For the last couple of weeks I’ve caught the end of the show “The Biggest Loser.” After this show there’s one called “Parenthood.” Last week “Parenthood” looked interesting, so yesterday, I thought I’d stay up and watch an hour of it.
In this episode two parents find out that their daughter (I think she’s supposed to be 16 or 17) has begun having sex with her boyfriend. The girl’s parents find this out in a terrible way when the girl accidentally calls her parents on her iphone by hitting it with her foot during sex. When her parents answered their phone while they were in the car they heard ….something they did not want to hear.
A little later, the girl’s mother confronts her and asks her if she’s having sex with her boyfriend, to which the girl responds, “no, no, no.” A few days later she comes to her mom and says, “Okay yes, we’re having sex.” Her mother responds with a look of shock and begins to ask her if she’s using condoms and “being safe”, if she’s being forced, etc. The girl says she’s using a condom and that she wasn’t being forced, to which her mother responded with more looks of disbelief and nothing else. When her father finds out he avoids her and tells her mother that he doesn’t have anything to say to her. At some point during the show the daughter breaks down and doesn’t understand why she’s being shunned and judged by her father and her mother only says, “we wish that you would have waited”. Her father at some point says, “I don’t ever want you to get hurt.”
This episode at first glance would seem pretty normal for a modern family. As I watched it, I empathised with these people more than I ever have with characters on a television show because I realized that this is the world in which I am parenting my children. I had a few panicked moments of horror saying over and over to myself, “THIS CANNOT, WILL NOT, happen to Clare or Mikey.” I was stuttering in my thoughts with sheer terror at the situation the parents in the show were faced with. I kept thinking, “What would I do? What would I say? How would I react?”
Towards the end of the show the father was talking to his sister (who is a parent of an incredibly rebellious teen who had at that point in the show run away). Of his emotional distance from his daughter he said, “I figured what she needs now is space”, to which his sister responds saying something like “When they think they know better than you and when they push you away that’s when you need to show up, to push harder, to be there. It may be too late for me.” I thought that was great. That’s exactly what a parent needs to do, to show up for their work, to guide their children, to lay down the law and show them how to pull themselves out of the miry clay.
It was strange watching this show as a Catholic parent. I found it odd that the girl’s parents didn’t seem to have any idea of why they were upset by their daughter having pre-marital sex. They also didn’t seem to address what they wanted their daughter to wait for. They merely said, “We wish you would have waited.” These parents seemed ill prepared to talk to their daughter about this situation and the only questions they posed to her were to ask if she was using a condom and if she was being forced. I fear this is the case with many parents today.
Most parents will acknowledge that they are upset about their child losing his or her virgininty, but don’t understand why and don’t know what to say or how to talk to their children. I hope and pray this never happens to us as parents and I feel more and more blessed and hopeful because I know that Jon and I are equipped with Christ’s truth. Thank God for John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. Thank God we have heard the good news and know the freedom that the Church proclaims about human sexuality. God help us when our children hit their teen years (or pre-teen years) and start to feel society’s pressure to have pre-marital sex.
This show just reminded me that we as parents need to pray SO hard for our children. Please pray for us as we struggle to raise up holy souls. Dear God use us in our brokenness and help us to be instruments that bring you glory.
Gah, what a horrible episode. I don’t recommend that show, but I guess I’m glad that watching it stirred up this reflection.
UIOGD.
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