Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / August 2005

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/projo_20050828_edwatch28.3743d
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Edwatch by Julia Steiny: Frank talk about parenting

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, August 28, 2005

One of the most peculiar aspects of the American approach to sex
education is the incredible concentration on intercourse.

Sex is a big picture -- love, reproduction, family life. Why limit the
attention to the fun between the sheets?

In an article on Medscape.com, "Why must we fear adolescent sexuality?"
Dr. Amy Shalet reports on her 10-year study comparing parents'
attitudes towards teen sexuality in the United States and the
Netherlands, countries chosen because they have the highest and lowest
rates of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world, respectively, and
because they are similar in terms of wealth, education and reproductive
technologies.

Her conclusion, in brief, is that U.S. parents just want their teens
not to have sex -- or at least not now or soon. The Europeans, on the
other hand, are mainly concerned that their teens initiate sex in a
loving, long-term relationship and that the teens are responsible about
pregnancy and disease prevention.

I am not here to say which is a better approach. Here I take no
position on contraception or even marriage. Instead, I argue that we
should get our attention off of intercourse itself, some of the time,
and look instead to the long-term results of a sexual union, which is
to say a family or a semblance of one.

Apart from trying to scare the kids with the specter of troublesome
babies and ugly diseases, we could help kids imagine themselves in the
role of mom or dad, just as you would have them study careers as a way
of imagining themselves in the role of an adult worker. Kids do not
find the role of mom and dad particularly sexy. This is good; associate
those responsible roles with sex.

On the other hand, relationships of any kind are pretty interesting to
kids, even those with sisters or uncles. Eleven- and twelve-year olds
are by no means ready to have a family of their own, but they are tied
to a family, and are thinking about and often grappling with it.

Given that literally any post-pubescent can make a baby, no matter what
their age, intelligence, education, work skills or ability to support a
baby, it only makes sense to instruct kids in at least in an
introductory way to the responsibilities and rewards of family life
before they are likely to conceive. The sixth grade seems like prime
time.

These days sex and parenting roles are far from rigidly defined. If
anything, they are unhelpfully undefined. So discussing these critical
roles out loud and ahead of time would go a long way towards helping
pre-parents better prepare -- and understand the wisdom of postphoning
-- the crisis of childbirth. After all, world literature is mainly
about families, behavior and interaction. Studying family roles in
different cultures, according to different traditions and values, would
provide an academic way of exploring the issues. The point would be to
get kids thinking about what it would be like to be the responsible
party, to be the parent and not the child.

But educators, probably more than others, are keenly aware that all
children come from families, and that in the U.S. today, less than half
of those families are configured according to the biological ideal --
that is, both DNA contributors committed to the child, to each other
and to a community (tribe, herd) that is reciprocally committed to
them.

In the last 50 years, the traditional family ceased to be the norm. We
now understand that a high-conflict nuclear family is worse off than a
calm, nurturing single-parent household. So no hard-and-fast rules
govern what a family should be. A household of people genuinely
committed to caring for one another is a high-functioning family no
matter what the blood relations.

Still, everyone had a mother and a father, if only for one night. Even
if one or both parents exited the scene, all children have a mental
model of their parents and what mother and father means to them.
Adoptive parents sometimes wish they could wipe that biological origin
from the kid's hard drive, but alas, they cannot.

Adopted children commonly seek their biological parents, if only to
satisfy what appears to be an instinctive curiosity. On the other hand,
some adopted children could not care less. All kids and families come
with their issues. Again, world literature has examples of all types,
convention and unconventional, happy and unhappy, in all sorts of
circumstances.

So, for example, it would be helpful, rather than the reverse, to
acknowledge modern realities, such as the ache so many children feel
for their often-absent fathers, especially in the urban core. There are
other such realities. But I can hear the educators now, rising up and
demanding why they should allow such a rats' nest of feeling to be
stirred up on school time.

Two answers: first, how will you ever raise test scores unless you can
help children use their education to get past the obstacles they find
in their lives? Read books, study history, see films about people who
have endured loss and overcome it. Trying to teach pubescents anything
that doesn't at least somewhat overlap with their interests doesn't
work anyway. Rather than shy away from what kids are thinking about,
help them give it language, and help them have empathy for those in
different family situations than their own.

Because, secondly, kids need to enter the phase of potentially active
sexuality with a much stronger sense of the impact of their actions. By
being irresponsible, you the sixth grader could one day cause a child
to ache because of your absence.

Curiously, Americans would rather let their child live in ignorance
than risk the child being exposed to distasteful facts, feelings or
opinions not their own. Kids are already well-exposed to graphic,
loveless sexuality by the TV that is their daily fare. But every kid is
the product of their parents' circumstances, sensibilities and
backgrounds, about which we remain mum. A sensitive understanding and
discussion of all kinds of family circumstances, along with some
dreaming and planning of their own, might well contribute to preventing
what social services see as chronically repetitive family patterns that
are not good for kids.

By the way, Amy Shalet's study shows that on average, both European and
American teens become sexually active around 17 or 18. In that they do
not differ. What is different about the two cultures is that one wants
to be assured of the presence of love and a sense of responsibility,
and the other acts as though they wish the whole subject would just go
away.

I concede that in the foreseeable future we won't agree on whether or
not to teach about contraception, for example, but surely we can agree
that the subjects of love, responsibility and their connection to one
another are sorely lacking both from school curricula and from the
culture itself.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she
consults and writes for a number of education, government and private
enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She
can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny [at] cox.net or c/o The
Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.