A few incidents in the last few years of work have made me
wonder about the different ways and the different things that parents educate
their children about sex. There’s the biological stuff, which is what parents
for some reason think is most confronting, but that every single generation in
every single country and in fact every sexually-reproducing species since the
beginning of animal existence has figured out quite easily. A parent could get
away with not ever mentioning to their offspring how babies are made, where
they come out of, and the logistics of what sexual intercourse entails, and
they’d pick it up anyway. I mean, in most cultures before our grandparents
generation such things weren’t discussed by parents with their children – and
yet people still had sex and had children, etc. It’s even less of a concern in
modern days where there’s television and other media, there’s schools purposely
teaching this stuff, and there’s other people (e.g. peers, relatives, health
professionals, etc.) who will readily discuss the biology of sex with anyone.
So it’s not what we teach children about the physiology of sex that concerns
me, but that other stuff we tend to forget about sometimes, the psychosocial
aspects of sex in a person’s life.
To go back again to the “olden” days now. Religion used to
be a big part in a greater proportion of people’s lives ‘back in the olden
days’. That’s a fact, that less people these days than, say, 100 years ago had
a religious affiliation, whether that be because they elected to or were
expected to by state mandates. In most religions, sex has/had a spiritual
connotation and there were rules and consequences described around it. If you
had sex before a marriage was confirmed, with someone outside of that marriage
agreement, etc. you had “sinned” and would incur a punishment for it. Now, the
punishment would be either or both imposed upon you by the church (e.g. been
disassociated from the congregation) or by God (e.g. you were lead to believe
that God would punish you by disapproval or loss of a post-life privilege,
dependant on what the religious creed was). For the non-religious (and of
course still applied to the religious) in ‘the olden days’, there was this
thing about reputation and social norms. Of course, social norms and expectations (as
does religion) still exist, but modern Western culture places less of an
emphasis on it, and more on being your own individual. So our parents and
grandparents generation placed greater emphasis on whether others thought or
knew that you had been engaging in something as disreputable as having sex with
someone you weren’t married to. Sex was a shameful thing. Even for those that
were married, it was not a proper thing to discuss or make jokes about or
depict in media or entertainment, etc. So, back in the day a parent who
educated a child about the psychosocial aspects of sex (the physiology been
much too embarrassing to discuss outside of biology classes or by scientists),
all you had to do is tell the child not to have sex because they’d either go to
hell and die or that the whole town would call them a slut and their life would
be miserable.
What are we teaching our children now about sex? Everyone
knows about the physiology of sex, even very young children, and parents and
their children will share very explicit details about sex. What’s wrong with
that? Nothing – except that sex to human beings isn’t just about the biology of
it. There’s nothing wrong with having all this knowledge about sex at all! But
I’m beginning to believe that we’ve taken too much comfort in only sharing the
easy stuff about sex, the stuff every child will eventually figure out even if
their parent never tells them about, and have left our children with the hard
stuff to figure out on their own.
In my job I’ve met many teenagers having absolutely never
considered some of the other consequences
of sex, let alone how to deal with them. We teach our children about sex, what
it entails, that there’s the possibility of pregnancy and infections, to use
condoms to prevent infections, and to use contraception to avoid pregnancy. But
where children are missing out on instruction is about romantic relationships,
who to have sex with, why or why not to have sex, how is sex related to love,
should sex bear any relationship to love at all? These are all questions that
increasingly younger people are having to charge through on their own. And I’d
like to share with you some examples of questions that I have witnessed some
very anxious teenagers try to deal with on their own too:
- How do I tell my parents I’m pregnant? Do they need to know?
- How do I tell my ex-boyfriend that I’m pregnant? Should I tell him?
- Should I tell my parents or my ex-partner/s that I have and STD? How can I tell them?
- Why did I get an STD when I was with a person I loved?
- Should I quit school because the other students won’t stop bullying me about being pregnant in high school?
- Is it ok to be sad about having a miscarriage even though no one else knew I was pregnant?
- What do I do now that I’m pregnant and my parents don’t want me to be and I still haven’t formed a concept on how I feel about abortion?
- How do I tell my girlfriend without hurting her feelings that I think she has a problem ‘down below’ because those warts don’t look normal?
- How can I get an STD when I use a condom all the time except with my regular girlfriend and she isn’t with anyone other than me?
- Is sex always meant to be painful or is it just because I don’t actually want it when it happens?
- Is it normal not to have had sex yet at my age? Does that mean I am lacking something or am sick?
Can a parent or anything in life prepare you to answer those
questions? I don’t know. But it certainly would break your heart to have first
considered questions like these when they apply directly to you and the
situation you find yourself in. I say, good on us for talking to our children
openly about sex and the need for safe sex practices and why they’re important, but
it’s now time to do the real hard work: prepare our children to think of the
consequences if they do find themselves in situations where the safe sex has
simply failed. Encourage the young person to think of their own opinions about
abortion, about social discrimination against teen parents, about sexually
transmitted infections, about the link between love, sex, and relationships,
about the effect on career development and parenthood, etc. We don’t need to
mandate our kids to the effect of “don’t have sex or you’ll die”, but we could
encourage them to ask themselves “could I deal with any of the consequences of sex? If not, then do I need to delay sex
for now?” And do this not because the child will go to hell or society will
ostracize him, but because he is an independent being worthy of not suffering
the negative consequences of sex.
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