Nothing freaks a parent out like the topic of sex and their kids. We don't want to teach you about it, we don't want you to know about it, we don't want to admit we ever did anything and we certainly don't want you anywhere near the topic either! You hear me? (Why am I yelling? Weird.) I took my teen daughter to see the Zach Efron film, "17 Again" this weekend and complained to her that I felt it portrayed teens as being single-mindedly focused on sex, with no other interests. My daughter thought that was a fairly accurate portrayal! Oh dear.
We absolutely want our children taught about the birds and the bees but our preference, since the whole topic makes us go slightly nauseated, is for their sexual knowledge to appear magically as if bestowed upon them like a gift from the three fairies in Disney's "Sleeping Beauty." There's so much conflict about what to teach in school, who should provide the information and what role Mom and Dad have to add to the mix of information and misinformation. I for one am a big believer in dropping books off in my kid's rooms for them to read and for a Q&A time to follow. So much easier to answer a few questions than to start from "where do babies come from" and misread my child's cues about what they want to know and are ready to hear.
It may not be your particular cup of tea but I was very interested to hear about new, free texting services available to provide your child (or you) with information about sexual issues. It almost sounds like the right way to use the term "sexting" which, by now, most of us are truly sick of hearing. In California, there is a service you can subscribe to at the unfortunately named "HookUp 365247". You text the word "hookup" to 365247 and within about a minute (my experience) you are registered to receive regular news items about sexual issues. You can also visit their online presence at TeenSource to read up on previous issues and get much more detailed information.
The New York Times had a story this weekend on this as part of a larger trend. In North Carolina, a more advanced version of this text service, called The Birds and the Bees Textline, actually has staffers at the ready to provide custom responses to a teen's query. They can also select from a drop down menu of commonly asked questions or FAQs. Naturally, there is concern that the point of view available from these online and texting services might not align with your family's perspective or religious point of view. Rather than turn off texting services to prevent your child from accessing this information, it's a far better plan to give your child the benefit of your knowledge and teaching up front. Even without texting services, most of this information can be found online at sites like Planned Parenthood's Teenwire site and at other state health organizations' web pages.
It's a long time since my 6th grade science teacher used an anonymous sex ed "Questions" box to allow her to answer our most embarassing questions in the classroom for everyone's benefit. She also insisted that everyone fill out the questions slip so we'd all have to put a slip of paper into the box, even if all we wrote was "I don't have a question". I'm sure if she is still teaching, she's probably using a texting service or other modern equivalent to get accurate information into her student's hand.