getting married in the next couple of years, I imagine it would seem a whole lot easier to wait than if you are thinking you might not be married until you are 30. I do think we need to take seriously the ways in which delaying marriage changes things.

I am so sorry to hear that. :( Just as a heads up, I'd keep an eye on him for a bit, even if he seems totally okay. That's a really traumatic thing. My husband was robbed at gunpoint walking home from work about five years ago, and, since he was fine, I just brushed it off as a really crappy thing to have happened that he'd probably not think about much again. He actually was pretty traumatized by it. He wouldn't walk home from work for a long time after that, and it took me a while to realize that it was because he was anxious. He also got really anxious about me and the kids going out for walks. It wasn't anything that interfered with him going about his life, but it definitely was a stressor for him for a good while after, and in hindsight I think I could have been more patient and understanding about it, rather than assuming that because he was 1) okay and 2) a guy who can handle himself, he'd just immediately get over it. I'd just make sure you son knows that you're there to listen to him anytime he wants or needs to talk through his feelings about what happened.

Charlotte is one of my favorite girl names, but I wouldn't use it for the same reason. Plus, we have good friends who have a daughter named Charlotte. I love Eleanor (with Nora as the nickname), but wouldn't use it because I have two friends who have Eleanor/Noras. I really wanted to name the new baby Theophilus (and call him Theo). DH immediately vetoed it, but if he hadn't, I probably wouldn't have gone with it, anyway. For one, our two other kids both have names starting with T (and "Th" at that!), and I was afraid of starting a trend that could get creepy. Two kids with the same first letter was a coincidence, three would have been maybe okay, but if we had a fourth, then we'd be in "that family" territory. Plus, if he had grown up and been an atheist, unless he had a well-developed sense of irony, he probably would have hated me.

That article sure was written to bring out a specific response in a specific group of people, and by the comments on this thread, it worked. I like how they buried under the bump the fact that this is NOT policy in ANY school, but instead is a small number of suggestions given in some "guides" in something called Nursery World Magazine. Call me crazy, but I'm betting that UK school policy isn't generally made on the basis of recommendations in a magazine called Nursery World. But, by all means, let's get outraged over a series of suggestions that nobody is going to follow in a magazine that very few people read. I bet we could find some guidelines in homeschooling publications that would make homeschoolers seems like extremist, dangerous idiots if they were reported in the way this story was reported. But of course this is representative of mutilcultural educational efforts as a whole. Wow, those PC lunatics control everything! I mean, they have lists of suggestions in little-read magazines that are made fun of in a major UK publication and not even under consideration as educational policy. Their plan for world domination sure is going well. My favorite color actually is brown. Well, brown and purple are probably tied, but I'm pretty specific about the shades of purple I like, while I like pretty much every shade of brown. It's a very warm, soothing color.

I was initially really excited when I saw "worldview" classes. I figured they'd be classes exploring various worldviews and encouraging students to consider ways of looking at the world other than their own. Then I realized that they were really "We're going to try to convince you that the beliefs your parents want you to have are completely true and that any other way of looking at the world is invalid, immoral, and dangerous" classes.

The problem is that the human body is not that straightforward. Many people have a set point for their body weight. If you decrease their calorie intake, their body will slow down so that it will burn fewer calories. And if they can't maintain a calorie intake that low comfortably, then when they up their calories to a comfortable level, they'll gain weight. I'd suggest focusing on health, not weight.

I'd look at Ellyn Satter's advice about child feeding. If you are providing your child with a variety of healthy foods, I personally think that allowing them to eat as much or as little of that food as they want is probably the best way to go, long term. Calorie restriction, especially when imposed by a parent, can lead to long-term issues with food and in many cases will not lead to better health or even permanent weight loss. The internet, FWIW, is the LAST place I'd go to ask about my child's eating habits, because everybody on the internet has a child who only eats small portions of whole-grain and organic foods and maybe some lean meat from animals they only eats whole-grain and organic foods and that they slaughtered themselves.

:iagree: This. I can't imagine, personally, that people pretending non-service animals are service animals so that they can bring them into stores and restaurants is a huge problem requiring a policy change. However, I also can't imagine that service dogs have to be allowed on tables. The manager could have asked this man to keep his dog off the table.

L'Engle was a universalist and an Episcopalian; she's my people. Sadly, though, I find A Wrinkle in Time kind of boring.

Every week, no problem. I'm Italian-American. Friday night was pizza night, every week, without fail, and we sometimes had it another night, too. Now, every day, I'd get sick of it. At one point when DH was working on his dissertation and I was teaching two classes, we were ordering in pizza all the time. One day the doorbell rang and DS, who was maybe 3 or 4 at the time, said, "It sounds like pizza!" Now that's when you're eating pizza too often!

I just recently became part of a home group my neighbors started at their house. The kids play in the basement, and the parents and other adults who volunteer take turns watching the kids each week. I think right now there's eight people on the list to watch the kids, so we'll each watch the kids once every eight weeks. A number of the kids are smaller (3 and under), one has special needs, and the next oldest are only 7, so there needs to be an adult supervising. I bring DS7, because he likes to play with the other kids, and the baby if he's awake. I leave DD home with DH. Since I'm right next door, if the baby was sleeping and gets hungry, DH can just run him over.

I'm not trying to drag this out, just curious. So if a woman only drank a single glass of wine her entire pregnancy, and her child had certain symptoms, the child would have a FASD diagnosis? They wouldn't look for other causes?

I'm really not trying to be dense here: if it were found that she was exposed to a 5 oz. glass of wine once a week during pregnancy, would they make a FASD diagnosis? Or, more in line with what people here are saying of their own experience, if she was exposed to half a beer once and half a glass of wine three times during the entire pregnancy, would FASD be the diagnosis? If it could be confirmed that the absolute only exposure to alcohol was 1 drink or less on isolated occasions, would they attribute the symptoms to that drinking, or assume there was another reason for them?

If that were the case, I would assume we'd see higher rates of ADD in countries where the kind of light drinking we're talking about during pregnancy is accepted. AFAIK, that's not only not the case, but the opposite is the case.

While I don't drink any caffeine, myself--I respond badly to it--I think the evidence is pretty clear that moderate consumption is okay. If I had a history of miscarriages, I might be extra cautious, but I don't think a woman choosing to have a cup of coffee in the morning or tea with lunch is doing anything risky, at all. And I think there is more than sufficient evidence to indicate that occasional light drinking is not risky. I don't have 1-2 drinks per week when not pregnant, so I certainly wouldn't do it while pregnant, but I think we have both scientific and crosscultural evidence to indicate that doing so is perfectly fine. I wouldn't give two extra-strength Tylenol to my baby--I'd get him to the ER immediately if he somehow ingested them--but I had no problem taking that while pregnant or while nursing. I can't imagine anybody would give their newborn an adult dosage of Zofran, but many pregnant women take that. I take an SSRI for panic disorder that, on the advice of my OB after a horrible experience going off of it in my first pregnancy (I ended up having multiple severe panic attacks every day, my blood pressure shot up, and it was just a miserable, scary, and not-very-healthy experience). I most certainly would not give 25mg/day of Zoloft to my baby, but I am perfectly comfortable taking it while pregnant and nursing. Many women take prescription or OTC drugs while pregnant or nursing that they would never, ever give to their child--and that would make a child extremely ill if ingested directly--but that do not harm a fetus or nursing baby. People take risks with their kids all the time that I wouldn't want to take. Unless there is clear evidence that what they are doing is causing demonstrable harm, I refuse to throw any stones and fully support their right to decide for themselves.