One of the most fascinating aspects of human nature, is the way in which we fail, again and again, to do what is good for us. We know that exercise is essential, but somehow find when the television is on, that someone has surgically attached us to our sofa, writes Breda O'Brien
We plan to spend more time with our children, but discover instead that our child is threatening to change her name by deed poll to "work", so that she can increase her chances of getting some attention. We mean to stop drinking so much, but the weekend rolls around, and we once again set about ensuring that our livers learn to float.
It is a well-known and much exploited tendency in human nature to plan to be good, and to end up, well, not being good. Gyms rely on it. If everyone turned up who took out a membership, the place would be overflowing. But they know many of the people who join will not go more than a couple of times.
Book clubs sign you up to a book a month, knowing that inertia will prevent you from returning that biography of Winston Churchill's valet written by his chauffeur, and next month's true story of what happened to Princess Diana (Princess Diana of Sweden, that is, born in 1314). You mean to cancel the subscription, but you just don't get around to it.
Knowing what you should do, and what the right thing is, is light years removed from actually doing it.
That is why I want to put my head down on the desk and weep when commentators say, as they have again in recent times, that we need more sex education in schools to solve the problem of young people becoming sexually active at younger and younger ages.
The assumption is that information, delivered in a classroom, by people who might also teach you maths, will change human behaviour. Human beings don't work that way. You may know that chlamydia is rampant in Ireland, and that as a girl, it may affect your whole life by rendering you infertile. But hey, then that hot guy agrees to come over and help you babysit the baby who never wakes up.
You can't believe your luck. After he has been working on your erogenous zones for an hour and a half, somehow it's easy to forget that he has been with at least half a dozen of your friends.
This may sound like a recipe for passivity, for shrugging and saying, "Sure, they are going to do it anyway." Or it may sound like a rant against school-based sex education.
In fact, I approve strongly of well-designed school-based sex education, but just not as the magic wand to solve deep-rooted problems.
Given the well-known human tendency to do what we shouldn't and to fail to do the things we should, what factors ensure that a surprising amount of time, we do the right thing?
Well, it is my hunch that it boils down to a combination of three essential factors - strong motivation, cultural reinforcement, and habits. Ireland had plastic bags merrily waving at tourists from every whin bush, and we all said it was awful, but they continued to wave. Then someone slapped 15 cent on the bag, and suddenly enough of the population remembers to bring re-usable carriers, and bingo! No more tattered non-biodegradable bunting. So strong motivation (meanness), cultural reinforcement (even SUV drivers don't want to be seen with plastic), and habit wins again.
So let's see, what do we give our teenagers? Well, we accept a culture that bombards them with sexual messages every moment of the day. God, it would be so uncool to, say, disapprove of an advertisement for mobile phones, which has a guy desperately ringing a friend to find out the name of the girl he was with the night before, just before she wakes up beside him.
We accept the fact that every soap they watch will show that having it off with everyone in sight, if decently spaced out over a year or so, is acceptable behaviour. We rarely talk about it to them, or seriously consider how we might challenge what the culture constantly reinforces. Lecturing doesn't work, or nagging.
But building good habits does. Some children who have had a stable, open relationship with their parents since childhood, will still go off the rails, when they come to their teens. (Not much cultural reinforcement out there for listening to Mam and Dad.) But many will not.
If we look at them, we see that their parents have inculcated habits in them. Habits of being honest, so that they can't look you in the eye with ease and lie to you that her parents will be supervising that party. Habits of associating sex with love, and not with 10 pints.
I believe that adults would be truly shocked at how many young people divorce the idea of love from sex almost completely.
Many still do not, and they are the ones who have the habits, the strong motivation to be different, and the cultural reinforcement of a small group of friends who support their values. It allows them to build a space that insulates them from the torrent of messages stating that sexual expression is a paramount value, but sexual fidelity is so, like, 1890s.
Without boundaries, cultural reinforcement, and good habits inculcated at home, sex education at school has slim chances of success. We concentrate on the wrong things, like trying to get them to carry condoms, when we should be teaching them that no condom protects the vulnerable adolescent heart. We try to get them to wait instead of being sexually active, but are waffly about how long to wait. Meanwhile, all around them advertisements scream: "Don't wait for anything. Have it all now!"
In fact, if we really want to tackle sexual activity at an early age, we shouldn't start with sex education at all. We should start with drinking.
Except, that would mean looking at what we adults do with drink, and the faithful way our children copy us. And that would mean changing our habits, and having the culture promote the idea that binge-drinking is for rejects. And hey, who has the motivation for that?