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Collective Parental Group Amnesia
An open letter to the UK Times |
| by JB Jackson | | posted on | 2009-12-30 19:04:01 | | views | 129 : last 2010-09-08 22:40:51 | | comments | 3 : last 2010-02-17 20:48:33 | | category | non_fiction | | rating | General | |
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In “Sex education? No, thanks!” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/parent_power/article6915681.ece), Anna Moore falls victim to a disease that plagues many parents of pre-teen children: Collective Parental Group Amnesia.
If Moore were an American, where the middle-class is hopelessly prudish and childhood innocence is fetishized in tragically flattering parental rituals, her story might be run by some newspaper in Kansas. It speaks volumes that she got a forum in the UK Times for what should have been a letter to the PTA (or whatever the hell Brits call their parent-teacher associations, which we assume involve tea).
But Moore was actually among the majority in the United Kingdom who favor a very sensible plan to teach accurate sex education at each grade level as a matter of public health. In Britain, the law has teeth that would never be tolerated in the US: A parent cannot withdraw their child from Sex and Relationship Education (known as SRE) until the age of 15 -- not even on moral or religious grounds.
But even the best-laid (pardon the expression) plans often go awry and Moore was horrified when her ten-year-old daughter was shown a video of childbirth and expressed disgust at the idea of intercourse.
Judging by the comments section, readers tend to latch onto these as at least understandable. The video was apparently "graphic," but, then, so is actual childbirth. However, Moore’s conversion happened before her daughter was prematurely grossed out over sex and labor at an age when she should properly be getting grossed out over menstruation and tongue-kissing.
“This year, though, my attitude has changed,” she wrote, “and it is my eldest daughter who has changed it for me...[Ten-year-old Ruby] is balanced, bright, sociable. Though children are generally thought to be growing up fast, for Ruby and her friends, puberty still seems a long way off.”
Moore’s evidence for this is that Ruby seems to have largely avoided the lures of ‘tween marketing – a feat on Ruby’s part far more deserving of an article than why Mum has apparently lost her mind.
“She and her gang collect cuddly toys from Claire’s Accessories, and give them names, characters and complicated social lives. They are writing a story about zombies, alternating chapters and e-mailing them to one another. For Ruby, boys don’t yet figure — they have nothing to bring to her party.”
If in a few years, Ruby (who we can only hope is a pseudonym) doesn’t revile her mother for publishing – in one of largest newspapers in the world – these childhood indulgences that pre-teens haven’t quite outgrown yet, but find increasingly mortifying as they go through puberty, Moore is still in for a rude awakening.
Young teenagers, who often do look and act for all the world like puberty is a long way off, are often sexually active within a matter of only a few short years. Most peer-reviewed studies have found some correlation (differing only by degree) between basic sexual information and delayed sexual activity, fewer sexually transmitted diseases, and decreased teen pregnancy (excepting married teens and defining adolescence as ending at age 18).
The jury has been in since the 1990s: “Abstinence-only” doesn’t work and chastity pledges just mean more teen boys are getting blow jobs.
Even though your pre-teen still looks and acts very much like a cuddly child sometimes, they are still navigating their own burgeoning sexuality – a fact Moore demurely acknowledges from her own teen years.
Typical of our somewhat-lucky generation, her mum didn’t discuss sex with her, leading her to the nostalgic observation that “the days when you muddled through puberty on your own, discovering moments of magic and misery, are probably gone.”
She doesn’t quite ‘fess up to bungling intercourse or even the more common fond memories of make-out sessions that leave the adolescent body in a state of arousal akin to what it would feel like if starvation were ecstasy. So we’re left to let that bit of purple prose conjure up our own bittersweet sexual awakenings.
Or maybe Moore has succumbed so thoroughly to Collective Parental Group Amnesia that she’s folding her memories like origami into only their most PG-rated form. In which case, why is she revealing her daughter’s activities in such excruciating detail?
Or at least her daughter’s activities as far as she knows. If we’re honest with ourselves, a great many of the most profound childhood memories are almost completely devoid of adults. This is generally a good sign. Those inclined to have a lot of powerful childhood memories of adults are often recalling abuse or dysfunction.
Childhood memories revolving around other short people (though often as unpleasant or even scarring as adults can be) are the privilege of a relatively happy childhood, free of adult concerns. And free of the moronic adult notion that we can and should have access to everything going on in our children’s lives.
What used to be calling “hovering” is now defined as “good parenting” to the extent that children have almost no unstructured time to work out the social and sexual landscapes they will navigate for the rest of their lives. There’s few things more disturbing than watching a 40-year-old deal with a break-up in a manner that would have only been age-appropriate at 15.
But Moore isn’t just falling for the oldest trick in the book – believing your children to be less sexually sophisticated than they actually are. It’s worse than that: Moore wants to abandon the kind of comprehensive sexual education that America may never see…because her daughter thinks sex and childbirth are...ew….gross!
To be fair, the curriculum she describes does seem advanced for ten-year-olds, but her coyness casts her credibility in a dubious light. She mentions a few other, less hair-raising, aspects of the SRE curriculum, but only in passing and we can fairly assume these may be more representative than the disturbing video she gives center stage.
As further evidence of Parental Amnesia, Moore seems surprised that several pop psychology books tell her “Ruby’s revulsion is commonplace.”
Does she seriously not remember – back before those misty-eyed “moments of magic and misery” – hearing about the sex act for the first time? "Revulsion" is a pretty good word for the reaction this typically invokes, even in children who only vaguely understand it.
In the tradition of self-help books peddling the obvious, her anodyne gurus note that, because each child is so unique, “Sex education is probably necessary since so many parents are so bad at explaining anything, but doing it in school is an incredibly clumsy solution.”
They don’t tell us where else children might be taught about sex, but they do speak a truth Moore appears to accept (one which would not fly with very many Americans otherwise inclined to agree with her): Parents are not only bad at explaining sex to their children, but most teenagers would rather chew tinfoil than listen to their parents talk about it.
Sure, a few people have cozy memories of “The Talk,” but, for the handful who even got it, the most vivid memory is a sensation of your hair crawling, snake-like, out of your scalp when you realize that your parents have actually done what they’re now describing. (Talk about revulsion.)
If you were already sexually active before you got “The Talk,” the memory of it may be worse, including a frantic paranoia that they somehow know and this whole awkwardly chummy set-up is a trap.
“My worry,” Moore wrote, “is that, instead of equipping Ruby for adulthood, SRE has made her worry about it and introduced graphic information that had not yet figured on her radar.”
That’s a pretty good description of sex education, even under the best of circumstances. The prospect of adulthood naturally causes “heightened anxiety” in young teenagers; it’s called “growing up.”
While I’m not an advocate of scare tactics (most of which involve lying, such as telling children that condoms don’t work), a certain amount of anxiety may be what delays sexual activity and its consequences in children who receive accurate sex education.
Moore even acknowledges this, in a brief contradiction to everything she just got through saying: “Though I don’t advocate banning sex education in primary school, I’d feel more comfortable if it was discussion led, rather than based on videos and detailed anatomical information.”
What a fine idea to bring to your child’s school! Too bad she wrote an article exposing her ten-year-old’s slumber party activities instead.
And, sadly for Ruby, Mum will be pulling her out of SRE, so she can sit “in the library, immersed in Harry Potter.” Let’s hope Ruby’s first boyfriend – who may already exist – thinks “Expelliarmus” means, “Wear a condom or go home.”
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© JB Jackson, 2009, All Rights Reserved.
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| Comments |
| Please remember that Authors are looking for feedback (both positive and negative). If leaving praise, or a critique, please try to qualify your comments - something a little more elaborative than 'Good job', or 'A Bit Boring' is generally encouraged. |
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| JB It sounds like the Brits are beginning to get maybe a little bit more like(GOD forbid) Americans! Great review of this obscure article!~ LOVE Brad |
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| Most parents are too childish and lazy to spell it out tactfully. and usually with "goodfellas" on tv in the background. |
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| Judging by the sexual illiteracy among Americans, I don't think tact is the problem here. It's not that a 10-year-old needs to be told about sex tastefully -- they just need to be told about sex. (Besides, tactlessness would be at odds with your competing theories of childishness and laziness, though I've never known you to allow illogic to prevent you from commenting, Steve :-) The prevailing wisdom is that, ideally, sex education should be taught in the home. Conservatives (especially religious ones) argue against it being taught anywhere but at home or church; liberals will usually acknowledge the school system as a necessary back-up plan. I'm suggesting both are wrong and it should be taught in the public schools, as a matter of public health and because the parent-child relationship itself makes the subject so awkward that children aren't retaining the information, even in the rare situations where parents are providing adequate and accurate information. There's too many factors working against it. Parents themselves need to cope with their children's sexuality and kids can't wait until parents have resolved this before learning about it. People like Anna Moore are the rule, not the exception -- no one wants to believe their 10-year-old is on the verge of sexual awakening. So most wait until at least early adolescence. If they're lucky, the kids aren't sexually active yet, but, by that age, there are few things more humiliating than watching your mom or dad writhe through an awkward description of intercourse. Worse is the realization that one's parents DID THAT! Eeeewww! Just as parents need to time to accept the sexuality of their children, kids need time -- and a maturity few teenagers possess -- to accept the sexuality of their parents. The teacher-student relationship isn't bogged down by all these hang-ups and, though it may still result in less-than-ideal situations, it's an overall better setting for kids to be taught the basic biology of sex, pregnancy, childbirth, STDs, etc. Much is made of the need for "putting it into context," but kids are individuals too; they'll develop their own context whether we like it or not. (In fact, we may like their context better if we give them nothing to reject by telling them what we think that context should be.) Unlike the British system, though, I do believe parents should be allowed to withdraw their children from the curriculum for any reason as long as (just as with homeschoolers) they meet the state's overall education requirements. If somebody wants to keep their kids ignorant, there's only so much American precedent allows for intervening. |
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