Boys Will Be ... Men. Someday.

One comment I hear often when I broach the subject of sex ed is, "I'm glad I have a son, I don't have to worry."

Insert sound of skreetching tires here.


Um, yeah, boys can't get pregnant, but they do actually face choices and risks and responsibilities in the arena of human sexuality. They also get messages about what it means to be a man that are just as whacked out and conflicted as the messages girls get about womanhood. The boys need the same attention from their parents as they prepare for adulthood that girls do. That includes:

• Accurate information about their bodies and how they work. This includes, as the child ages, information about how their bodies differ from those of the opposite sex and how (and why) their bodies will change as they approach and pass through puberty.


• Accurate information about how humans reproduce. Logically, this should include information about how humans don't reproduce. A kid might legitimately be confused about how the Virgin Mary managed to get pregnant but his own parents fail to produce a younger sibling.


• Accurate information about your family's beliefs as they should apply to sexual behavior. What do you and your faith believe about sexual activity before or during marriage? Contraception? Abortion? What constitutes appropriate behavior in your eyes? What standards of behavior do you expect your child to follow?

Contrary to popular belief, boys don't just have one thing on their minds. They want and need to know about love and what goes into building a healthy romantic relationship. They want and need to know what girls their age are thinking and feeling. They want to know what will make men of them; they need to know that making decisions based solely on their immediate wants is what little boys do.

The third bullet should answer problems raised by the other two, not replace them. You can let your kids know that a thing is "normal" (within the common range of human experience) without endorsing it as something that's morally right. Face it. Whether you think contraception is morally acceptable or not, the fact that it is possible to engage in regular coition and prevent pregnancy through use of family planning methods remains. Whether you think masturbation is okay or not, it's a physical impulse common to human beings and other creatures in the animal kingdom. Providing complete data to your kids on the first two points will only serve to bolster your authority with your kids. Lying will serve the opposite purpose.

Grab Bag

Pain meds are still making me slow-witted, so I will confine myself to reacting to other people's blog stuff today.

In my continuing quest for how-to tips on teaching kids about human sexuality, I often find myself back at Karen Rayne's website. I haven't added a permanent link to her, since I'm ambivalent about her laissez-faire approach to teenage sexual activity, but she keeps making sense. So it was with her recent series on Parents and Sex Education.

The Advocates For Youth people have lots of good resources for parents, but there's a big gap on their Abstinence page - they don't provide information about "What If I Have Sex And Don't Use Birth Control?" beyond a link to "emergency contraception." Uh, yeah, how about some data on the rates of conception and STIs among people who aren't using contraception? That would be more useful and way less distasteful than telling the little rats, "Don't worry, you can get rid of it if you're knocked up."

Hey, speaking of this last, that reminds me of an important issue in raising kids that I'm trying to broach now as mine get older. How old is grown-up? This question applies in sexuality education but has major broader implications - when do you as a parent expect your child to be responsible for his or her own economic support and/or housing, for example? What level of post-secondary education will you fund for your child and under what circumstances? As you help your kids develop their values, it's worth remembering that your ultimate goal is to produce a good adult human being who can fend for him- or herself in the wild. When childhood ends is one of the limits that children should be taught.

(Hurrah, I did come up with some original content. Now I can go to bed. Yay me.)

Prom By Any Other Name

The annual rite of passage known as prom is coming. None of my kids are affected, seeing as how the oldest is but 10, but I see the prom magazines emerging at my grocery store's check-out shelves. I remember pouring over the pictures of dresses and imagining how great it would be to be a teenager, almost a grown-up, and go to a ball like a princess. I also remember thrilling when I was older at how easy it would be to get permission for once to stay out all night instead of having to meet my parents' usual (objectionably early) curfew.


Come to think of it, I remember lots of things about prom. Never mind.


What got me thinking about prom was reading about the concept of a purity gala. Now don't get me wrong, I heart paternal involvement, but the idea of a father-daughter prom thingie where you wear a pretty white dress and dance with Daddy and vow to remain celibate until marriage strikes me as too little, too late. Daddy's role in shaping a girl's self-respect and moral formation - of which sexuality is a component - starts from the day she's born. How Daddy treats Mommy and the time he spends with his girl are critical to the success of her relationships with others as an adult. That's reflected in the role fathers play in debutante balls or cotillions, where Daddy is an important figure but the ostensible point of the event is introducing a young woman into adult society under the protection of her family and social cohort. Where is the young woman's burgeoning adulthood reflected in the purity gala?


Prom takes the place of a cotillion or debut - or purity gala - for most girls, but without the underpinnings of family involvement it offers little more than an opportunity to dress up and stay out all night, preferably while enjoying as many red carpet accoutrements - fancy dinner, limo, hotel suite - as possible. Prom is a celebration of conspicuous consumption and self-gratification. Prom is the practice ground for overblown, overpriced weddings. Prom is - oh, I'm sorry, was that out loud? While you can argue that prom lets kids celebrate their entry into adult life, it does so in a bubble where they can enjoy adult freedoms without adult responsibilities.

Any time we fail to discourage our kids from dwelling more on the material aspects of an occasion than they think about the meaning and long-term implications of the occasion, we are doing them a disservice. Prom or Purity Ball, we need to make sure the little rats grow up knowing what their choices mean. Oh, and speaking of what choices mean, I wish I could kill "abstinence education" as a phrase in favor of "chastity education." For heaven's sake, no one I know is positing abstinence as the end state we're recommending for our offspring once they enter adulthood. Chastity, by contrast, implies sexual behavior corresponding to one's age and marital status. Isn't that the point we're trying to teach our kids?

Looking For A Voice

I'm having a problem with picking links. The sites I can find that address my chosen topic are invariably liberal and secular. The sites I find that link to my intended audience are, well, not about my intended topic. The link about modesty has certain charms, but it doesn't lead where I want to go. So I think I'll throw out a bunch of stuff from all over the ideological landscape and work from that. And maybe someday, someday, I will get comments from someone who doesn't know me personally. Heck, I got up to five visitors on the site the other day, at least two of whom weren't me ...



I'm finding a lot of fodder for thought at the RHRealityCheck blog on sexuality education, for example. But when one of their prominently featured pages is "About The Right" and religious considerations are addressed in sneering tones, I can be pretty sure that the conservative-leaning folks I think I'm targeting are not going to treat the RealityCheck as a credible knowledge source. Call it a hunch. What bugs me in some of their posts is not the concept of comprehensive sexuality education, it's the absence of the role of parents. A school can no more give your children a comprehensive sexual education than it can raise them for you. And teenagers, let's all repeat again, are still being raised by their parents until they reach majority and often beyond. The school has an important role to play, sure, but I don't understand the primacy public discourse gives to the role of the school. This isn't just a liberal failing - check out this abstinence blog and tell me if you see anything there that tells you what in Sam Hill parents are supposed to be doing.

Do As I Say, Not As I Did

Those of you who led blameless lives before and after becoming parents should skip this post and go about your regular business of making the rest of us feel inadequate and/or hypocritical. Thanks. See you later.


Are they gone?


Okay, good. For the rest of us, one of the pitfalls of telling the kids about the birds and the bees is the fact that, sooner or later, the kids will want to know what we did when faced with the choices that will confront them. Sooner or later, the oldest child will learn enough calendar math to figure out that he couldn't possibly have been conceived on your wedding night unless he was the world's first 9-lb preemie. One of these days, your kids will find the photo album from your first wedding or get an earful from drunk cousin So-and-So about what a ladies' man old Dad was back in the day. Me, I've got to get the high school and college diaries out of reach of my kids before they take it in their heads to start rooting around in boxes in closets.


I guess this applies whether the topic is sex or drugs or honesty - we want to equip our kids so they make better (safer, more moral, less embarrassing) choices than we did. If we lie to them about our experiences, we lose credibility when they inevitably find out. If we launch unbid into an account of that one time at band camp, we run the risk of glamorizing our bad choices. What's a parent to do?


First of all, it's important to spend some time thinking about your own choices and experiences (positive and negative) and how you might explain them in light of the values you want to pass to your child. I say "might" because the point of this exercise is not so much what you're planning to tell the kids about what you did as it recognizing how your attitude about your experiences will communicate itself.

Second, remember that the earlier you begin communicating your expectations and beliefs to your child, the more natural it will seem to your child to talk in terms of expectations and beliefs later, like when your 12-year-old wants to know why she can't have boys at her slumber party. The older the kids get, the more appropriate it becomes to discuss how your own experiences formed your expectations and standards. (Of course, there's no reason to be overly specific in describing your experiences to your kids, either. "I waited until I was engaged" is a perfectly valid statement without adding the fact that you were engaged three times before you got married.)

Young Love

My 10 year old boy has announced that he "kinda likes a girl in a mommy-and-daddy way." Cue cinematic scream here. My little boy! It's starting. Can the horrors of adolescence be far behind? He already eats his own body weight in snacks each day, and he's the same height as his teacher, plus he's all moody and stuff like Mr. Spock in pon farr. The day my mother promised me ("someday you'll have a child just like you!") won't really come until the five-year-old girl comes of age - but it just got a lot closer.

So what does one ask one's 10 year old son about the object of his affections? I started with her name. Then is she nice? Is she in the same classes with you? (Oh, who am I trying to fool, that came out more like is she smarter than you, or dumber, or about the same?) Does she know you like her? And, quite unbidden, from the depths, is she pretty? (The boy's answer to this last was surprising. "Not yet, but she will be in middle school," he told me. I don't know how I feel about that as a reply, but I do admire his originality.)

I can see in retrospect where my mother's interests were when I recall her reaction to my many childhood crushes. I don't remember what she asked me about my crushes, but she always made three points:

1. You will have a lot of crushes before you fall in love with the man you marry.

2. You cannot get married until you finish college.

3. You better not get pregnant until you can afford to take care of a baby because I am not planning to raise your children.

If pressed, Mom would offer up some additional thoughts and moral considerations to accompany these points. But the prime directive was clear: my job was to stay focused on my education and not get pregnant. When I reached puberty, she added more emphasis on a fourth point. "If you do get in trouble, we are going to yell at you and get mad, but we will always love you and help you. You can tell me anything. I can't promise I'll like it, but talk to me and I will try to help."

You know, I wish now that I'd heard a little bit more about chastity and honesty in relationships when I was growing up. But a lot of what my mother did was spot-on. She was honest. She clearly and frequently communicated her expectations. She drew a distinction between her love for me and her approval of my choices. That was important, since my parents were not "free-to-be, you-and-me" kinds of parents. They tolerated a fair amount of verbal dissent, but they held us to a pretty high standard of conduct. Except in a couple of social justice arenas and my father's military service, the 1960s totally passed them by. There were no co-ed sleep-overs. There were no boys allowed in my room. If my boyfriends came to call, they had to pass parental inspection and were usually supervised by my younger siblings. I knew in advance what their opinion would be when it came to teh hanky-panky. But I also knew that their love would be at least as strong as their disapproval and that I could turn to them. (I wish I had figured that out a lot earlier about God, actually, but that's a topic for another time. Though my parents had a hard time talking about His love, they were mercifully good at modeling it for me.)

The oldest is not ready to declare his feelings to his crush. That is fine with me. Dating and mating are still a ways, off for now. Still, the boy has given fair warning that I need to have something better to say than is she pretty? the next time. I don't know how much longer I have before he stops overtly seeking my approval, so I want to make use of the time I have.

My next conundrum: how do you raise kids to be chaste when you, uh, totally weren't?

Terms of Engagement

I'm Catholic. Specifically, I'm a show-up-for-Mass-quarterly-but-volunteer-every-week-and-drag-the kids-to-religious-ed Catholic. My parents fed me the faith of my fathers with the same zeal they fed me lima beans and about the same result - I grew up knowing they were good for me and being able to participate in public occasions without spitting them out, but I didn't develop any enthusiasm for either until I was in my 20's. But throughout that period of my life, I was blessed with friends from various Christian and Jewish traditions who didn't reject me out of hand for my worldly excesses and helped me recognize by their examples how God could be a real and powerful presence in a human life. The openness to God they taught me paved the way for a conversion experience that set my relationship with the Lord apart from my newfound appreciation for succotash.

The Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews who shared their faith with me left me with great admiration for their ideas on modesty and chastity. Nonetheless, I live in the secular world, and my kids go to public school. I don't plan to keep them out of the public school's sex ed programs when the time comes, as it will this year for my oldest. Life sciences belong in the curriculum of any school, in my worldly opinion. But parents have a unique responsibility to prepare their children for adulthood that goes beyond breaking out the charts and telling them the names of body parts and what they do. If you don't have an example of how to do that, it's tempting to leave it to the schools or just leave it alone. Neither is a good option.

One of the challenges I face in teaching my kids about these topics is conveying the right amount of information for their level of interest and understanding. What I have found very effective is answering their factual questions in the simplest, most limited fashion I can manage, then opining on God's role in creating the fact in question. If they ask more questions, I add one new piece of information at a time and repeat the process. If not, I back off. Example:

Child: How did the baby get into Mommy's tummy?

Parent: Daddy helped put the baby in Mommy's tummy. God made it so every baby needs a Mommy and a Daddy to get started.

Child: How did Daddy help?

Parent: Daddies have special seeds in their bodies for making babies. Mommies have special eggs in their bodies for growing babies. When a Daddy seed and a Mommy egg come together, they make a baby grow. God can make a baby out of just a little tiny egg and seed.

Child: What does the seed look like?

Parent: It's really small, and you can't see it except under a microscope.

Child: Does it look like a watermelon seed? We saw seeds inside a watermelon once. Remember?

(This is why it's best to start talking about bodily parts and functions with your kids from their earliest childhood, by the way - it takes a lot of micro-conversations like this over a number of years to convey information about human reproduction without over-sexualizing it.)

Ew, Mom, That's Gross

I was blessed with a mother who frankly answered every question I ever asked about the birds and the bees and gave me a moral framework in which to digest the information. Now I have three children of my own, ages 5, 7, and 10. I work to strike a balance between satisfying their curiosity and protecting their innocence as I prepare them for their teen years and adulthood.

The "where do babies come from" talk was deceptively easy with the boys. Since they are being raised in part by the narrators on "Animal Planet," they were familiar with the concept of mating yielding offspring. All I had to do was add in the "God made the humans like the animals, but He gave us the power to make moral decisions (and conceal estrus)" part and color in details about the mommy eggs and the daddy seeds and where the babies grow (regularly illustrated by my own swelling belly) and how they come out as circumstances required. I thought I had it made until the day that the oldest told me and his younger brother and sister about how he was brought by a stork.

"Stork! Stork!" exclaimed the children in delighted chorus.

"You know perfectly well you grew inside of Mommy and came out of Mommy's body when you were born," I insisted to the oldest. "You were all covered in goo."

The boys' eyes grew wild. "Stork! Stork!" they exclaimed in horror.

Only time will tell how my kids turn out, but in the interim I know there are a lot of parents and guardians out there wrestling with when and how to tell their kids about puberty and reproduction without sending them the wrong messages about human sexuality and morality and family life. Not all of us are comfortable talking about these topics, but better we should do it ourselves then leaving it to strangers in the entertainment industry or even the schools.