DMBarber on "Adding padding to beginning and end of text"

Great site! A few things:

You should always make any changes by using a child theme. Here are the directions to do so.

For future reference, a   by itself only adds a space to the line. You need to wrap your   in a paragraph tag to create a new line (and therefore space between your paragraphs and title/date/comments) like this: <p> </p>

After you have created a child theme add this to the child theme css:

.entry-content p:first-child {
 margin-top: 1em;
}
.entry-content p:last-child {
 margin-bottom: 2em;
}

1em is the height of one line of text. .5em is half the height, 2em is the height of 2 lines of text. You can change the numbers in the code above to suit your needs.