I went to a meeting at my daughter’s middle school on Monday that I really didn’t want to go to. No, she hadn’t done anything bad that triggered a sit-down with the principal. Her teachers all love her every bit as much as she loves school. (Lucky, right?) This particular meeting, you see, was the annual “Human Sexuality Parent Information Night.”
This sex-ed stuff makes us parents more uncomfortable than our kids, I’ve realized. Maybe we know too much. We have too much “perspective,” and we fill in all the little details in ways our tweens never do. Whatever the reason, I found myself sitting in a standard-issue middle school chair (too small for my 6-foot-6-inch frame), shuffling my feet and fidgeting like a grade schooler at 2:50 in the afternoon, 10 minutes before the bell.
I want my little girl to grow up. And I really, really don’t want her to grow up. I need her to understand human sexuality. And I’d do anything to keep her from ever finding out what HPV stands for. I guess you could say I’m a pretty average dad.
But none of us average dads are raising our kids in an average world anymore, are we? The stuff our kids find out about sex rarely has anything to do with textbook diagrams and kindly, occasionally embarrassed instruction coming from science teachers. Indeed, a lot of it comes from decidedly unembarrassed (brazen, really) screenplays and teleplays, splashed across large and small screens. It comes from songs and video games. It comes from the radio and racy novels.
And quite a lot of it shouts, “Wouldn’t it be cool to hook up sooner rather than later? Shouldn’t you give this thing called love a shot—soon!? Couldn’t you ignore your dear old dad for a while and get a real life? A real relationship? Some real spice?”
Of course it never really works out the way our entertainment culture wants us to think it will. And that goes double for tweens who are trying to live up to the lifestyles of the racy and raw. We published this Culture Clip on Monday:
Adolescents who begin dating in middle school are four times more likely to eventually drop out of school and twice as likely to use alcohol, marijuana and tobacco as their peers. They’re also more likely to struggle in their study skills, according to new research from the University of Georgia. Study author Pamela Orpinas, a professor at the school’s College of Public Health and head of the Department of Health Promotion and Behavior, followed 624 students from 6th to 12th grade at six schools in northeast Georgia. She says of her team’s findings, “A likely explanation for the worse educational performance of early daters is that these adolescents start dating early as part of an overall pattern of high-risk behaviors.” Orpinas says her research suggests that “dating should not be considered a rite of passage in middle school.”
All I can think is maybe those kids don’t have an average dad who goes to Human Sexuality Parent Information Night. It wasn’t much that I did, mind you. I showed up at a meeting. I had another small, incremental “talk” with my girl after breakfast the next morning. I let her know that if she was going to insist on keeping on growing up, then I was going to insist on keeping on caring about how she grew up.
But maybe that sort of averageness is enough. And if it is, then I guess we need a whole lot more averageness these days.
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