Don’t wait for the school to do it
My mother told me about sex over the dinner table when I was about 12.
My brother had come home from playing in a kid’s tree fort, puzzled by a graphic hand gesture one of the boys had made. He wanted to know what it meant.
And so, over a plate of elbow macaroni and ground beef drenched in Puttanesca sauce, I learned the facts of life.
Unsurprisingly, I lost my appetite.
I was also temporarily incapable of looking anyone over the age of 20 in the eye for several weeks. For months, the convent loomed attractive. I might have joined if I wasn’t certain my mother would summarily disown me.
What I got from my mother were facts. I also got, from an unlikely source, a religious perspective on sex that I didn’t get three years later in public high school. My mother told me that sex was a “gift from God.”
Earlier this month, a study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine Monday found that 12-year-olds given an abstinence-only message were significantly more likely to delay having sex than those receiving more comprehensive sex education.
As the Christian Science Monitor put it: “Abstinence-only education does work. Sometimes.”
The qualifier is critical.
A plethora of early studies, including federally funded studies by the Cochrane collaboration and the Mathematica Policy that found abstinence education had no effect on teen’s sexual behavior. Finally, a study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health looked at 934 high school students, specifically scrutinizing those who took the “virginity pledge.” That study also found no difference in the rate of teens having sex between those taking the virginity pledge and those who did not. What it did find was that those who took the virginity pledge were less likely to use contraceptives.
In spite of the program’s demonstrable ineffectiveness, funding for it tripled, from $73 million a year in 2001 to $204 million per year in 2008.
So what was different about this last abstinence-only program? For one thing, the students it targeted were quite young –12—and the moralistic tone of the instruction was ripped away. Instructors,counseled participants to delay sex “until they are ready,” rather than until marriage, the Monitor reports, adding, “The program also did not include a moralistic tone or disparage condom use, and instructors discussed contraceptive use if the subject came up during the course of the class.”
The United States has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world, with some 750,000 teens getting pregnant annually. From 2002-2006, Waterbury’s teen pregnancy rate was either double or near double the state average. It is fourth in the teen pregnancy rate, behind Hartford, New Britain and Windham.
If we can’t figure out a way to stop kids from having kids, we’re going to have more kids living in poverty, failing in school, suffering family violence and sexual abuse, landing in jail or becoming teen parents themselves. All of these outcomes researchers say are more likely to teen parents.
And while we fulminate about whether sex education should be given with a cudgel, with a condom or with a cautionary tale, we might want to look at what, when and how we tell our own children about sex. Squeamishness about “the talk” means that more kids are learning the most crucial facts of life from anybody other than their own parents. And yet when you ask them, more teens, 38 percent, pointed to their parents as the biggest influence on their sexual behavior ‑ more than friends, the media, educators, siblings, or religious organizations.
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o don’t wait for the school to tell your kid ‘No, never; Yes, sometimes” or “Sure, use this.” Have the talk. This country has the highest birthrate and abortion rate thanany other country. That can’t continue. We need a little bit of morality here and a lot of sense. That begins at home, at the kitchen table, before it ends up on the street.