To: Shmuley Boteach
From: Amy Sohn
Subject: Stop Blaming Husbands!

Dear Shmuley,

Family Killers: The BlackberryDon’t you think the reason today’s parents find work so exhausting is because the American workplace is still so unfriendly to families? Many companies still expect employees to be available at all hours and on weekends, when moms and dads want to be spending time with their kids. This has only gotten worse with the advent of Blackberries, cell phones, wireless Internet, and telecommuting, which make workers available around the clock.

As Judith Warner reported in her book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, more than a third of all working parents in America have neither sick leave nor vacation leave. In the late nineties, Warner reports, five years after the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, fewer than half of US workers were eligible for unpaid leave. And any who were eligible did not take advantage because of fears of repercussions at work. My tax dollars pay for day care for children of military personnel but if I want it for my own child, I have to shell out $12,000 a year. And it’s $25,000 if I want one-on-one care in the form of a full-time nanny.

DIK (dual income with kids) families are pulled in too many directions at once, stressed from work when they come home, guilty about time spent away from their kids even when they need personal time for their own sanity, and resentful of all the competing expectations. This is especially true of moms, who are expected to put their children ahead of work all the time, even if their companies penalize them for it by mommy-tracking them.

It’s no wonder, then, that, as Warner reports, a 2002 Gallup poll on stress and relaxation time found that families even with household incomes of over seventy-give grand were among the “most stressed’ households in America. And this is rich people. Our government needs to start putting families first with more universal pre-K, national standards for day care, paternity leave, longer maternity care, emergency day care in the workplace, and longer vacations.

Despite my pessimism about our government’s abandonment of the American family, I am more optimistic about our teenagers than you are, especially with regard to teen sex. Increased awareness of and discussion of sex has made kids smarter about it and more prudent than even my own generation of teens (I was fifteen in 1988.)

87% of Teens are Chaste: Or so say the pollsA recent NBC News and People poll that surveyed teens about their sexual attitudes and practices found that eighty-seven percent of teens aged 13 to 16 have not had sexual intercourse. And seventy-three percent have not been sexually intimate at all. Why? Nearly three-quarters of the virgins said they had not had sex because they “made a conscious decision not to” and three-quarters said it was because they believe they are too young. As for the active teens, nearly two in three said a principal reason they had sex for the first time was because they met the right person. Whether or not this is true, at least they are not treating sex as brazenly as you think.

But let me get back to the subject that brings you and me together: adult sex. We both agree that too many American married couples are in sexless marriages, but Shmuley, you put too much onus on the men. You are right to point out that low male libido is a plague – and I think it’s far more common than popular culture would have us believe.

You say in your book that women who have “let themselves go” do so because they feel that their husband doesn’t care how they look. And this is true for some. But many women, especially mothers, let themselves go in spite of active entreaties and compliments from their husbands. This is because the erotic needs that the husband once satisfied are now satisfied by the child – they get touch, physical affection, suckling (if breastfeeding), smell, and constant contact - and they don’t even have to wear lipstick to get it! The physical relationship with children, while not sexual, is sensual, all encompassing, luxurious and erotic enough to satisfy some of the same needs that sex once satisfied.

So when Dad comes home and demands sex, Mom doesn’t feel desire, because she already has a sensual partner in her newborn. Other women “let themselves go” because their sexuality was never that important to them in the first place (don’t worry, Shmuley, I’m not talking about myself) and they are relieved to have an excuse (the child) to refuse sex. This isn’t a problem if the husband has low desire too, but if he’s got high desire, Mom and Dad have got a serious problemo.

Mama's got a brand new bag: Feed the flame of your marriages, ladiesWomen need to make a conscious effort to maintain a relationship to their own erotic selves throughout marriage. An erotic marriage is like a fire and if you don’t feed the flame with oxygen, it goes out. For women, the oxygen comes in many forms – erotic novels, movies, a flirtation at work, a crush on a movie star, intense eye contact with a stranger on a subway train, a pair of expensive footwear, a nice set of lingerie, a new Murakami novel. Too many women forget to “feed the flame” after childbirth because they simply don’t have the time or energy to devote to it. If a woman has desire, she will find a way to make love with her husband but after motherhood it takes more work to locate the desire, and women should be willing to put in the work.

And yet it seems that in our country, married sex is all but dead. I agree with you that, “the functional termination of a couple’s sex life is a functional termination of the marriage itself.” How sad, then, that The New York Times recently reported the results of a survey by the National Association of Home Builders in which “builders and architects predicted that more than 60 percent of custom houses would have dual master bedrooms by 2015” and some builders said that “more than a quarter of their new projects already do.” This article came only weeks after another Times article on co-sleeping, in which several affluent families admitted that one or more of the parents regularly slept in the child’s bed or had children in the parents’ bed with them.

How odd that you and I agree in so many areas. I believe that my own witnessing of a healthy married relationship (my parents’) has made me see the value of prioritizing my husband’s and my intimacy, now that I am a mother. Yes, kids need their parents to pay attention to them. But they also need their parents to love each other and show it.

I keep wondering whether it was your own parents’ divorce that led to your desire to “fix” other people’s marriages. I asked you about this in my first letter, but like a reluctant therapy patient, you ignored the question. How did your parents’ divorce come to inform your own interest in family life, your show, and your entire career? You dedicate your book to your mother. Do you speak to your father? Are you angry with him? Have you sought therapy? Come on, Shmuley. Give me an Oprah moment.

Amy

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To: Amy Sohn
From: Shmuley Boteach
Subject: Would Alienate Your Only Source of Love?

Hi Amy,

Thank you for your compliment about my apparent youth. Since many tell me I am an old soul, I will take your words as a compliment.

One Love: Irish Catholic or Jewish - who cares when it comes to children?Your expression of “your people” puzzles me. I know of only one human family and one human nature. As John F. Kennedy said, “We all cherish our children’s future…” In other words, what we share in common by far outstrips that upon which we disagree. Similarly, your comments about sexism and xenophobia in the orthodox Jewish community are highly misguided. The definition of orthodoxy is an adherence to Torah law, and the Torah mandates the highest respect for women and a love for the stranger. On the contrary, the sexism that I witness is in secular society where, after sixty years of feminism women today are still valued more for their bust than for their brains, a heresy that is not practiced in orthodox Jewish society.

Be that as it may, I enjoyed your letter very much and you write extremely well.

The reason why parents cannot enforce discipline among their children today is three-fold. The first is physical exhaustion. Since we define success today primarily through our professional endeavors, that is where we exert out energy. There is very little of us left by the time we come home. And it is easier to give in to our kids and let them do their own thing then lay down the law. The second is guilt. So many parents do not give their children the attention they need. So they give in to them as a way of compensating for their neglect. The third is the most interesting of all. In an age where so many parents have bad marriages, they depend on their children as their principal source of affection.

Now, would you punish or alienate your only source of love?

That’s why one of the principal solutions to the lack of parental discipline is a more holistic definition of success, that embodies both the personal as well as the professional, and more passionate and intimate marriages.

I disagree profusely with your comments on teen sexuality. Indeed, research suggests that there is even a direct link between teen sexuality and teen depression. A study by the Heritage Foundation, in-turn based on the government-funded National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, found that about 25 percent of sexually active girls say they are depressed all, most or a lot of the time, while only 8 percent of girls who are not sexually active feel the same.

The kids are not all right: Teen sexuality has been linked to teen depressionWhile 14 percent of girls who have had intercourse have attempted suicide, only 5 percent of sexually inactive girls have. And whereas 6 percent of sexually active boys have tried suicide, less than 1 percent of sexually inactive boys have. The report challenges the previously held notion that teens become sexually active in order to self-medicate their own depressions.

"Findings from the study show depression came after substance and sexual activity, not the other way around," says researcher Denise Dion Hallfors of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. The study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, analyzed data from a national survey of more than 13,000 teenagers in grades seven to 11.

Pretty tragic, huh, that it takes children slashing their wrists or sinking into a morbidly dark depression to awaken parents to the dangers of children engaging in activities that should be reserved exclusively for adults, and married ones at that.

Sex is the most powerful impulse known to man. It is as overpowering as it is pleasurable. Do you really think that those in a rickety boat should be exposed to this storm? How could we ever have believed that allowing big children detonate such powerful emotions, in empty relationships where neither party is sufficiently developed to assimilate such strong emotions, would do anything but eviscerate the emotional landscape of its child practitioners? Heck, we don't even let teenagers play with fireworks for fear of them blowing their own heads off. But we've given them the emotional equivalent of a nuclear blast.

Many parents mistakenly believe that the first job of a parent is to love their child, when really the primary responsibility of a parent is to protect their child from harm. You can't love that which is no longer extant. An object of love that is destroyed will forever remain unloved.

Thus, prior to loving your child, prior to teaching your child, prior to even to feeding your child, your first objective is to protect your child. Your role as guardian comes before any other. A parent who allows harm to come to his or her child is a parent who has been delinquent in the very fundamentals of child rearing.

Most parents believe that protection involves guarding children from physical harm. You lock the door at night so that your kids won't be injured by robbers. You drop them off at school so that they won't be abducted by kidnappers. You teach them how to cross the street safely so that they won't be hit by cars.

But protecting your children from external dangers is miniscule compared to the task of safeguarding them from absorbing influences that will corrupt them from the inside, and it is much easier to recover from physical scars than from their emotional equivalents.

You shouldn't want your MTV: Trash TV rots adolescent brainsLook around and you'll see parents who take little kids to R-rated movies, who allow their kids to listen to and sing misogynistic melodies and sexual lyrics, and who let their kids play video games where the most graphic violence is the main selling point. I know otherwise responsible parents who smoke marijuana with their teenage kids, and I know parents who have no problem with their kids watching MTV and VH1 music video junk for hours a day. Indeed, parents today seem to have little compunction about the tremendous amounts of garbage from the popular culture being pumped directly into their children's cerebral cortex. Will we pretend that daily loads of toxic smut will not permanently coarsen our children, robbing them of their innocence and making them grow up preternaturally? By treating our children as young adults rather than big kids, we are allowing them to skip the childhood stage of life, which is essential to a strong foundation in their later years.

Healthy parenting involves the dual role of nurturer, on the one hand, and protector on the other. A child is like a sapling that requires water and nutrients, but also protection from weeds and pests. The unconditional love we give our children instills in them a sense of security and internalizes a feeling of value. If they are shortchanged of love, they will later grow to believe that things like money are currencies by which they may purchase an otherwise lacking self-esteem.

But unconditional love is just one side of the coin. All the watering in the world won't shelter a vulnerable plant that has been uprooted by a fierce wind. We have to shield our children from the increasingly malign influences of a culture that is telling them, subtly but constantly, to skip the essential stages of childhood and become an adult while they are really still kids. Exposure to gratuitous violence, sex and other uniquely adult subjects overwhelms children with emotions and experiences they cannot digest, sowing confusion and anxiety. It also imparts to them an inauthentic desire to prematurely discard the wonders of their youth and join an adult world that where they trade in awe for cynicism and conviction for compromises.

Our kids may not look like it, but they're crying out for a protector. It may seem that they just want to be left alone, that they crave unrestricted freedom and unbridled indulgence. But deep inside they want to be protected. They want someone to stop them from harming themselves. They want someone that says no. And if not you, the parent, then who?

One final thing, Amy. Please give my warm regards to your husband. And please tell him that aside from hating evil, hatred is something we should purge from our breast and eradicate from our heart.

G-d bless you and your family.

Shmuley

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