Sex Ed and Parenting
Tips to help you help your kids
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Sex Ed and Parenting - Let’s talk about it!
Q: I am a product of purity culture. Because of abstinence-only-until-marriage “sex ed,” I grew up fearing sex, and then I tried to rebel and ended up making a bunch of risky choices that I would never want my kids to make. Now that I’m a parent, I keep wondering how to help my kids not fear sex and also not put themselves at risk the way I did?
I’m DELIGHTED that you’re thinking about creating a context where your kids learn to have a loving relationship with their own bodies!! And I think that’s the missing puzzle piece when someone who grows up with only scary information about sex then tries to reclaim their sexuality. Both approaches to sex are grounded in the behaviors we engage in, rather than in the relationship we have with our own bodies, our own pleasure, and our own unique sense of the relationship between affection for another person and erotic connection with that person.
And so: loving your body is your homework assignment, in order help your kids learn to love theirs. They absorb everything you do and feel, every fleeting emotion that passes through you, so practice noticing the residual feelings shame that still bubble up from your childhood, and gently let it float away, creating space inside you for a feeling of love and beauty. In my imagination, the shame floats over to a compost pile somewhere, where it fulfills its purpose as bullshit: it becomes fertilizer for something else.
Sometimes you’ll have to fake it ‘til you make it, and at the moment what matters is that you make choices that prioritize your bodily autonomy and your right to wellbeing, and say out loud that that’s what you’re doing. And practice never talking shit about your body in front of your kids.
You have a second assignment, too, which is to start talking to your kids about sex. You know them better than anyone. Your instincts will help you know how much they’re ready to hear. You understand where they are, developmentally, and thus how much detail they need. Literal pro-tip: details aren’t dangerous, they’re just more liable to be misunderstood. Err on the side of detail if you have time to be very clear. If you’re taking advantage of a 10 minute car ride home from the grocery store, that’s a time for less detail.
I have a friend who grew up with negative messages around sex, and she too was determined to make sure her girls got a better beginning than she got… but she waited and procrastinated and eventually the issue was unavoidable because one of them was assigned a book in school that included a lot of sex. She always read along with their assigned books, and this time she was shocked—not because there was sex in it, but that the sex was so unrealistic. It represented sex as easy, requiring no communication or effort.
So she took a deep breath and sat the girls down for a frank discussion of saying yes and no, using protection, and the necessity of lube. Was she nervous? Sure. Did she stumble? Yah. Was it a perfect conversation? Nope. Was it the last time they ever talked about sex? Not even close.
You don’t have to be ready. You just have to start.
Okay, now that I’ve answered the personal human part, I’d like to get on my evidence-based public health sex ed soapbox for just a minute. There is no ambiguity in the research over the past 40 or 50 years: abstinence-only-until-marriage sex education results in HIGHER rates of STIs and unwanted pregnancy and, if it matters, EARLIER age of starting to have sex with others. Comprehensive evidence-based sex education reduces rates of STIs and unwanted pregnancy and “delays sexual debut,” as the research sometimes puts it, which I think is hilarious.
Anyone who feels unsure about whether comprehensive sex education in schools is a good idea, I get it, I understand, you worry that providing young people with information about their sexuality will make them have it and have more of it, but that is not what great sex ed does. It empowers young people to create for themselves an authentic and joyful sexuality that is not constrained by someone else’s idea of what they should do with their body.
There is a moral position I’m taking here, which is that everybody deserves full bodily autonomy. I believe that each person gets to choose when and how they are touched, gets to choose how they feel about their body and how they live inside it. I believe all people, regardless of gender, sexuality, dis/ability, age, ought to be free to decide how and when or if they will share their body with another person. And what the research tells us that an important part of empowering people to practice that bodily autonomy is giving them facts about how their body works and an opportunity to process the messages they receive from pop culture, from their peers, from their families, and from other cultural messages like their religion, and to choose for themselves which messages are true and right for them and which are not.
Let me give you one example of what’s included in comprehensive sex ed, beyond just condoms and contraception: In one activity, each student may complete a worksheet asking them to consider their values and their hopes for the future. And where does sex fit in that future? Does that sound scary or dangerous? Don’t you want your tween or teen considering their values and their future?
I want that for every single person who reads to this. I want everyone, whether you’re fifteen or twenty-five or forty or sixty or ninety, to know how your body works and to process which messages you’ve received feel right and true for you and which aren’t, and then the freedom to live by your own truth.
It honestly shocks me sometimes that in 2021 this is controversial… but then other times I remember the how deep the roots of purity culture and the patriarchy go. We have to keep digging, keep digging, keeping wanting our own freedom from other people’s ideas about our sexuality, and freedom for others.
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