Florida Catholic | Abstinence ‘Game Plan’: parents counsel teens

Abstinence ‘Game Plan’: parents counsel teens

MARCI ELLIOTT | FLORIDA CATHOLIC CORRESPONDENT

Published: 08.15.08

Facilitator Jon Crumpacker records responses from teens on consequences of sex outside of marriage during a July 28 Game Plan workshop at Good Shepherd Parish.
MARCI ELLIOTT | FC

TALLAHASSEE | Middle and high school teens at Good Shepherd Parish are learning to make choices about abstaining from sex and other temptations through a youth abstinence program called “Game Plan.”

This positive, sports-themed program of three Monday workshops began July 28 and continued Aug. 4 and 11 in the lower level of the Good Shepherd Parish center. The Game Plan program teaches that abstinence until marriage is the safest, most healthful lifestyle. It demonstrates how choosing this lifestyle early will have a huge impact on every other aspect in teens’ lives and will be central in helping them reach all of their goals.

“It will give you a good education that will last through high school and the rest of your lives,” Kari Albers, one of several parent-facilitators, told 33 teens in the first group July 28.

While the youths – mostly rising eighth- and ninth-graders – gathered for dinner, games, prizes, activities and other elements of the Game Plan workshop downstairs, parents met upstairs for a separate session. Mario Sacasa of the diocesan Department of Marriage and Family Life and social worker Mary Ballard gave the parents advice and insight on how they can encourage their adolescent children to make intelligent decisions to abstain from sex until marriage.

Game Plan was developed in cooperation with National Basketball Association player “Ironman” A.C. Green of the Miami Heat by Project Reality, an Illinois-based nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing sexual abstinence through programs in schools. It is available in Florida, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., and uses the manual, “A.C. Green’s Game Plan Program for Abstinence.”

“We’ve added Catholic components and teachings of the church,” said Barbra Crumpacker, one of the organizers of the Good Shepherd program. “It has a Catholic focus along with Game Plan, which has a sports theme.”

National news channels have reported that teen sex and pregnancy have declined in the past two years, citing such abstinence programs as one of the major reasons.

The July 28 Game Plan session began after dinner with a game involving “Silly String” to make the teens comfortable and put them in a positive mood. Albers, a religious education teacher at Good Shepherd, began the interactive workshop by asking the youths questions about goals they had for their future, distractions that could delay or prevent them from reaching goals, and how to prepare themselves for those goals.

The teens themselves named several obstacles that could get in the way of their lifelong ambitions: alcohol, lack of money, family illness, peer pressure, drugs and others. In a later interactive exercise, teens named consequences of having sex before marriage: having babies out of wedlock, dropping out of school, missing out on social life, giving up your baby for adoption, possible sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS, loss of friends and strained relationships with parents and family members.

“In high school, there will be plenty of decisions you’ll have to make,” Albers told the group. “It’s easier to balance things when you prepare.”

From the manual, the students read that abstinence is a good thing because it means keeping something. There’s a difference between waiting and saving sex until marriage, Albers noted.

Jon Crumpacker, Barbra’s husband, spoke to the teens about outside influences that will pressure them, particularly the media. A member of the working media himself, as a graphic artist and “computer guy,” Jon Crumpacker said he knows firsthand how the media manipulates its targets, especially the teenage market – the No. 1 targeted age group.

“The first thing you learn when you work in the media is its concept of ‘suspend disbelief,’” Jon Crumpacker said. “It means turn reality off. In movies, for example, all people are beautiful. They jump off tall buildings without getting hurt. They walk away from chase scenes and accidents, and they have sex with lots of different people with no consequences. The media says sex is cool, sex is fun, everybody’s doing it, all of it is good and nothing will happen to me. But we know reality is different.”

And the media’s No. 1 goal, Jon Crumpacker told the teens, always is money.

Facilitators Brian and Heather Venclauskas worked together on “Rules of the Game.”

“Just as there are rules and boundaries in sports, there are boundaries in life,” Brian Venclauskas said. “Boundaries are the way we keep ourselves safe.”

Wrapping up the July 28 session, he and the other facilitators worked with the teens in smaller groups to list the physical, emotional/mental and social consequences of premarital sex.

Brian Venclauskas added one more category of consequences, especially for Catholics: spiritual.

“The No. 1 reason Catholic teens abandon their faith is because of sexual sin,” he noted.

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