NFP books, learning time, chastity education

[Guest guest]

1. Regarding instruction from a book. Sheila and I taught ourselves the STM from an article by Dr. Konald A. Prem and from a small book by the Kanabys back in the Sixties.

It will be helpful if those who have had trouble learning NFP from a book would identify the books and authors. We wrote the Fourth Edition of The Art of Natural Family Planning with the idea of making it very user-friendly. We know that thousands of couples have used it for self-instruction. However, there is undoubtedly room for improvement. So if the book that has been criticized is The Art of NFP, we would like to know. The more specific the criticisms, the better. Only in this way can we improve in our next effort. Critics of The Art of Natural Family Planning can address us at the email address from which this is mailed. I am sure that authors of other books would appreciate the same constructive criticism.

2. As Joe Stanford indicated, there is a distinct difference between the time it takes for an instructor to convey the necessary informaton and the time it takes for an individual couple to learn how to put it into practice. If the woman has normal temperature and mucus patterns and if the couple are motivated by the desire to do the right thing for the right reasons and to avoid sin, a half-hour of instruction, adequate written materials, and a brief review of a couple of charted cycles may suffice. If the woman has the sort of medical problems that are frequently reviewed in this List, the time for both will vary.

3. For couples who understand the terminology, basic rules for both achieving and avoiding pregnancy can be printed on a normal-size business card, as we illustrated in the Fourth Edition of The Art of NFP.

4. Even more important than early introduction to fertility awareness is an early introduction to traditional Catholic teaching reganding chastity including the need for modesty and custody of the eyes, avoiding masturbation, not deliberately seeking or causing sexual arousal while dating, and the repeated teaching that sexual intercourse is exclusively a marriage act that ought to be a renewal of the marriage covenant. The couple who enter marriage burdened with sexual addiction are going to have a more difficult time living chaste periodic abstinence.

5. Lastly, though the subject has not been raised recently, chance conversations have raised the question whether our NFP programs are doing an adequate job of conveying the teaching that couples need to have a sufficiently serious reason to seek to avoid pregnancy. The sort of things that might be constructively dealt with in a national NFP association is how we all can do better at teaching marital chastity and that NFP is not just Catholic birth control.

A blessed Christmas to all.

-- Kippley