Teaching to love

Commentary

These words of Pope Francis are a call to educate on sexuality. He defines it as one of the most pressing responsibilities of parents. As he says, it is a positive and prudent necessity, which can only be understood within the framework of an education for love, where healthy modesty is cared for, and where knowledge of the meaning, respect, and esteem for the values of male and female sexual difference is included.

Our children spend years learning to read and write, mathematics, English, physics and chemistry, foreign languages, and technology. They discover and accept that practicing their favorite sport requires hours of training, perseverance, and self-improvement. Would it not be a strange contradiction – a suspicious stupidity – to think that the only thing that does not need education, nor values to grow and mature, is the adolescents’ sexuality, the impulses, and tendencies of their masculine and feminine bodies?

We parents cannot evade the matter, placing the education and maturation of our children’s sexuality in the hands of media, sources, and subjects who, of course, do not love them as we do, do not want them to mature, do not want them to learn to respect their body and the body of others, nor can they teach them true and good love.

If we parents want the best for our children, how can we leave the education of their sexuality, so decisive for their future life, in the hands of others, who can do them much harm?

Children and adolescents must be helped to learn to protect themselves from bad habits and those uses of the body that they see in movies or social networks, which render them egocentric, frivolous, irresponsible, and greedy for the playful and sensual use of bodies. As human beings, male or female, we do not have a body as a thing with which we can do whatever we want. We are bodies. Therefore, what we do to the body, we do to ourselves, to our person. The wrong use of the body deteriorates and impoverishes the personal subject.

To explain to our children that complete management of what we are – spirit, soul, and masculine or feminine body – does not take away freedom but rather guarantees it. It is essential to have learned to be a master of oneself to love and be loved. Those who are slaves to their impulses will not be able to love us truly, as they will only look for us to satisfy themselves, and then they will cast us aside like garbage that gets in the way. All this and more, our children must learn from their parents, at home, taking advantage of daily life occasions together.

We must never forget the great secret of parenthood: if parents, as spouses, love each other and live together, then they possess one of the most potent weapons for the education of love and their children’s sexuality. That weapon -the union of love their parents formed – is a seed sown in the child´s most profound intimacy and a good reference for all their adult life.