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Originally Posted by scaeagles
CP, what makes a birthday more special than any other day of the year? Seriously. It is simply the same as any other day. Simply a passage of time. It is just something that is chosen to be comemorated. What makes a bar mitzvah special? Is the turning of 13 supposed to magically make you a man? Different cultures, religions, people groups, whatever, have different tradtitions and things they place value on. This is something we place a high value on.
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On the topic of the specialness of holidays and celebrations, I feel that people are a forgetful species and often the day-to-day can blind us to the passage of time. Constructs like birthdays and holidays force us to stop and take notice. My younger brother brought up the subject the other day saying "why give gifts on bdays? It's such a phony construct. Why not just give a gift to someone you love on some other day, just because?" My response was "because people won't."
Again, I'd like to bounce this back to you. You place a high value on the fact that you taught your child a valuable lesson. To me, this lesson is the same as any other valuable lesson we teach our children. I could list 25 equally important lessons off the top of my head and I'm sure if I had time I could come up with hundreds. Why does this one get jewelry, or require a physical reminder, or however you want to phrase it?
If you want to compare a Bar Mitzvah to this, I have to say again that they are different things. A Bar Mitzvah is a change, a turned corner. It's a graduation from Hebrew school. It's a culmination of skills in Hebrew and understanding the Torah. You are treated as an adult in the synagogue and perform multiple adult-only good deeds in front of the congregation for the first time. It's an achievement, a graduation into the adult world, and from then on the 13 year old is treated as an adult in the congregation.
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Originally Posted by scaeagles
I'm not saying sex is a bad thing. Neither are guns. Nor drugs. Nor alcohol. Things are not bad in and of themselves, it is the usage of such things that is...bad, or better said, inappropriate.
Sex for my 13 year old daughter would, in fact, be bad. I say this without hesitation and unapologetically.
And I'm not sure why these rings are offensive or even made fun of, really. I don't see the big deal.
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I obviously agree that your 13 year old shouldn't be having sex. As I said before, I will have similar talks with my kids. The offensive part is the concept of "chastity".
What if I wore a ring to show that I was "Pure" because I didn't drink alcohol? Or one to show that I've never touched a gun? "I've never been sullied with weaponry" I'd think to myself. I'd also have a Purity Ring because I had promised to eat only foods that were high in nutritional value.
The connotation is that those that eat fatty foods are bad. That those that choose to use guns are bad, that those that drink socially are bad, and that those that have sex before marriage are bad. IMHO, this is closed-minded thinking.
I will tell my child, both explicitly and implicitly, how I feel on these issues. "We choose not to own guns because we don't like guns. We choose to drink alcohol socially. We chose to have sex before marriage but not until we were engaged. This is how we view the world and we present you with our values. You are not better than people that use guns or drink more often or have sex earlier. We feel that these are better choices, and while we strongly urge you to follow them from our own experiences, in no way do we claim that we know everything."