Protect Your Children: Tell Them Things.

Yesterday I read about the Ontario government backpedaling and deciding not to release their new sex education curriculum after all.

Apparently, its language was too frank for some parents and religious groups in Ontario. Including a Catholic bishop. Don’t get me started.

I am of the opinion that you can not give enough information to people. Give them as much as they can take in, in a format that makes sense to them, developmentally, and you can’t go wrong. Maybe the sex education curriculum is too thorough for your liking, maybe you suspect the kids won’t really take all of it in anyway, but wouldn’t you rather have too much information than not enough?

The areas of the curriculum parents see as most problematic, according to the Globe and Mail, are the references to same sex families (for grade 3 students) and the references to anal sex for the purpose of explaining sexually transmitted infections (for grade 7 students).

I don’t know much about child development but I know that if a kid has two parents the same sex, she will have noticed by grade 3. So will her friends. Should we ignore it? Or talk about it. Should we let the kids fill in the gaps on the playground? Or give them accurate information.

Same sex relationships exist, just like different sex relationships exist. Ignoring things you don’t like DOESN’T MAKE THEM GO AWAY. Not acknowledging things that make you uncomfortable DOESN’T MAKE THEM GO AWAY. They are still there. You closed your eyes and shouted lalalalalalala fiddlesticks! And guess what. When you open your eyes, there will still be same sex couples. Having sex with each other. Sometimes in the bum.

Not that you can read this with your eyes closed.

It follows, then, that even if no one tells your child about it, it will still be real.

Anal sex happens. It really does. I think I want to make a t-shirt that says that.

When I was in elementary school, grade 6, year of SO NOT awesome, we had sex ed. We learned about tampons. Some boys on the playground called me and my friend “lezzes.” We didn’t know what that meant but we knew it was bad. Like “spaz” and “the R word” and “the F word that rhymes with rag.” Guess what, they didn’t learn any of that in sex ed. They were, we were, uneducated. We learned from older siblings, Judith Krantz novels, Judy Blume novels, television, the magazines on the top shelf at the 7-11, our parents. We pieced our random information together and then re-pieced it, like a jigsaw puzzle, until things made sense.

Generally, we were wrong.

We didn’t have the Internet, more’s the pity. That would have filled in a LOT of blanks.

That’s why I love this post by a 14 year old boy about the sex ed debate in Ontario. Because he’s all, yeesh, it’s the Information Age. You can tell us or the Internet will tell us. Whatever.

I guess my overarching point is this. You can’t prevent people from knowing things. You can’t stop your child from being curious or from being gay or from thinking about anal sex. If you think you can? You have control issues. (And also, I personally think you suck.)

You can help your child avoid pregnancy and disease and sexual abuse. Yes! How? By giving them information. That is the best way to protect them. By giving them information. Armed with information, they can say NO. They can say, not without a condom, here, I brought one. They can say I’m telling on you because what you just did to me was wrong.

Not that they WILL. Not every time. But sometimes is better than no times.

(And if you’re not comfortable talking about it, and the schools are offering to talk about it for you? Let them!)