All I Need Is Love

Hey, thanks to Kate Shatzkin of the Baltimore Sun's Charm City Moms for linking to this site. I guess this means I will have to add some new content, but not tonight. Tonight I am watching weird Japanese cartoons with my sons and sewing monsters.

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.)

Technical Details

I had a hysterectomy on Thursday after two years of not life-threatening but increasingly troublesome reproductive health issues. It was a fine teachable moment in terms of anatomy, and it will forever put to rest the question of whether my kids should expect another younger sibling.

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?

Cover The Piano Legs?

I read Karen Rayne's post "Prudes or Caretakers" with great interest and commented at enough length that I figured I might as well use it as blog fodder. Bottom line: we can’t lose sight of the fact that the transition from child to adult depends on the ability to sort through mixed messages. The question I’m asking myself is, what can parents do to teach their kids discernment enough to filter out all the crap that’s being spewed their way?

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.