respect for individual personhood will help them to live more harmoniously in their relationships with others.

As children and growing adolescents face the often destructive pressure of culture and conflicting community values, particularly in sexual practices, parents should guide young people to recognize the importance of integrity by emphasizing the need for mutual trust and mature understanding in achieving a long-lasting intimate relationship. Parents will recognize that a truly committed sexual relationship is likely to be beyond the power of a young adolescent, and they will encourage abstinence.

Undergirding a Quaker family is the community of Friends, which bears corporate and individual responsibility for the meeting's children. Meetings should invite and integrate children and young people into as many of their activities as possible and cultivate their gifts. They should recognize that children and young adults can often do jobs and share insights within the meeting that are usually reserved for the greater maturity and experience of their elders. Younger Friends can strengthen our corporate life with a fresh perspective, with energy and enthusiasm, and with a feeling of accomplishment that can bind them more closely to their meeting and its life as they find respect and meaning in service to their spiritual faith community and to society at large.

Meetings have a particular responsibility to concern themselves when families are in distress. Too many Friends feel the effect of physical or emotional

violence inflicted by members of their own families. There may be serious illness, financial difficulties, or other problems within the family. Healing comes through counsel, time, hard work, and supporting relationships. Prayer, love, and forgiveness, with divine grace, are powerful forces in restoring healthy personal interactions.

A monthly meeting alive with the Spirit provides support for its children, parents, families, teachers, and caregivers. In identifying and nurturing the gifts of our children and youth, we pass our heritage on to the coming generation, and they in turn are being prepared to become the future of our religious community.

I have long been convinced that families are the primary agents of social change in any society. It is in this setting that individuals first become aware that the passage of time means growth and change, that tomorrow is never like yesterday. It is in this setting that one's first daydreams about a different future take place.... The family is not a barrier between us and a better society, but a path to that better society.

-- Elise Boulding, "The Family as a Way Into the Future," Pendle Hill pamphlet 222