Experts agree, Ann Hurlbut writes, "that the loss of natural play opportunities in an urbanized world of smaller families and a 'push-button civilization' meant that play, alas, could no longer be left to kids. Read her article and on online discussion about the state of (child's) play.

Hurlbut writes:

Our era of superachievement angst and No Child Left Behind duress is not the first time adults have worried that academic pressures are prematurely crowding out the kind of hands-on playtime that kids love. It will also not be the last time that the crusade to restore the primacy of play runs the risk of eroding the very playfulness the crusaders are eager to see more of. The paradox of the endeavor seems all but unavoidable. Play advocates bolster their case by proclaiming play's social, emotional, and cognitive benefits, as David Elkind has recently done in The Power of Play: How Spontaneous, Imaginative Activities Lead to Happier, Healthier Children. Yet the more successful such advocates are in their instrumental defense of play, the further they stray from an appreciation of play as precisely the opposite—a pursuit that serves children's own (not always obviously constructive) purposes, rather than the didactic designs of their elders.

It is a conversation reminiscent f our earlier item on Boys Gone Mild.

On Friday, David Brooks had a provocative op-ed in the New York Times that made the argument that most efforts to teach moral behavior fail because the instruction is based on a misconception of human nature. Here are highlights:

A little while ago, a national study authorized by Congress found that abstinence education programs don’t work. That gave liberals a chance to feel superior because it turns out that preaching traditional morality to students doesn’t change behavior.

But in this realm, nobody has the right to feel smug. American schools are awash in moral instruction — on sex, multiculturalism, environmental awareness and so on — and basically none of it works. Sex ed doesn’t change behavior. Birth control education doesn’t produce measurable results. The fact is, schools are ineffectual when it comes to values education. You can put an adult in front of a classroom or an assembly, and that adult can emit words, but don’t expect much impact.

That’s because all this is based on a false model of human nature. It’s based on the idea that human beings are primarily deciders. If you pour them full of moral maxims, they will be more likely to decide properly when temptation arises. If you pour them full of information about the consequences of risky behavior, they will decide to exercise prudence and forswear unwise decisions.

That’s the way we’d like to think we are, but that’s not the way we really are, and it’s certainly not the way teenagers are. There is no central executive zone in the brain where all information is gathered and decisions are made. There is no little homunculus up there watching reality on a screen and then deciding how to proceed. In fact, the mind is a series of parallel processes and loops, bidding for urgency.

We’re not primarily deciders. We’re primarily perceivers. The body receives huge amounts of information from the world, and what we primarily do is turn that data into a series of generalizations, stereotypes and theories that we can use to navigate our way through life. Once we’ve perceived a situation and construed it so that it fits one of the patterns we carry in our memory, we’ve pretty much rigged how we’re going to react, even though we haven’t consciously sat down to make a decision.

To make this point more concrete, Brooks gives the example of a teenage couple in a parked car. What will influence their decision to have sex? Is it what the learn in sex education class either at school or church? Brooks says no:

When a teenage couple is in the backseat of a car about to have sex or not, or unprotected sex or not, they are not autonomous creatures making decisions based on classroom maxims or health risk reports. Their behavior is shaped by the subconscious landscapes of reality that have been implanted since birth.

Did they grow up in homes where they felt emotionally secure? Do they often feel socially excluded? Did they grow up in a neighborhood where promiscuity is considered repulsive? Did they grow up in a sex-drenched environment or an environment in which children are buffered from it? (According to a New Zealand study, firstborns are twice as likely to be virgins at 21 than later-born children.)

In other words, the teenagers in that car won’t really be alone. They’ll be in there with a whole web of attitudes from friends, family and the world at large. Some teenagers will derive from those shared patterns a sense of subconscious no-go zones. They’ll regard activities in that no-go zone the way vegetarians regard meat — as a taboo, beyond immediate possibility.

Deciding is conscious and individual, but perceiving is subconscious and communal. The teen sex programs that actually work don’t focus on the sex. They focus on the environment teens live in. They work on the substratum of perceptions students use to orient themselves in the world. They don’t try to lay down universal rules, but apply the particular codes that have power in distinct communities. They understand that changing behavior changes attitudes, not the other way around.

Read the entire column (subscription required).

Does Brooks' argument make sense? If Brooks is correct, doesn't this reinforce the importance of communities (including the faith community) in forming moral attitudes and behavior? Does it suggest that parents and the Church need to rethink how we approach the moral education of our children?

"Teen birthrates continued their 15-year decline in 2005 as adolescents increasingly got into the habit of using condoms during sexual intercourse," writes Marc Kaufman in The Washington Post.

The story includes another bit of good news:

About 47 percent of high school students -- 4.6 million teens -- reported having had sexual intercourse in 2005, down from 54 percent in 1991.

And a bit of bad news:

While teen sexual behavior appeared to be less risky, more young people were arrested for serious violent crime in 2005 than in each of the previous three years. The arrest rate of 17 crimes per 1,000 juveniles, however, remained significantly below the peak rate of 52 per 1,000 in 1993.

The Pew Research Center has released a new study that shows a marked increase in the desire for part-time work versus full-time work in recent years. The preference for full time work has dropped for both stay-at-home moms and working moms. Fathers, on the the other hand, still prefer full-time work:

In the span of the past decade, full-time work outside the home has lost some of its appeal to mothers. This trend holds both for mothers who have such jobs and those who don't?

Among working mothers with minor children (ages 17 and under), just one-in-five (21%) say full-time work is the ideal situation for them, down from the 32% who said this back in 1997, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Fully six-in-ten (up from 48% in 1997) of today's working mothers say part-time work would be their ideal, and another one-in-five (19%) say she would prefer not working at all outside the home.

There's been a similar shift in preferences among at-home mothers with minor children. Today just 16% of these mothers say their ideal situation would be to work full time outside the home, down from the 24% who felt that way in 1997. Nearly half (48%) of all at-home moms now say that not working at all outside the home is the ideal situation for them, up from the 39% who felt that way in 1997.

The lack of enthusiasm that mothers of all stripes have for full-time work outside the home isn't shared by fathers – more than seven-in-ten (72%) fathers say the ideal situation for them is a full-time job.

. . .

Among women with minor children, views on this question vary little by income or education level. There are minor differences by race. Black mothers are more likely than whites to say full-time work is ideal; both groups are about equally likely to say no outside employment is ideal.2

Married mothers are somewhat more likely than unmarried mothers to consider no or part-time employment ideal; this pattern occurs in both the 1997 and 2007 Pew surveys. However, unmarried mothers are much less likely to prefer full-time work today (26%) than a decade ago (49%). A plurality of today's unmarried mothers now prefer part-time work (46%), while 26% prefer not working outside the home and 26% prefer full-time work.

Mothers with younger children (ages 0 to 4 years) also are less likely to prefer full-time work today (16%) than a decade ago (31%). A narrow plurality (37%) preferred part-time work in 1997; today 48% of mothers with younger children prefer part-time work, while 36% prefer not working outside the home and 16% prefer full-time work. The preferences of mothers with older children (ages 5 to 17) are about the same today as they were a decade ago.

The decline in mothers saying full-time work is ideal for them occurred about equally among mothers with higher and lower education levels.

Among all working mothers, there's a strong disconnect between the kind of job they say would be ideal and the kind of job they actually have. Some 60% of working mothers say they'd prefer to work part-time, but -- according to figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – only about a quarter (24%) of all working mothers have a part-time job.

Read it all here.

As the father of a toddler, I can certainly understand the desire for part-time work. But, why the large change in attitude? What has happened to increase the desire for part-time work? And what does this say about the lack of interest in fathers in part-time work? Finally, what does this tell the Church about public policy advocacy to support families?

Katerina Ivanovna has a good discussion of these results at the group Catholic blog Vox Nova here.

Fuller Seminary's Youth Ministry Resource page has an article that discusses what sort of response Youth Ministers might make to a recent study that shows how profoundly a young girl's internalized decision to see being attractive as more important than being competent can become.

"Researchers studying the influence of self-objectification, meaning the tendency to view our own bodies as ‘objects,’ have found that the way a girl feels about her body predicts how she’ll throw a softball. If she has learned that her body is an object and she needs to be concerned about her appearance at all times, she is far more likely to 'throw like a girl.'

Most of us probably don’t include softball throwing in our list of youth ministry goals. But if it’s true that the way girls feel about their bodies affects the way they toss a ball, then it’s all the more true that the way they feel about their bodies impacts the way they view the One who created them in His image. As youth workers who seek to create space for this Holy One to work, recent research and media reports can help us respond to three ‘mores’ that bring new twists to not-so-new issues for our girls."

Instead of just dismissing this as a funny little bit of news, consider this quote from the article:

Over 77,000 invasive surgical procedures were performed on teens 18 and younger in 2005, representing a 15% increase since 2000. While that in and of itself is shocking, consider this: minors cannot undergo these surgeries unless their parents consent. In most cases, since these procedures are not covered by medical insurance, the parents pay for the surgery as well.

The article goes on to list some action points that Youth leaders and clergy might consider as a way to respond to these pressures.

There's no mention of how the same sorts of societal pressures are affecting young men in this article, though there have been a number of articles and books recently that have pointed out that some young boys are struggling in an "overly-feminized" classroom paradigm.

Read the rest here: Fuller's Center for Youth and Family Ministry | Youth Ministry Resources

Care to share any strategies that have worked for you?

In an age of "sex buddies," "friends with benefits" and "sexual friendships," father-daughter purity balls have become an increasingly popular trend among conservative Christians in the campaign for abstinence instead of condoms. Since the first event was held in Colorado Springs in 1998, the concept -- that holding on to one's virginity until marriage is ordered by God -- has spread to 48 states according to the Chicago Tribune.

The debate about this movement is whether it promotes abstinence or gives girls the message that they are property belonging to the male head of household until turned over to a husband. Is this a positive or negative image of female sexuality?

A report commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services and released this year found that four federally funded abstinence-education programs offered in public schools and by faith-based community groups have had no effect on sexual activity. The study found that youth in the programs were no more likely to abstain from sex in four to six years after they began participating than those who were not in the programs.

But on the other hand,

Studies by sociologists have shown that girls who spend more time with their fathers are more likely to have higher self-esteem, go to college and get better jobs than those who do not. According to Wilson, if a young woman can go to her father to get answers for core questions, such as "Am I beautiful?" she won't need to seek confirmation of her worth from other males.

During some purity balls, fathers present their daughters with gold purity bands. In Peoria, the daughters presented their fathers with gold keys and the fathers signed forms pledging to live a pure life and protect their daughters' purity.

*This is a suggested vow for the girls to say as they hand over a key to their fathers:

Dad, this is the key to my heart. Please hold it for me until my wedding day and give it to my husband.

*Fathers are asked to sign a Purity Covering and Covenant that states:

I (daughter's name) father (or mentor) choose before God to cover her as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband and Father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide and pray over her and my family as the High priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.

(The daughter then signs it as a witness)

Read the article here.

This item was prompted primarily by a desire to tell as many people as possible what a wonderful movie Juno is, but to give it a little more intellectual respectability, we included a link to Ruth Marcus' recent column on talking to her daughters about sex. And that's when things got complicated.

She writes:

This is the conundrum that modern parents, boomers and beyond, confront when matters of sex arise. The bright-line rules that our parents laid down, with varying degrees of conviction and rather low rates of success, aren't -- for most of us, anyway -- either relevant or plausible. When mommy and daddy didn't get married until they were 35, abstinence until marriage isn't an especially tenable claim.

Nor is it one I'd care to make. Would I prefer -- as if my preference much matters -- that my daughters abstain until marriage? No; in fact, I think that would be a mistake. But I'm not especially comfortable saying that, quite so directly, to my children, partly because that conversation gets so complicated, so quickly.

She moves on to the pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears, and then concludes:

And so the message I choose from Spears's pregnancy--and the one, once I recovered my composure, I ultimately delivered, is this: It could happen to you--even if you're the kind of "conscientious" girl who, as Jamie Lynn's mother described her, is never late for curfew. And so, whenever you choose to have sex, unless you are ready to have a baby, don't do it without contraception.

This is not only good advice, but probably all of the good advice one can manage in a 700 word op-ed piece. Still, there is protection and there is protection. Sexual relationship go awry in any number of ways less dire than an unwanted pregnancy, and young people need to be prepared for potential emotional as well as physical reprecussions. Such conversations are even more difficult to conduct with the necessary honesty and delicacy than The Talk. Yet they are so important, so worth having, that parents must be willing to have them badly.

Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily summarizes some interesting research on teens and lying. The research focused on the issue of when teens thought it was okay to lie to their parents or to their friends. The results are interesting: teens are much more likely to think it is okay to lie to their parents when their parents direct them to do something immoral (such as not to be friends with a person of another race) than other circumstances, but teens are much more likely to lie to their parents than to a friend:

Serena Perkins and Elliot Turiel came up with six situations in which lying might be justified, then asked 64 teens aged 12 to 17 which ones were acceptable and which were not. The situations are below:

Moral:
* Parents don't want their child to befriend another teen because he/she is of a different race
* Parents want their child to fight another teen because he/she had been teased by them

Personal:
* Parents don't want their child dating a teen they don't like
* Parents think the club their child wants to join is a waste of time

Prudential:
* Parents object to their child not wanting to finish her/his homework
* Parents don't want their child to ride a motorcycle

In each case, the participants were asked whether it would be acceptable for a 16-year-old to lie about doing (or not doing) these things despite their parents' objections. . . .

[N]early all teens believe it's okay to lie to your parents when you've defied their expectations to commit an immoral act. A statistically significant portion of older teens (age 15-17) believe lying is okay when the parents have personal objections to their behavior, but significantly fewer younger teens (age 12-14) believe this type of lie is acceptable. When the parents seem to be looking out for the child's best interests (the prudential domain), most teens believe lying is wrong -- though significantly more older teens still believe lying is acceptable in this case as well.

But Perkins and Turiel went further: They asked a separate group of 64 teens the same questions, except the role of parents was completely replaced by the role of a friend. Is it okay to lie to a friend? . . .

Both groups were significantly less likely to say it was okay to lie to friends in the moral and personal domains -- even if a friend asked you to do something immoral, about 50 percent of teens still said it was not okay to lie to them about the fact that you took the moral high ground (of course, telling the truth might be the higher moral course in this situation). In the prudential domain, the pattern was reversed, and lies were seen as more justified by both groups of teens.

In many ways these results aren't especially surprising, but it is interesting to note when the differences in age groups come into play. Younger teens are less likely to believe lying about personal / prudential situations is okay compared to older teens, suggesting that older teens justify their lies based on their sense of autonomy.

But there are limits to this trend: the researchers also asked both groups whether it was acceptable to lie about a misdeed (breaking their parents' / friends' cell phone), and all agreed that this was unacceptable.

Read it all here.