Some other things that occur to me, in no particular order are:

1) Teach your children a truly Catholic sense of sin and forgiveness. Too often, in Christian circles and in the wider culture, people talk about “being a good person” versus “being a bad person”. The implication being “good people don’t do X” — and thus if one transgresses, one is either cast out as a “bad person”, or one revises one’s ideas of right and wrong. This is totally different from a traditional Catholic understanding of sin and forgiveness, and I think it leads a lot of people astray.

2) Emphasize that things have a purpose. Sins such as lust, greed, adultery, fornication, gluttony, homosexual activity, sloth, lying, etc. all involve perverting the purpose of human acts. It’s not simply a matter of “you’re not allowed to do that”, but that God intends us to work in certain ways — ways which often don’t fit with our desires. This doesn’t apply only to gay people — all of us have desires, sometimes near crippling desires, which are not in keeping with our purpose. A “everything is okay so long as you don’t violate a couple of key sexual norms or kill anyone” attitude is going to make morality seem like it falls much more heavily on some than on others.

3) Help your child understand from an early age that often, through no fault of your own, you don’t get what you yearn for — either temporarily or ever. You may feel terribly in love with someone, but not be able to “do anything about it”. Or you may wish very much that there was someone you could be happy with, yet never find anyone.

What I would like to know — and I am not asking you personally — is how you teach kids not to do something (say, have sex before marriage), and at the same time make it clear they can come to you if they disregard your advice and something goes wrong (say, they get pregnant). Another thing I would like to know is how parents are supposed to teach their children what the Church teaches about homosexuality, when there’s a not insignificant chance that a child will turn out to be gay. They are two rather different matters, in my opinion, but I think they are both cases where it would be very difficult for Catholic parents to get it right.

I agree that one question which we need to ask is who is part of the “hook up culture.” I myself do not know. I don’t run in the circles where it happens, or if it does, I’ve been left entirely clueless of it (I have only one friend I know of, an agnostic, who is of that culture, and he knows quite well my disapproval of it). Yet, when I explore the net, and the forums all over the net, and see what is being discussed, it seems quite strong and common with the youth today. It is a major problem, though of course, there are people like me, singles who are outside of it. I do know why I am not a part of it; but I don’t know why everyone is not a part of it. One question that needs to be asked of those who are not, is it lack of opportunity(temptation) or morals? And if it is morals, what exactly was it that led them to hold fast; what is it that really worked. I think interviews of such people would do wonders.

If we want to talk sex ed in schools — I’m entirely okay with abolishing all of it: contraceptive-based and abstinence based. Neither kind has proved to be very affective at much of anything, and I don’t see how we got into thinking that teen agers (who mostly don’t like to listen to their teachers in regards to anything else) would listen to them when it comes to not having sex or always using birth control.

(Plus, I don’t even send my kids to school, so sex ed is not the first thing I think of in this regard.)

I guess when you said “stop trying to lower the incidence” I pictured that as advice to individual people. As the father of three daughters, I certainly don’t picture my wife and I saying: “Statisticaly, one and a half of you will have sex by age seventeen, so do please use birth control. Mum and Dad won’t be judgemental.”

Rather, we’ll put a lot of work into trying to make sure that our children follow the course which we think would be best for them in the long run: waiting to have sex will they get married. And I think it would be better for society if more parents did the same. (One can nudge these things a big, for instance my socializing primarily with other families of with a smilar set of standards.)

But as for sex ed and such — I don’t think that the national or even the city level is the right way of dealing with these issues. Schools should teach academic subjects and leave the parenting to parents.

WJ,

Probably one of the major questions would be how much the population is every actually part of the “hook up culture”.

Darwin,

No, but there may be a certain rate of shoplifting (or sexual activity among young people) that it is easier to live with than to do something about. Every human life is priceless (at least if the people are white, affluent Americans), but a price is still put on human lives by organizations like the EPA in order to do cost-benefit analyses on projects.

If it was lower in the past due to social and cultural mores, one must assume that if social and cultural mores changed it could be that low again.

I am not sure that social and cultural mores are changed by sex-education classes in the sixth and seventh grades. If the general culture says “have sex” and your sixth-grade teacher says “don’t,” it is the culture that is going to win out. And I am not sure we can have a less permissive society. That would be turning back the clock. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a permissive but responsible society, though.

I suppose there is some good to raising the average age at which young people have sex (in our culture), but from the sex-in-marriage-only perspective, it is delaying premarital sex, not preventing it.

Well, there’s no arguing with statistics–at a certain stage of the game, anyhow–so without countering your point I’ll just remark that, strangely, all my anecdotal evidence suggests the opposite. Having lived in Germany for a period and having traveled extensively through most of Western Europe (though not in the U.K.), I encountered many young people “in relationships” who were sexually active, but who all seemed to be in more or less “serious” relationships. Friends from the continent in the U.S. have also remarked to me, several times, about the strangeness of the U.S. “hook-up” culture, which they didn’t quite seem to know how to navigate. (I do think you would be hard pressed to find a more permissive sexual environment than the average U.S. university.) This evidence, as I said, is merely anecdotal, and there are probably ways of accounting for it–socio-economic strata of the people I know from Europe, etc.–that can be reconciled with the statistical evidence you provide.

It appears that one professor Daniel Schmitt has done a study on promiscuity in different countries (defined by one night stands, “poaching” people from other long term relationships, etc.) which ranked the UK #1 among large developed countries and the US #6. A couple links:

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article5257166.ece

http://www.marketingcharts.com/topics/asia-pacific/study-finds-uk-men-women-most-promiscuous-7051/bradley-promiscuity-index-western-countriesjpg/

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20030803/ai_n14555793/

David,

Two points occur to me:

1) Just because something seems to appear in equal quantities in two places does not necessarily mean that it ought to be accepted as “natural” and not discouraged. Whether one does that has a lot to do with whether one considers it wrong. If shoplifting were equally prevalent in the US and UK, that wouldn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t try to reduce it.

2) Even if teen promiscuity is similar in the US and Europe now — it was much lower in both places a century ago than it is now. If it was lower in the past due to social and cultural mores, one must assume that if social and cultural mores changed it could be that low again.

Wj,
That would be a great book.

Cathy,
Schools are great institution for cultural norming. Their effectiveness toward any given problem varies though. When a college girl says she is going out to get laid, she will not encounter disdain at the idea. If a college boy says he is going out to get trashed, he likewise isn’t scorned. This isn’t the case in other cultures.

If it’s the same in the US as in Europe, maybe it’s just a natural, to-be-expected phenomenon, and people should stop trying to lower the incidence and just try to make young people responsible.

If one is to believe this study:

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3324401.html

It sounds like it’s more a matter of teens in the US simply using birth control a lot less than teens elsewhere. (The percentage of US teen pregnancies that are aborted is also much lower than elsewhere — for example, only about 1/2 of Sweden’s teen abortion ratio.)

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3324401.pdf

Clearly, there’s some big cultural difference which is probably the source of this discrepency. I think MZ is dead on in pointing out that claiming that this is the result of lack of education is foolish.

But it doesn’t seem to be an issue where US teens are having more sex despite more puritanical cultural attitudes. They’re having the same amount of sex, but using birth control less — whether because they’re careless, or because a larger percentage of US teens actually _want_ to have children than is the case in other developed nations.