Got Condoms? Your 6th Grader Might

New York legislators have renewed a national debate about sex education by passing a law that requires—for the first time in twenty years—detailed sexual health instruction for middle school and high school students. While many New York schools have been distributing condoms for decades, the new curriculum actually teaches children as young as eleven how to use them.

Abstinence vs. public health vs. Teen Mom I’m torn. While I like comprehensive sex education in the abstract, I’m not sure I want my eleven-year-old daughter practicing with latex and bananas. No worries here in Arkansas. So far, she has only seen The Video (probably the same one I saw at her age). Next year she will participate in a week long abstinence-only sex-ed class that relies on STD scare tactics and a not-so-subtle implication that premarital sex is a VIP pass to Hell.

Read the rest of this post on TODAY Show Moms.

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Image: Tomizak, Flickr

The Other Kind of Breasts

Ever since sex-ed, the Boy Genius has been more interested in all things anatomy and physiology. (Aha, maybe this is why the fundamentalists don’t like education!) The other day we were discussing poultry.

Boy Genius: So when we eat chicken breasts, what is that exactly?

Rational Adult: It’s chicken breast.

[pensive, squinty look followed by:]

Boy Genius: But chickens don’t have breasts.

The OTHER Thing About Sex

Yes, I know you’re getting tired of my kid’s sex-ed. But I’m not, and it’s my blog. Today the sixth grader watched “The Film” in health class.

“Yeah, the teacher finally told us that people have sex for pleasure.”

“Extreme pleasure,” I added.

“Really? Is it extremely pleasurable when you do it, Mom?”

My First Time? That’s Classified

The sex education of my 11-year-old continued this week. The abstinence-only curriculum stressed the physical and emotional problems that come with having sex. The intention of all the scare tactics is to convince the kids to wait until marriage. Problem is that this competes with my intention of convincing him to wait until he is 30 or 40 to get married.

Of course, my child knows I didn’t wait.

“When’s the first time you did it?” he asked as I was tucking him into bed.

“That’s classified information.” I told him I’d be glad to tell him anything he wanted to know, but not quite yet.

“Okay. When’s the last time you did it?”

Abstinence Education and My 6th Grader

File this under Things I Shouldn’t Write About for a Variety of Reasons.

And…. Go.

My son is going through abstinence education at school. On the 5th day of Reality Check, the kids have the option (no pressure) of signing an abstinence pledge. This could be a problem considering on the first day of the curriculum I told my son to “forget about all that crap they tell you about waiting until marriage.” I did, however, request that he abstain until he gets to college.

“If you do that for me, I’ll send you off with a crate of condoms.”

(Insert 1950s style husband muttering in the background  - something about “ruin your life” – as if said husband did not sample the wedding cake until after the vows.)

Anyway…

Cut to night #2 of abstinence education. I was proud of my husband for at least acknowledging the existence of erections. Although he still can’t say the word penis, he covered the basis science of blood flow. But I was the one my son asked the important questions, like WHY does it get hard and what happens to girls – since they don’t have a penis.

I will spare you the details, mostly because you already know them.

“Kinda weird, huh?” I said, all Mom-like. “But I promise it will all seem really cool one day.”

He smiled – too big. “Yeah – first day of college.”