Dr Gerard O’Shea says he believes in parents; possibly much more than they believe in themselves. On a late September evening, at the parish centre under St Mary’s Cathedral, a small but eager gathering of around 40 parents, religious, teachers and sexuality educators turned out to hear from one the Church’s most eminent sexuality education specialists.
Throughout the night, his comments were peppered with tiny affirmations of parents’ essential role in being icons of love and the primary and unassailable educators of their children in the meaning of sexuality.
Most parents want to do the right thing by their children, he said, and even those dismissive of Church teaching on sexuality have embraced the methods he has been tracing for around 15 years.
“Let’s get serious. What the Church has to offer is incredible – people just don’t know it yet. Until we get out there and tell it, they’re going to be missing out,” Dr O’Shea told the gathering.
“This is not something they do not want to hear, it is something they do want to hear and when you hear the truth it goes straight to the heart.”
Dr O’Shea, now a senior lecturer at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne, literally wrote the book when it comes to training children in a well integrated sexuality, authoring As I Have Loved You for parents pre-adolescent and adolescent children, published last year.
Like every other parent on the planet, he has made his mistakes.
“Don’t do what I did,” he said, remembering his first attempt to provide sexuality education to his eldest child, his now-25 year old son, when he was around nine-years-old.
Keenly aware of his responsibility as a father, Dr O’Shea thought it would be a good idea to take his son for an ‘educational’ drive,’ following the traditional wisdom that sex education is principally about providing clinical details of sexual intercourse.
“I wouldn’t have to look at him, he couldn’t look at me, and he couldn’t get away,” Dr O’Shea said of his intentions.
“I gave him every detail in that long 45 minutes. I told him everything he would ever need to know about sex,” he said, remembering how his son had recoiled in horror.
“It was the wrong approach.”
Approaches offered by others, inside and outside the Church, were no better. On arriving at his first assignment as a school principal, he found the existing sexuality education program wanting.
“It didn’t conform to Catholic teaching so I said, ‘we’re not doing it any more’,” Dr O’Shea said. “You can do that in Melbourne because every Catholic school is independent.”
The responsibility fell to him to devise another way of going about it for his students and, most importantly, his children.
Dr O’Shea decided to take his own medicine, sitting down with his wife to devise what they, as parents and as a married couple, wanted for their children:
“We want our children to live a fulfilling and happy life in time and eternity,” they wrote. “To discover their vocation … to have an opportunity to follow it.
“We believe their best chance of being happy is to live as God intended … We want them to use the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of society [drugs, casual sex, exploitative relationships] … to develop at their own pace … [and] to be there for them as they need us; and remain part of their adulthood because they want us to.”
It was the beginning of a project that would eventually see him go on to develop To Know, Worship and Love with renowned Melbourne bio-ethicist, Professor Nicholas Tonti-Filipini.
The school program was first run at a Catholic school in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne.
About 20 per cent of the parents resisted the initial invitation to attend an information evening, so he rang them. Still, five parents resisted, so he paid them a personal visit.
“The thing is, is it important?” he told the gathering.
It was a program he would repeat every year thereafter, for ten years, before he retired from his school principal posting and was targeted at Year 7s, with Year 6s and any other interested person from the school, invited to attend.
The hard sell is not something he is afraid of. In one instance, his Archbishop asked him to calm a situation in which a group of angry parents had erupted at the local priest’s decision to ban pro-contraception, ‘pro-choice’ family planning groups from access to parish children.
A group of outraged parents announced they would go ahead and contract their services off-site, anyway.
In an effort at reconciliation, Dr O’Shea addressed the parents at a public meeting on the content and method of authentic Catholic sexuality education.
It was the most frightening assembly he had ever stood before, he said, but the outcome of the night was one not even he could have envisaged.
“I would open my mouth to say something and then they would shoot me down,” he remembered.
“But after about 1.5 hours, almost all of them came up to apologise.
One woman said, ‘you made me realise that when we are talking about sex education we are not talking about the act of sexual intercourse; we are talking about what it means to be human’.”
The best place for kids to learn about healthy sexuality is not the school, Dr O’Shea said, it is in the home, with parents whose relationship mirrors their love.
That education should follow the ‘Four Essential Principles of Christian Education in Human Sexuality’ in the Church’s landmark book of instruction in this area, The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality, authored by medical and theological specialists and co-ordinated by Australian Bishop Peter Elliott.
“Each child is unique and should be formed individually, that’s the first principle. How can that happen in a classroom? I just leave that there as a question,” Dr O’Shea said.
The other principles stipulate that the moral dimension should always be included in explanations; that formation in chastity and timely information about sexuality be provided in the ‘broadest possible context of education for love’; and that information should be provided clearly and delicately at a time appropriate for the individual child.
The age for beginning this kind of education with children varies anywhere from eight to 14.
A firm believer in Maria Montessori’s developmental stages (said to occur around every three years), Dr O’Shea says parents will know when the right time arrives, usually around the age of nine:
“There is a change of mood … they are bit irritable, a bit short with you; you know something is going on.
“For some it happens around the age of nine, for some it is much older.”
If at all possible, mothers should teach girls and fathers, boys. In both scenarios, parents should make a regular appointment with their child.
“If you don’t do that when they are at the right age, if you come at them when they are 15, laying down the law, they’re not going to be listening because you didn’t have time for them prior to that,” Dr O’Shea said.
“Don’t start with ‘oh, I’ll tell you what happens’, start with a deep conversation with them that is ongoing and then you would have established your credibility as somebody worthwhile to talk with.
“They can pin you to the wall but they start to see you as a person they can talk to about deeper things.”
After the painfully awkward car-ride he experienced with his first child, Dr O’Shea said he realised that blunt and specific information about the act of sexual intercourse was not the place to start.
This stands in stark contrast to contemporary secular approaches to sexuality education which put great emphasis on providing explicit, clinically precise information about sexual intercourse and harm minimisation at a relatively early age.
But children recoil from information for which they are not ready, Dr O’Shea said, resulting in embarrassed hilarity in classroom situations and extreme discomfort and reticence when delivered by parents.
Making a weekly appointment on Sundays with his youngest son, then-aged nine, was one of the best things he ever did. “Moral principles are felt before they are articulated … you build them through long apprenticeship and, eventually, you say what they are.”
“It is about clear information, delicately given, but not all at once,” Dr O’Shea said.
But neither is it the shamed-faced, puritanical approach to which some in previous generations were subjected.
His generation was one which received the message the wrong way round, he said: “Here’s the moral principle and here you apply it.”
Context and honesty are key.
“You can’t say ‘hey, I’ve got something to tell you. Come inside and we’ll kneel in front of the statue of Our Lady and light a candle’ … they’ve actually got to know what you’ve said”.
Within 12 months, he had gotten through most of the things he needed to say to his youngest son (five years later, and his weekly appointments with his now-14-year-old son are still ongoing).
The teaching content of his approach consists of four areas, or stages, as detailed in As I Have Loved You; it doesn’t begin with explicit information about sexual intercourse but about the nature and meaning of the human person (‘Changing and growing: puberty and fertility’, ‘Friendship, vocation, marriage and family’, and ‘Faith and morality’, follow).
Human beings are spiritual and material, he said; they have a will and can choose to love and do what is right.
“Love is what God does … Jesus is the one who showed us that love in a human person has quite distinct realities behind it; you need a human body to love … the human body is meant to express love,” Dr O’Shea said.
From there, the course continues to save a more explicit discussion of sex for later, exploring how humans show love to one another through the corporeal works of mercy, and through true friendships as distinct from exploitative ones.
An extensive conversation about the nature and meaning of friendship and vocation follows, culminating in an understanding that the best gift any person has to give is their self.
“There’s something about this age [years 5-7] that is absolutely focussed on the major questions of philosophy, they love it … What’s the difference between a rock and a tree and a dog and a human being? That’s matter to keep them going for ages.
“You’re not directly hitting them with sexuality information at first, you are starting to make them think about these things … Each of these levels has a sexuality and as you rise up the hierarchy of being, sexuality means something different at each level. You are starting to introduce that kind of understanding.”
Love is defined for children as having been revealed in the Trinity and possessing five characteristics: it is free, permanent, unselfish, unlimited and embodied in a gift of self for the other.
When this is understood, he says, “Now they are ready to hear the information you thought you had to start out with in the beginning.
“What you’ve got to do is start to build the context and make the case for married love, bit by bit. It’s a long process and you can’t do it in a three minute sound bite…”
Parents should not underestimate their own abilities in this area, or those of their spouses.
“Generally speaking, when I have spoken about this, parents say ‘I want to do this; I want to be a good parent’. I’ve never yet met anybody who didn’t want to do this.”
He is regularly asked by mothers about how they can go about implementing the kind of education Dr O’Shea is talking about when their partner might not be on board.
“My answer to that is, ‘have you given him a chance?’ There may be aspects of it where he mightn’t feel comfortable, but is your husband human? Okay, if he is, he probably loves his son.”
After a brief break, Dr O’Shea fielded questions from the floor. He announced at the start that there were five or six questions which he always got and if he didn’t get all of them he would ask them of himself, so as to cover all bases. Turns out, he didn’t need to.
What do you do when a child is exposed to hardcore pornography on smart phones, computers or tablets? one man asked.
“So many of them have been,” Dr O’Shea said. “Depending on the age, sit them down and say, what you have seen is really bad; make them morally awake.”
The same goes for when a child has not seen but heard highly explicit information from others. Before the age of nine, a child’s natural latency period means they are not ready for sexual information and they don’t want it, he said:
“Now, if you doubt that, all you have to do is take even 12 months sitting in the chair of a principal and watch people come to you whose children have been violated in that way.
“Those children are appalled. They feel as if it is terrible and they want to be reassured.”
When young children have been exposed to sexually explicit material, it is important to reassure them, to acknowledge the reality of it without going into details they are not ready for.
“‘Some of (what you have heard) is true but some of what (was) said is not … The time will come when we will talk about those things but it’s not now; you’re not ready to hear it’.
“It will pass over most children but I am sorry to say that in about ten per cent of cases it’s not enough … and you need to seek psychological help.
“Generally you don’t have to because those children think ‘oh good, I don’t have to think about that’.”
At the end of the night, audience members seemed reassured – and enthused. “You’re going to know how far you can go and when, because you are there,” he told one father.
“Bear in mind that you have your son because God gave him to you, and he’s therefore given you the capacity to deal with things.
“You’re going to be fine,” Dr O’Shea said. “I have no doubt.”
Dr O’Shea’s resource for parents, As I Have Loved You, is available from The Record Bookshop. For further information contact Bibiana on (08) 9220 5900 or via: bookshop@therecord.com.au.