It Takes a Village (17 page)

The result is tragic, especially for teenagers who are in difficult circumstances to begin with. Girls who become pregnant are usually a grade or two behind in their academic work. Frequently they come from disorganized families they would like to escape. Such girls often see little future for themselves, and a baby can look like a way out, or at least something they can call their own. Where sex is a quid pro quo for social status and security in the surrounding culture, these girls get little help from the village in persuading them that they have other options.

Many teenage boys are in a comparable bind. Lagging in school and frustrated by what they perceive as a lack of opportunity, they see in sex and fatherhood a route to tangible power and accomplishment. It is a primitive proof of manhood, but it is achievable.

When I talk with girls in their teens who have a baby or who are about to have one, they often say that they expect the child's father, who is usually older, to marry them. If I ask why he has not yet done so, they come up with a variety of excuses: he has to join the army or get a job or end a relationship with another girl first. There is always a reason, and however dubious it sounds, it does not prevent these girls from fantasizing about being loved and cared for. Girls pregnant with a second baby tend to be more cynical about marriage, but the sense of being unconditionally needed by an infant remains a powerful lure.

Girls with more advantages in life may decide to take chances with sex because “everybody else” is, or because they want to be popular with a certain boy or clique. They may forgo contraception and protection against sexually transmitted diseases because such planning requires that they acknowledge the choice they are making, and it doesn't mesh with the fantasy of being “swept away.”

I wish we would all take a deep breath and remember that sex has been around for a long, long time and we are all here because of it. It is an important part of who we are and how we live, and there should be no shame in our children's curiosity about it. If we could accept that, we could begin talking to children, as soon as they could understand what we were saying, about the importance of honoring their bodies and entering into relationships responsibly. As children grow older, we could explain that there are stages in each human being's life, and that sex is an appropriate part of an adult's life, something that comes with maturity and readiness for commitment.

 

W
HY DO
some kids try risky behaviors when others don't? How can we create conditions in both our homes and our society that increase the odds that they won't? How are we to equip kids with the character and the skills they will need to make it safely to adulthood?

When it comes to substance abuse, the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University is providing some answers. Under the direction of its chairman and president, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., it has begun an annual survey of the attitudes of American adults and adolescents toward cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and other illegal drugs, with the aim of alerting adults to what can be done to protect children. Califano spells out what is at stake: “Make no mistake about it. If our children get through the adolescent years, ages ten to twenty, without using drugs, without smoking, without abusing alcohol, they are virtually certain never to do so.”

Some of the factors that increase the risk of substance abuse in those years deserve emphasis. Casual attitudes toward marijuana and minors' access to cigarettes raise the likelihood that teenagers will make a sad progression from cigarettes to marijuana to more serious drug use and earlier sexual activity. Dropping out of school puts the child at greater risk, as does having a parent who is an abuser of alcohol or drugs.

If this knowledge had been available years ago, Bill and his mother might have been aware that Roger, who for years witnessed his father's alcoholism and experienced its destructive consequences, was a prime candidate for alcohol and drug abuse. One reason my husband is adamant about curbing smoking among teens—and adults, for that matter—is the fact that he learned firsthand, in his own family, about the slippery slope that begins with the use of one addictive substance and leads to other destructive behaviors and attitudes.

Teens who participate in at least one after-school activity other than sports use drugs less often than those who don't. Ironically, adolescents with part-time jobs are more likely to use drugs—owing, perhaps, to their disposable income and early independence. Those who regularly attend religious services, however, use drugs less frequently than teens who attend rarely or never.

The CASA survey recommends steps we can take—if we have the will—to protect children: vigorously enforcing laws that prohibit the sale of cigarettes and alcohol to minors; establishing “drug-free” schools; paying for research about and treatment of addiction; halting the glamorization of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs in advertising and the entertainment media.

The characteristics that keep kids from using drugs are harder to quantify but not to understand. Children who truly grasp that they have a choice to make in the matter are more likely to make a responsible one. So are children with high self-esteem. Most influential of all is the optimism and awareness that comes from knowing their parents are interested in and involved in their lives. As the report noted: “What matters is not so much parents' work situation, or even their marital status. What really counts is their
involvement
in their children's lives. What really counts, finally, is firm guidance…or, as one parent put it, ‘watching my kid like a hawk.'”

 

S
OMETIMES, THOUGH,
the tools families have at hand—discipline, watchful guidance, and love—just aren't up to the task. A teenage girl I know of killed herself at the age of fourteen, leaving a note that said, “I don't think I'm strong enough to be a teenager in today's world.” More than anything it says about “today's world,” that statement is testimony to the presence of severe depression and despair, which requires the intervention of sensitive, well-trained experts. As I and others have learned painfully through the suicides of friends and loved ones, too often individuals and families are reluctant or ashamed to reach out to the village for assistance. And too often, when they do, the village doesn't reach back. We need to see to it that such help is not only available but readily offered, without stigma, to those in need.

One way of offering help is to provide teenagers with variations of what societies in the past have always given them—powerful, creative, challenging, and life-affirming ways of moving from childhood to adulthood. Among Native American peoples, these have often taken the form of a spiritual journey mentored by a wise elder, from which the young people return strengthened and filled with a vision of their higher purpose. Young Jewish boys and girls study sacred texts and traditions to prepare for a bar or bat mitzvah, in celebration of their new maturity.

It is no coincidence that these movements into maturity are marked by a public affirmation. Our own culture is in need of such powerful rites. Teenagers need more than a driver's license to herald the passage from childhood to adulthood.

Great Transitions,
a new report by the Carnegie Corporation on preparing adolescents for the upcoming century, recognizes that we have left kids adrift at this critical stage of transition. It recommends that our nation offer more youth-supporting events and activities. It should be no surprise that teenage gangs have flourished in their absence. Teenagers need a sense of belonging and want to be engaged in constructive activity. Community service for young people offers the combination of challenge and involvement that so many desperately need to stay on course in life.

However we go about it, we must recognize that the years of adolescence have traditionally been the times of greatest opportunity and greatest danger. Added to this is the indisputable fact that these are the most complex times in human history. Whether children are swept away in the undertow of confusion or reach maturity safely depends on how strongly and creatively we affirm our faith in their promise.

In the end, though, our children will reach a point of independence when we can't watch over them or counsel them or see that others do. That is when character takes over—and when they need their shovels. Few of us will ever be tested like Nelson Mandela, but challenges, crises, failures, and disappointments, will come. Developing the “iron will and necessary skills” to shovel our way out from under whatever life piles on is a lifelong task for us all. And doing what we can to see that all our children are similarly equipped is our lifelong responsibility to them and to the village.

S
ome of the best theologians I have ever met were five-year-olds.

As children, my friends and I had long, serious discussions about what heaven would be like. One day a boy named David, who had bright-red hair and freckles, announced that he wouldn't go to heaven if he couldn't have peanut butter. We all argued over whether angels (which we all hoped to become) ever ate anything, let alone peanut butter. As the debate raged on, each of us sought guidance from a higher authority—our parents. When we compared answers the next day, we found that grown-ups could not agree on this critical theological point, either.

I sympathized with our parents years later, when Chelsea and her friends came to Bill and me with even weightier inquiries. By first grade, they were asking: “Where is heaven, and who gets to go there?” “Does God ever make a mistake?” “What does God look like?” “Why does God let people do bad things?” “Do angels have real bodies?” “Does God care if I squash a bug?” “Is the Devil a person inside or outside of us?”

Bill and I were struck by these questions, even as we struggled to provide thoughtful answers within the scope of a child's understanding. They reflected a much deeper spirituality than we generally give children credit for. And they strengthened my belief that children are born with the capacity for faith, hope, and love, and with a deep intuition into God's creative, intelligent, and unifying force. As child psychiatrist Robert Coles observes in his book
The Spiritual Life of Children,
“How young we are when we start wondering about it all, the nature of the journey and of the final destination.”

PEANUTS® reprinted by permission of United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

Like the potential to walk or to read, the potential for spirituality seems to be there from the beginning. A wonderful little book,
Children's Letters to God,
contains messages that are filled with hope and trust, humor and sensitivity, and an awesome sense of familiarity. “Dear God,” writes one young child, “I bet it is very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in our family, and I can never do it.” Another asks, “How did you know you were God?”

The inclination toward spirituality does not need to be planted in children, but it does need to be nurtured and encouraged to bloom. One way we do this is by teaching children to translate the spiritual impulse into the shared form of expression, in words and rituals, that religion provides.

Religion figures in my earliest memories of my family. My father came from a long line of Methodists, while my mother, who had not been raised in any church, taught Sunday school. During a recent visit, she joked that she had begun doing so in order to keep Hugh from sneaking out of his class. When a friend of mine asked her what the essence of her spiritual teaching was, she replied, simply and sincerely, “A sense of the good.”

We attended a big church with an active congregation, the First United Methodist Church in Park Ridge. The church was a center for preaching and practicing the social gospel, so important to our Methodist traditions. Our spiritual life as a family was spirited and constant. We talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied, and argued with God. Each night, we knelt by our beds to pray before we went to sleep. We said grace at dinner, thanking God for all the blessings bestowed. My brother Hugh had his own characteristic renditions, along the lines of “Good food, good meat, good God, let's eat!” But despite our occasional irreverence, God was always present to us, a much-esteemed, much-addressed member of the family.

Bill is a Southern Baptist who feels as close to his denomination as I do to mine. Over the years, we have attended each other's churches often, and Chelsea spent time in both until she was ready to decide, at age ten, to be confirmed as a Methodist. The particular choice was not as important to her father and me as was her commitment to being part of the fellowship and framework for spiritual development that church offers.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead felt that exposure to religion in childhood was important, because prayer and wonder are not so easy to learn in adulthood. She was also concerned that adults who had lacked spiritual models in childhood might be vulnerable as adults to the appeals of intolerant or unduly rigid belief. My own experiences confirm Mead's conviction. I have known parents who were not themselves religious but who conscientiously ensured that their children were exposed to at least one religious faith for these reasons. I have also met people who had turned away from the teachings or structure of the faith in which they had been raised but were inspired to return by their own children.

At a formal dinner recently, I sat next to a distinguished businessman who told me he had started reading the Hebrew Bible from the beginning. Even though he had been bar mitzvahed decades before, he had not thought of himself as a religious or spiritual man. But one day, while holding his daughter, he had pointed at the sunset and said, “Look at the beautiful painting God gave us tonight.” His little girl asked, “Who is God?” He decided that he owed it to her to introduce her to religious faith, just as his parents had introduced him. There is no substitute for this. If more parents introduced their children to faith and prayer at home, whether or not they participated in organized religious activity, I am sure there would be fewer calls for prayer in schools.

 

C
HURCHES, SYNAGOGUES
, mosques, and other religious institutions not only give children a grounding in spiritual matters but offer them experience in leadership and service roles where they can learn valuable social skills. A friend, reflecting on the role of formal religion in her childhood, remarked one day, “My church was my finishing school.” She recalled the first time she spoke in public, a one-line recitation as part of an Easter morning program when she was four. Each successive Easter, her part in the program grew larger. Her church leader showed her how to speak clearly and loudly. With every public performance, she gained greater self-confidence.

I knew what she meant. In my own church, I took my turn at cleaning the altar on Saturdays and reading Scripture lessons on Sundays. I participated in the Christmas and Easter pageants (learning a lesson in recovering poise the time I fainted in my angel costume in the overheated sanctuary) and read my confirmation essay on “What Jesus Means to Me” before the whole congregation.

Chelsea's Sunday school teachers in Little Rock and Washington have helped her and her peers to explore and express ideas, worries, and fears, from getting along with parents who “just don't understand” to dealing with teenage temptations. Churches are among the few places in the village where today's teenagers can let down their guard and let off steam among adults who care about them. Churches that make kids feel welcome and supported are doing more than involving them in worship. As I have mentioned, a survey of teenagers' attitudes and behaviors found that those who attend religious services regularly are less likely to experiment with risky behaviors like drug use. I wish more places of worship were open after school and on weekends to provide constructive activities for kids under adult supervision.

Some churches are becoming villages in themselves, offering members access to state-of-the-art technology, family centers, and adult discussion groups on topics like marriage and parenting. Many churches, like mine in Little Rock, offer preschool and day care programs, and some now include athletic facilities and even restaurants. These churches provide a social center for people of all ages.

But no matter how broadly churches and other places of worship are redefining and expanding their religious and social roles, the right to religious and spiritual expression extends beyond their boundaries. How do we protect that expression under the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion and its prohibition against any government “establishment” of religion? For children, this question often concerns the extent to which they may learn about religion and express their own religious convictions in our public schools. I share my husband's belief that “nothing in the First Amendment converts our public schools into religion-free zones, or requires all religious expression to be left behind at the schoolhouse door,” and that indeed “religion is too important in our history and our heritage for us to keep it out of our schools.”

On the other hand, we run into problems when people want to use governmental authority to promote school prayer or particular religious observances or to advocate sectarian religious beliefs. When public power is put behind specific religious views or expressions, it might infringe upon the companion freedom the First Amendment guarantees us to choose our own religious beliefs, including the right to choose to be nonreligious.

To bring reason and clarity to this often contentious issue, my husband asked Secretary of Education Richard Riley and Attorney General Janet Reno to develop a statement of principles concerning permissible religious activities in the public schools. The complete guidelines, which are available at your local school district office or the Department of Education, include the following:

• Students may participate in individual or group prayer during the school day, as long as they do so in a non-disruptive manner and when they are not engaged in school activities or instruction.
  
• Schools that generally open their facilities to extracurricular student groups should also make them available to student religious organizations on the same terms.
  
• Students should be free to express their beliefs about religion in school assignments, and their work should be judged by ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance.
  
• Schools may not provide religious instruction, but they may teach
  about
  the Bible or other scripture (in the teaching of history or literature, for example). They may also teach civic values and virtue, and the moral code that binds us together as a community, so long as they remain neutral with respect to the promotion of any particular religion.
  

This last point is particularly important, because it defines an area in which the role of religious institutions overlaps with the role of parents, schools, and the rest of the village: the responsibility of helping children to develop moral values, a social conscience, and the skills to deal with the issues they will confront in the larger world. Just as it is appropriate, often necessary, for schools and other institutions to help build character by teaching the values at the heart of religious creeds, it is also necessary for churches to connect the development of personal character to life in the world beyond home and church.

My church took seriously its responsibility to build a connection between religious faith and the greater good of a society full of all kinds of people. I received my earliest lessons about how we were expected to treat other people by singing songs like “Jesus loves the little children / All the little children of the world / Red and yellow, black and white / They are precious in His sight.” Those words stayed with me longer than many earnest lectures about race relations. (To this day I wonder how anyone who ever sang them could dislike someone solely for the color of his skin.)

My church's youth minister, the Reverend Donald Jones, arranged for my youth group to share worship and service projects with black and Hispanic teenagers in Chicago. We discussed civil rights and other controversial issues of the day, sometimes to the discomfort of certain adults in the congregation. Reverend Jones took a group of us to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speak at Orchestra Hall (despite some church members' suspicion that King was a Communist). We argued over the meaning of war to a Christian after seeing for the first time works of art like Picasso's
Guernica,
and the words of poets like T. S. Eliot and e. e. cummings inspired us to debate other moral issues.

I wish more churches—and parents—took seriously the teachings of every major religion that we treat one another as each of us would want to be treated. If that happened, we could make significant inroads on the social problems we confront.

Many parents do make the teaching of these values an essential component of religious instruction, and many others see them as a focus in themselves. Like me, however, they have undoubtedly learned to recognize the look of young eyes glazing over at the first hint of a long-winded explanation of some principle. Better a story that demonstrates the spiritual and human qualities we wish to transmit to young people. In our bedtime reading and prayer ritual when Chelsea was younger, Bill and I read children's versions of Bible stories to her. Cain and Abel exemplified envy and its consequences. David's conflict with Goliath illustrated the power of faith in the face of overwhelming odds. Queen Esther's courage in saving the Jews underscored the need for courage and careful planning before taking risky action. The Good Samaritan parable is an example of compassion toward people who are of different backgrounds. Religion is not just about one's relationship with God, but about what values flow out of that relationship, how we follow them in our daily lives and especially in our treatment of our neighbors next door and all over the world.