Catching up on my morning news fix, I ran across the most disturbing of stories. You all know generally what my views are on things like sex ed, politics, religion and the like. This story only reinforced my belief that instead of keeping teenagers in the dark about things like sex/alcohol/drugs in the hopes that filtering down to them only what you believe they should do or know will magically make them do what you think they should do as opposed to treating them like people with brains who can handle getting all the information delivered to them so that they can start to learn to make their own informed decisions about things. Trust me when they grow up the ability to look at a mass of info and then make decisions based on that is gonna come in WAY more handy than the ability to listen to a line of BS someone feeds them and take it as just the way things are.
Case in point- in my home state of Florida apparently the schools have implimented a sex education program that is abstinence-only. This is the first part of the story that makes me cringe. That my friends is not a sex ed program, there is in fact not a whole lot to learn about when your policy is just don’t do it. Guess what happens next? Kids either blindly follow you, or they start trying to figure things out for themselves. Shockingly when they did a survey among Florida teens on what they know about sex, pregnancy, disease prevention, they found that teens had just started making shit up esentially and spreading among themselves “tips and tricks” that are silly in some cases, and just plain dangerous and life threatening in others.
Among the highlights of what kids think:
Drinking a capful of bleach will prevent AIDS
A shot of Mountain Dew will stop you from getting pregnant, as will smoking pot.
I am most disturbed by that bleach thing- honestly you’d rather rush your kid to the hospital because they drank bleach to try to prevent aids, or break out a condom and a banana and show them how to actually prevent STDS?
Are you parents happy knowing that your daughters are out getting high to try to stop getting pregnant from the unprotected sex they just had?
As I’ve said before, kids are going to have sex, it’s part of being a teenager, and yes sometimes they have it too early and lots of times they have it for the wrong reasons, but when they DO do it, cause they will wouldn’t you rather they were protected from things like diseases that they will have the rest of their lives or faced with having to raise a child when they are still for the most part a child themselves?
I know for most parents the dream is that their kid will wait until they’re out of high school and in a committed relationship before they start having sex, and that their precious babies will never do a single drug, and won’t drink until they’re 21 if at all. I know all these parents were also teenagers once and if they think back real hard they’ll perhaps remember what it was like to be 16 and trying to find yourself, or just trying to fit in and be accepted by their peers. I’d rather my kids made their own informed decisions about things and when they do take part in the activites that I myself took part in at that age that they’ll use their heads about it and know better to drive or get in a car with someone high or drunk and to always always always put a friggen condom to use when they start exploring sex with someone.
