WISDOM...

...and common sense, and kindness, at an excellent conference sponsored by the Diocese of Shrewsbury, tackling the question of  sex education, and the respective roles of parents and teachers. Main message: parents often find it hard to talk to their children and help, support and encouragement is available. Very good news: an excellent new handbook, just out, on this topic: info here...

The conference drew large numbers of teachers and parents, along with school nurses, clergy, and school governors. For the first time, here was a major conference tackling this issue not with polemics or with ghastly schemes for showing children lurid materials or exhorting them to assume immoral behaviour to be the norm. There was immense interest and enthusiasm and the mood was upbeat and positive, the discussions thoughtful and informative.

We are going to hear a great deal more on all of this...a new mood and style on sex-ed is in the air, especially among Catholics who have long been wary of the standard got-funded propaganda line on this (ie the pretence that giving children contraceptives will lower the pregnancy rate: it doesn't, and of course is immoral  and cruel anyway).

Guest speaker at the conference was Fr Jaroslaw Szymczak from the Family Support Foundation in Poland. He has worked for some years helping troubled families, and also working with young people in reformatories....his talk, focusing the needs of the young, was inspiring and illuminating. It's not rocket science: the need for families to spend time together, for parents to listen to their children, for children to know that their parents love and value them, is all very straightforward...but there are so many pressures on families today, and so many young people whose experience of family break-up means that they feel unable to trust, and so many people looking for love that they have failed to find at home and then seek in all the wrong places...

It was a privilege to be part of this conference (Auntie was there in v. humble capacity, helping with some admin.) - and extremely interesting to realise that, among much else, the Church in Poland has been getting to grips with some social problems in ways that we in the rest of Europe would do well to study and emulate...