Few things are more indicative of our mainstream media’s idiocy than the fact that right wingers have been allowed to wave the “family values” banner for so long despite this rather unseemly hostility to minor children.
More thought, and more snark on the issue from Womenstake. Salient point: The contraception is being handed out to middle schoolers in direct reaction to the alarming pregnancies in the middle schools. Dress it up however you want, but the screaming over this policy is straightforward opposition to direct measures to keep girls from giving birth when they’re in middle school.
117 Responses to “Huh, maybe she does kick puppies for fun”
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I love the quote she uses:
“who are they having sex with? Other 12-year-olds?”
Umm, mostly, I’d say yes. Other 12-yea-olds. Neither of them is likely to be able to support a baby. That’s the point of the program.
Well, even if it’s older guys, which it likely is, then it’s still not right to be having a baby.
It seems to me that giving out contraception is a good way to at least have a chance for a face-to-face moment with a girl to see if you can find a bit of openness that will allow you to get in and help her, if in fact she’s stuck in a relationship with an older guy. What doesn’t work is sticking your fingers in your ears and singing, “IF I PRETEND IT’S NOT HAPPENING, IT’S NOT HAPPENING.”
Furthermore, enough with all the “but my kids can’t even get a Tylenol without my permission” comparisons. To get any services at the school clinic, students need to first get their parents’ permission, but once they have permission, students are entitled to the same right to medical privacy as anyone else.
Rinse…repeat.
I’d say yes. Other 12-year-olds.
UHM..well no, and this is in fact a legitimate issue. I just don’t think that pregnancy and childbirth in middle school should be the consequence for sex with older “boys.”
I see GotDaFever beat me to the snark I intended. Although it’s more like 12-15 year olds, probably. But yes. And it’s worth wonders — why did they immediately jump to the conclusion that there had to be adults involved in this sex somewhere? A bit of projection, mayhaps?
I’m sure there’s a range of students involved, and yeah, sadly the odds are that it’s older boys and younger girls, simply because the odds of a 12-year-old boy being sexually mature aren’t spectacular.
That said, I continue to love the “Wages of Sin are Death” attitude that the right crows about. I don’t want my daughter having sex at 12. I’m going to make that clear. But I also am realistic enough to know that I really don’t want my daughter to be pregnant at 12, and that’s the higher priority.
Gah! Warn me before linking directly to Malkin’s site!
*scrubs her harddrive*
This is so screwed up I think it might make my brain explode. HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY HAVE SEX WITH GUYS THEIR AGE???!! Seriously, she is basically saying that teenage girls MUST be having sex with older men. Isn’t it normal for men to have sex with 12-year-olds? AAAAAAA! How could 12-year-old boys be capable of having sex with 12-year-old girls? Who I guess are all just dirty sluts, temping those sweet, innocent boys.
I think I’m going to barf.
I don’t want my daughter having sex at 12. I’m going to make that clear. But I also am realistic enough to know that I really don’t want my daughter to be pregnant at 12, and that’s the higher priority.
While I understand why the parents may be complaining about schools providing contraceptives to middle-schoolers, these parents have no right to effectively impose their personal views on parenting on other parents with differing perspectives.
Also, this may be anecdotal, but when they started handing out contraceptives during my frosh year, the amount of sexual activity among the vast majority of us didn’t skyrocket as these pundits would have you believe. Many of us were too busy with other priorities of high school life that *surprise* some of us 13-18 year olds were able to handle with little to no parental supervision.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but is this complaining another sign of the increasing infantilization of American adolescents that I and several of my similar aged friends (late 20s) have been observing over the last 10-20 years?
Mr. Fecke: “the odds of a 12-year-old boy being sexually mature aren’t spectacular.”
I was quite capable of impregnating someone at twelve. Never had the chance, would have been scared shitless at the time, and had the social skills of a middlingly suave brick, but I was indeed capable of ejaculating semen. And there were some twelve-year-old girls who took interest in me, though as I said they didn’t get too far because of my many insecurities (and I am being utterly unfair to womenfolk to suggest that the interests preteen girls had in the preteen me would have led to sexual relations, but there was a chance….)
Ah, the things I missed out on by having low self-esteem, a poor body image, a poor musculature, and high-functioning Aspergers (which at the time was called “being a selfish meanie” rather than an Autism Spectrum Disorder, which still doesn’t sound great.)
Don’t people realise that when you go through puberty, you get a sex drive? It’s not like it just waits around nicely for a couple of years (or marriage) to kick in. With the age of puberty dropping* you would expect to see sexual behaviour in this age group rising.
It’s not so much ZOMG CORRUPTING THESE LITTLE GIRLS as people are growing up faster and coping with adult drives at a younger age.
I remember that most of my friends and I were already close to our full heights/development when we were twelve, and were often mistaken for university students.
*supposedly. I never managed to get an adequate explanation of why, on the one hand, we were taught that girls used to go through puberty in their mid teens, and on the other, that girls once-upon-a-time had their first children around 12-13.
No, no, she only kicks the puppies because they need kicking, or they’ll become socialist running dogs…
Amanda wrote:
According to The New York Times, the school’s own survey had found that “about” 5 of the school’s 500 students had identified themselves as sexually active. It’s been a while since I was in elementary school, but I still remember how to do percentages: 5 out of 500 is 1%.
So, for 1%, the school board and the Health Department decided that they would make contraceptives available for all; that’s just brilliant.
Now, there are some restrictions, which have been published elsewhere, though aren’t in the Times’ story. To receive any services at all from the Health Department, parents must sign a consent form. But once that consent form is signed, the Health Department may provide contraceptives without notifying the parents. Thus, this policy means that the Health Department is putting pressure on poor parents: either allow us to provide contraceptive services without your knowledge, or your child gets no services from the Health Department. Parents of greater means don’t have to worry, but the poor families are coerced.
Or, one might reasonably trust that regardless of how “liberal” the HD staff may be (and wasn’t one of the objectors against the policy a school nurse?) they will nevertheless not actually approve of such young girls having sex either, if only for reasons of general public health, and will therefore use the distribution of BC as teaching moments.
It would be cheesy and ineffective to merely pretend to offer the stuff just to lure the kids in to a lecture, but I daresay that a lecture will come with actual distribution, and who knows, perhaps even effective intervention. The key is precisely that the school clinic wouldn’t have punitive authority and would ultimately give BC to a girl who really insisted on it-if not quite “no questions asked,” at least “no answers demanded.” But kids who might have good, or at least strong, reasons not to listen to the nominal authorities, might well listen to good, sympathetic sense from medical practitioner there to help them.
I really don’t think they intend for more kids to have sex; rather, they hope at least some will change their minds if they defuse the authoritarianism of “Just Say No!” with sober self-interest instead, others will back off givn sympathetic low-pressure counseling–and the rest will at least avoid pregnancy and STDs, and maybe seek out help earlier and more effectively than they otherwise would.
Is this kind of reasoning so completely alien to you, Dana? Is it really more important that the school authorities maintain a monolithic stance against the cooties of admitting kids do have sex?
Remind us again why we’re not supposed to conclude your beliefs amount to “punish the wimmins!”
So, for 1%, the school board and the Health Department decided that they would make contraceptives available for all; that’s just brilliant.
They’re the ones most at risk, and who are least likely to get the help they need at home. I know that idea boggles your mind, Dana, but you might try looking at the situation just a little deeper. When I wrote about this yesterday, I made that very point–that people like Malkin would probably screech and howl and ignore the fact that policies like this aren’t instituted with the majority of students in mind, just with the small minority who actually need them. But it’s the mindset of non-thinking conservatives that if everyone doesn’t need a service, no one should have it.
I love the comments. These people seem to enjoy the suffering of others.
Our kids are special, unlike those unwashed heathens:
Desire for punishment for those who have sex:
Desire for control through fear:
Bad science:
I work as a 911 dispatcher. We often get calls about young girls having sex-girls under 16. Often,the male is older-at least 17-often much older.
I don’t oppose providing birth control for young girls,but it’s good to remember,that when 11-12 year old girls are having sex-often a crime is being committed.
I work as a 911 dispatcher. We often get calls about young girls (under 16) having sex. Frequently,the male is at least 17,oftern much older. I don’t oppose providing birth control for young girls. But,when talking about 11-12 yr old girls having sex-often a crime is beong committed.
I think it’s well understood that the younger the girl is when she first has sex, the higher the chances the male partner is a creepy older pervert, who has flattered her with stories about how hot she must be to score with an older guy.
That said, girls who fall for this line need help, not punishment and certainly not a body-damaging, life-altering problem of having a baby.
In light of this discussion, I offer this entertaining video:
I can remember two girls getting pregnant in middle school that I know of. One was with a boy her age, another with a guy in college.
Dana, why do you want 5 out of 500 middle schoolers to get pregnant? No, seriously. Look at it from a non-asshole perspective: You are seriously suggesting that in order to keep kids who probably don’t care to use contraception from what? Knowing it exists? Getting some condoms to blow up and giggle with their friends? You are willing to sacrifice the well-being of 1% of girls.
How is it you guy supposedly wave the flag of loving children again? Wishing pregnancy on girls is pretty low and sick.
Mr Foxwell wrote:
As it happens, I have two daughters; one is a sophomore in college, and the other a sophomore in high school. Neither of them has ever come home staggering drunk, neither has come home stoned, neither has ever just not come home, neither smokes, neither drinks, and neither of them has ever gotten pregnant. My older daughter won a Naval ROTC scholarship and is majoring in aeronautical engineering at Penn State; not exactly a fluff course of study. My younger daughter gets good grades and is an altar server. Yet somehow, someway, other people (many of them who have no children at all) seem to think that they would take better decisions in child-rearing than my wife and I would.
What the school board did was to undermine parents; in their infinite wisdom, they decided that if other people’s children wanted contraceptives, that they would provide the legal consent, and not worry about whether the real parents consented.
When my kids were growing up, it didn’t take them long to figure out that if dad said no, go ask mom, and maybe she’d say yes; it also didn’t take long for us to figure out that tactic and make certain we provided a united front. What the school board has done is completely circumvent asking either dad or mom; we’ll just as the HD nurse.
And what this decision teaches is that no, sex among pre-teens is a really bad thing [wink] [nod], but if you must, here, we’ll enable you, and we won’t even tell your fuddy-duddy parents.
Please, tell me how that isn’t the school board and the Health Department from assuming child-rearing duties from the parents.
Kids are heavier than they used to be, which means their hormones are kicking in faster. When I worked in Medicare I remember talking to parents of pregnant 8 year olds! Needless to say the “father” wasn’t also 8 years old…this is not about middle school girls making bad decisions, it’s about keeping them from being exploited and having their lives ruined by being forced to have the children of older males.
Oops, that’s *Medicaid above.
Amanda,that video was fantastic!Where do I find more of that sort?
exholt: Two things. First:
Fixed that for ya.Second: Yes.
If are in authority and everybody else is children, you don’t have to listen. Indeed, the very notion of listening is silly, because it implies a participatory social system rather than an authoritarian one. Why do you think that Oh So Religious People have a hard time with the very concept of a democracy? Because a democracy infers by necessity the concept that people are rational adults capable of — and having a right to — make their own decisions. Hyper-religious types start with the impression that everybody is a child, period, with no rights that aren’t subject to the authority of Sky Daddy ™. Having sold themselves into the harem for the promise of the Eternal Life potion (please allow not six-to-eight weeks but only until death for delivery) they demand that everybody else be jammed into the seraglio with them as proof of the validity of their decision.
It is also why they hate the free exchange of ideas, education and information of which they do not approve. In their view, all decisions others than theirs are Wrong, therefore why should people be allowed the choice.? And if you allow them to read, think and discuss, they might demand the choice, and they can’t have that, can they?
resident_alien: http://midwestteensexshow.com/
A very, very funny and cutting bunch. Well worth a look or three.
I got my period in 6th grade, at age almost 12, and I wasn’t the first, and this was back in the early 80s. It’s not something new that children are maturing faster” - they gave us the useless little presentation at our Catholic school in 5th grade, because they knew some kids were going to hit puberty that year. And yes, there were couples fooling around down at the back of the schoolyard out of sight from the building, where the older kids had always gone to make out, in sixth and 7th grade, in 1980. There wasn’t anyone pregnant my year that I know of, but it was the sort of place where someone could be whisked away and a cover story of “transfer” told and who’d know it?
Ignorance is not innocence, and neither guarantees a chastity belt.
Seriously, Dana, did you give any thought at all to this before you wrote this? Would you stand up at a Board of County Commissioners meeting and speak against a guard rail on a curve above a deep ditch because it was statistically shown that only one out of a hundred vehicles plunges off the road?
What I find interesting about Dana’s and Malkin’s stance, too, is the idea that if something is available, you must use it. If pills are available, the girls must take them, right? Well, by that logic, the cocks are available, etc. And you can’t and certainly wouldn’t dare ban cocks from school. And since the girls must be having sex because they can, then that doubles up the need for contraception, no?
To get to the point about these girls being possibly sexually abused: this program is more likely to catch it than no program. I worked for Planned Parenthood a few years back and took a training on young teen girl/adult male relationships: what could be harmful about them, what was illegal, and what had to be reported to the authorities. Two things that stood out - young women who had relationships with significantly older men rather than their male peers were more likely to a) become pregnant and b) contract STDs. At least where I live (Ohio), teachers and school nurses, like PP employees, are mandated reporters - meaning that if they have evidence of statuatory rape or sexual abuse of the teenagers visiting them, they are required by law to report it. So this program will also serve as another way to protect teenage girls from that exploitation.
That you know of, Dana. The fact that you’ve made it clear to strangers on the internet that hiding certain behavior from you would be the best strategy, I’m sure your daughters figured it out, too. Since you’ve abdicated the responsibility of being a guide through experimental phases, you should be thanking the lucky stars that your daughters have other sources of help should they need it.
By the way, children are people, not property. Your weird language about how you have a right to dispose of your family members as you see fit is the language of how property is handled. Children are people, and they have rights. They are not trophies for you to decide if you wish to polish them or throw them in the trash.
First just let me say I completely support fully available contraceptive information for girls and women of all ages. I don’t want anyone to think I’m a troll.
The main concern I have about this program that I haven’t seen addressed in the articles is the issue of who exactly is going to be prescribing the birth control pills. If a girl goes to her doctor, or Planned Parenthood, she gets a gyno exam and physical, and all the necessary medical information before being given what is, let’s not forget, medication. Is the school nurse dispensing this or what? Are they getting medical exams on a regular basis? I haven’t been on the pill in a LONG time but I remember having to go every six months to get it renewed, getting the info repeated to me about the risks, the warning signs, the not-smoking lectures, etc. And I certainly also hope they’re going to continue educating girls about the STD risks. Hormonal methods of BC don’t protect against those.
I do agree with the commenter who said that a program like this is actually MORE likely to protect young girls from being preyed on by older men, just by providing a forum for discussion.
Dana: Something like 99% of all college students drink. I’m sure your daughter does too. Face the facts, she’s an adult. Some of the biggest alcoholics i knew were in engineering.
As for me, one of my concerns with this program is the side effects of the pill. As it stands right now I don’t think they warn girls and women seriously enough about the way the pill can mess you up. I seriously thought that no side effects would hit me, and I wound up having to get off of it because the mood swings were utterly incontrollable. While I’m not a fan of mandatory parental notification for pretty much anything, I’d feel more comfortable if these girls were seeing a real doctor who was taking into account the problems that are inherent in birth control.
“If a girl goes to her doctor, or Planned Parenthood, she gets a gyno exam and physical, and all the necessary medical information before being given what is, let’s not forget, medication. Is the school nurse dispensing this or what?”
The pelvic exam isn’t really necessary for someone to safely be prescribed hormonal BC, and there’s no reason a school nurse couldn’t perform the physical. Beyond that, is there any reason to think they wouldn’t repeat all the risk info out of the medical brochures and keep educating about STDs? I mean, really, if they didn’t care about these kids not wrecking themselves, they wouldn’t be starting a this program in the first place.
“As it happens, I have two daughters; one is a sophomore in college, and the other a sophomore in high school. Neither of them has ever come home staggering drunk, neither has come home stoned, neither has ever just not come home, neither smokes, neither drinks, and neither of them has ever gotten pregnant. My older daughter won a Naval ROTC scholarship and is majoring in aeronautical engineering at Penn State; not exactly a fluff course of study. My younger daughter gets good grades and is an altar server.”
Why is it that people who hold these viewpoints, when asked why they want to condemn children without access to wise and caring parental guidance to ignorance and danger, feel that the answer to this question is that since their OWN children personally have access to this from them, all the kids who don’t somehow don’t matter and should be thrown to the wolves?
“Yet somehow, someway, other people (many of them who have no children at all)”
Got any proof of that? They never do.
“seem to think that they would take better decisions in child-rearing than my wife and I would.”
No, they think that they would make better decisions in child-rearing than negligent, uncaring and downright abusive parents. I gotta agree with that; you can’t do worse than the bottom of the barrel. Dude, it ain’t all about YOU and YOUR KIDS, ALL THE TIME. There are literally hundreds of millions of other parents and kids, believing it or not, coexisting with you all right now as we speak!
“What the school board did was to undermine parents; in their infinite wisdom, they decided that if other people’s children wanted contraceptives, that they would provide the legal consent, and not worry about whether the real parents consented.When my kids were growing up, it didn’t take them long to figure out that if dad said no, go ask mom, and maybe she’d say yes; it also didn’t take long for us to figure out that tactic and make certain we provided a united front. What the school board has done is completely circumvent asking either dad or mom; we’ll just as the HD nurse.And what this decision teaches is that no, sex among pre-teens is a really bad thing [wink] [nod], but if you must, here, we’ll enable you, and we won’t even tell your fuddy-duddy parents.
Please, tell me how that isn’t the school board and the Health Department from assuming child-rearing duties from the parents.”
OK. So you think your kids are going to come to you, or ever would have, to ask your permission to start having sex? Just like that, “Hey Dad, will you give me permission to have sex?” Regardless of the age they start, or have already started, or plan to start? And now you feel instead that your kids have the option to ask the school nurse for permission to have sex! And she can say yes, legally!
Perspective shift, back to reality. Your kid, no matter how wise and pure you think he or she is, is eventually almost certainly going to have sex, and it is a very, very rare case where she is going to ask you to officially okay this first. Nor is she ever going to ask a health professional of any description to okay it for her. She’ll decide, without anybody else getting to tell her yes or not. Do you personally know of more than 1 in 1000, if even THAT many, people who got permission before boinking first, including both you and your wife? From anybody?
Major reality check point here is, the kid is neither asking nor getting permission from anybody to have sex. This is not, sadly I can see, an area in which parental authority actually, truly extends, and it never has, despite strange and wishful thinking from some parents who apparently have forgotten that they themselves in a million years would never ever ever have asked their *own* parents for “permission to have sex.”
There is one “parenting choice” the school is usurping from you. You can make it a lot more likely or a lot less likely that your daughter will get pregnant or contract a sexually transmitted disease whenever she does decide to have sex. As a parent you have the most power and influence, so many studies have shown, as to those kinds of results of sexual activities in your children. The school admittedly is reducing your ability to punish your children by having sex before you think they should with health problems ranging from semi-serious to life-threatening. However, since the desire to do such a thing to your child for ANY reason or cause, sexual or non, is a clear sign of a very abusive parent, then the school is absolutely right to step in and protect your child from your abuse. There really is no valid defense for such a punishment to be inflicted on a child, and it’s so disgusting to even contemplate as a deliberate act that I don’t think I will any longer.
I’m puzzled.
Pandagon is a blog that is shockingly chock-a-block with cat people. I would think that for Kittie True Believers, a Malkinite puppy kicking would be seen as a point in her favour.
(DIVES! Rolls for cover in ditch, avoiding hail of bullets and used cat litter!)
Ruth: Most of the medical establishment agrees that birth control pills, for women that are not overweight or smoking, are as safe as Tylenol. That’s why EC can be sold over the counter. BC is certainly safer than the alternative that the wingnuts are prescribing, pregnancy and possibly childbirth.
Now, I realize that this doesn’t sit well with people that had problems with BC, but problems is a different issue than safety concerns. I’ve had BC problems, too, and just messed with the dose until I got one that worked. The side effects were unpleasant, but not dangerous, sort of like the side effects of Tylenol. Side effects is a different issue than safety concerns. Sometimes you have to deal with side effects by switching from Tylenol to aspirin. Sometimes you have to realize that the side effects are unmanageable. All that sucks, I wish medicine were more exacting, but it’s not a safety issue.
“As it happens, I have two daughters; one is a sophomore in college, and the other a sophomore in high school. Neither of them has ever come home staggering drunk, neither has come home stoned, neither has ever just not come home, neither smokes, neither drinks, and neither of them has ever gotten pregnant. My older daughter won a Naval ROTC scholarship and is majoring in aeronautical engineering at Penn State; not exactly a fluff course of study. My younger daughter gets good grades and is an altar server.”
Why is it that people who hold these viewpoints, when asked why they want to condemn children without access to wise and caring parental guidance to ignorance and danger, feel that the answer to this question is that since their OWN children personally have access to this from them, all the kids who don’t somehow don’t matter and should be thrown to the wolves?
“Yet somehow, someway, other people (many of them who have no children at all)”
Got any proof of that? They never do.
“seem to think that they would take better decisions in child-rearing than my wife and I would.”
No, they think that they would make better decisions in child-rearing than negligent, uncaring and downright abusive parents. I gotta agree with that; you can’t do worse than the bottom of the barrel. Dude, it ain’t all about YOU and YOUR KIDS, ALL THE TIME. There are literally hundreds of millions of other parents and kids, believing it or not, coexisting with you all right now as we speak!
“What the school board did was to undermine parents; in their infinite wisdom, they decided that if other people’s children wanted contraceptives, that they would provide the legal consent, and not worry about whether the real parents consented.When my kids were growing up, it didn’t take them long to figure out that if dad said no, go ask mom, and maybe she’d say yes; it also didn’t take long for us to figure out that tactic and make certain we provided a united front. What the school board has done is completely circumvent asking either dad or mom; we’ll just as the HD nurse.And what this decision teaches is that no, sex among pre-teens is a really bad thing [wink] [nod], but if you must, here, we’ll enable you, and we won’t even tell your fuddy-duddy parents.
Please, tell me how that isn’t the school board and the Health Department from assuming child-rearing duties from the parents.”
OK. So you think your kids are going to come to you, or ever would have, to ask your permission to start having sex? Just like that, “Hey Dad, will you give me permission to have sex?” Regardless of the age they start, or have already started, or plan to start? And now you feel instead that your kids have the option to ask the school nurse for permission to have sex! And she can say yes, legally!
Perspective shift, back to reality. Your kid, no matter how wise and pure you think he or she is, is eventually almost certainly going to have sex, and it is a very, very rare case where she is going to ask you to officially okay this first. Nor is she ever going to ask a health professional of any description to okay it for her. She’ll decide, without anybody else getting to tell her yes or not. Do you personally know of more than 1 in 1000, if even THAT many, people who got permission before boinking first, including both you and your wife? From anybody?
Major reality check point here is, the kid is neither asking nor getting permission from anybody to have sex. This is not, sadly I can see, an area in which parental authority actually, truly extends, and it never has, despite strange and wishful thinking from some parents who apparently have forgotten that they themselves in a million years would never ever ever have asked their *own* parents for “permission to have sex.”
There is one “parenting choice” the school is usurping from you. You can make it a lot more likely or a lot less likely that your daughter will get pregnant or contract a sexually transmitted disease whenever she does decide to have sex. As a parent you have the most power and influence, so many studies have shown, as to those kinds of results of sexual activities in your children. The school admittedly is reducing your ability to punish your children by having sex before you think they should with health problems ranging from semi-serious to life-threatening. However, since the desire to do such a thing to your child for ANY reason or cause, sexual or non, is a clear sign of a very abusive parent, then the school is absolutely right to step in and protect your child from your abuse. There really is no valid defense for such a punishment to be inflicted on a child, and it’s so disgusting to even contemplate as a deliberate act that I don’t think I will any longer.
I hate the spam blocker. I think I ended up posting twice. Or maybe never. Arrrghhhhh…
Seeker, the feminist community is chock full of bi-animal lovers. Look at Jessica Valenti, from who we get our marching orders: One cat, one dog. I myself have wished often for a dog, if I had the space or inclination to care for one.
Of course, this catholic taste in pet love will probably end up being more evidence that we’re all perverts.
Amanda wrote:
I don’t want any of them pregnant — and I don’t think that they ought to be screwing around at all. What decisions like this from the -of-so-caring school board do is to undermine (further) parental authority and parental teaching.
You know, the Health Department could have had a policy which enabled these underaged girls to get contraceptives, if their parents specifically approved. By taking their decision in this manner, they have explicitly excluded the parents, and assumed in loco parentis authority for themselves.
Disgusting and immoral. Names and addresses, please.This whole discussion is cute, but any middle schooler who is not clever enough to score some birth control on their own is probably not clever enough to be having sex. I’m a big supporter of this program, but there is no WAY I would have ever let any school official know that much about my personal life. I’d be too afraid some well meaning battle axe nurse would blab in the teacher’s lounge or tell my parents.
And, lord knows, middleschoolers and highschoolers never make decisions or mistakes that are contrary to good sense and/or what their parents or teachers tell them. Thanks for clearing that up for us.Really, Dana, your first sentence embodies one of the greatest flaws of the conservative mind. You don’t want X to happen, so removing plans for preventing X and merely telling people not to do X will suffice. The fact that such command-based wishful thinking has failed throughout human history doesn’t seem to register. It rather reminds one of Berke Brethed’s sarcasm on what the Reagan administration’s plan would be to reduce teen pregnancies: speaker vans cruising make-out spots blaring “NOW STOP THAT AT ONCE!”.
Btw, you meant to write “oh-so-caring” and instead wrote “of-so-caring”, thus meaning actions that have their source point in caring. (Blows kiss) Your freudian slip is showing, dear.
This birth control plan is really symptomatic of a wider policy starting point. I have always felt that one of the highest orders of intelligence was the ability to rationally plan for one’s own inevitable stupidity. It is a good guide for people and it’s a good guide for public policy. Why? Because societies, governments, cultures and subcultures and especially individuals will occasionally-to-sometime-to-often make dumb choices. You want your plans in place to minimize the damage. This birth control issue is merely one example of that.
People who oppose the program have their feet firmly planted in wishful thinking, a hope that you can moralize and teach consistent choices. Doesn’t happen. Has never happened. Won’t happen.
Former US Army Chief of Staff Gen. Sullivan put his finger right on it in the title of his management book: Hope is Not a Method.
I got into a truly terrifying discussion on this topic on a friend’s livejournal the other day.
The commenter who gave me the willies is a public health nurse, and saw some truly awful things in her area. Her response?
To teach her kids “…a moral belief system beyond pop culture. I discuss modesty with my 9 year old pointing out examples and explaining why we don’t dress like hookers. We date to marry and reproduce, not for hanging out and boozing it up.”
I responded saying:
“My concern is that there comes a point where a kid will hear “This is what I want for you,” and turn that into ‘This is what I think the world should look like.’
I had a friend in college who was decidedly asexual, but she never made anyone around her feel shameful for the sex they had. (Including one notable year when every other room in her suite had couples in them.) If parents could teach respect like that, then I have no problem with teaching “date to marry, intercourse to reproduce.” That line (without teaching about pleasure in one’s body, anyway) can evolve into slut-shaming, shame about sex in general, and another generation deriding other peoples’ sexual practices. ”
She responded with more fear-mongering, completely missing any call for education and information I’d included.
She’s going to be in for a real shock when her kids rebel.
Ruth,
The last time I went to PP, I talked to a doctor for all of about 20 minutes before walking out with a prescription for birth control. You don’t need a gyno exam or a physical to get the pill. The consultation would probably take a little longer with girls who have never taken birth control before, though maybe they’ll have all the details on how to take it and common side effects in health class.
Amanda wrote:
True enough, which is why I applied the adjective “staggering.” At least if they have drunk something, they didn’t get totally smashed.
You know, from a woman who has no children, and who has referred to pregnancy as being “punished” for having sex, I find it hysterically laughable that you seem to think you know better how to rear children than someone who has actually done it.
A simple fact: whatever my wife and I have done in child rearing has apparently worked, while the bovine feces you spout on how to rear children, well it hasn’t failed yet, since you haven’t actually tried it yet.
But I’d guess that, if the Lord ever blesses you with children, you wouldn’t want to hand over your parental responsibilities and decision-taking to strangers.
“This whole discussion is cute, but any middle schooler who is not clever enough to score some birth control on their own is probably not clever enough to be having sex.”
Is anyone making the argument that there are middle schoolers who should be having sex? Because middle school is pretty damn young to be having sex, even with peers.
That’s before you even really get to the whole “the less clever you are, the more likely you are to need someone trying to hammer home messages about how to protect yourself from pregnancy and STDs, how you don’t ‘owe’ anyone sex, how it’s illegal and exploitative for non-peers to pressure you into sexual activity, etc.” thing.
I don’t want any of them pregnant — and I don’t think that they ought to be screwing around at all.
And I want a cookie and a million dollars.
Okay, so that’s not going to happen. They’re obviously screwing around. So, do you want them pregnant or not? Simple question. For those who are doing it, do you want them pregnant or not? The “consequences” squeeing people at Malkin’s place clearly feel that pregnancy is an apt punishment for the middle school slut set. What do you think should happen to a girl who has sex that young? Don’t you think the punishment of pregnancy at such a young age way outstrips the “crime”?
We don’t have to make any assumptions at all about Dana’s kids. Let’s take him at his word and suppose he and his daughters have a wonderful, open, simpatico relationship with not a hint of creepiness to it.
Certainly my own reactionary parents, as far as I know, achieved similar results–up to a point anyway. I certainly never went tomcatting around town–in fact I have good reason to think my parents were very worried they’d done too good a job internalizing the official Catholic message “no sex whatsoever for you young man, in thought, word, or deed, until you are decently married!” I didn’t date, didn’t have any friendships to speak of–I think Dad worried I might be gay, and accordingly put up one of his public school CCD (that’s Catholic Sunday school, folks) students to kiss me one night. Plus there were a number of other little hints he dropped me that a certain amount of fooling around would be a good thing–even going so far as to tell me that if I did knock up some girl, I wouldn’t necessarily have to marry her. Whatever the heck he meant by that. But none of this broke me out of my shell of outward obedience and inner shame and guilt over perfectly healthy sexual feelings.
With my next sister (I’m oldest, then Mom had three daughters and a son in clockwork 2 year intervals) the issue actually was that she was in fact a lesbian, and looking back on her childhood it’s perfectly clear she at any rate was born that way. I have some reason to think that she was not clear on this herself until late HS or even her freshman year at Occidental College, most particularly because when she was 15 or so she met this guy working in a Panama City Beach tourist trap. He was a felony convict, on a work-release program that had him sleeping behind bars. She told me much later how she fell in love with him, and seriously considered running away with him when he was released. But we went on a big family road trip extravaganza that summer to ultimately visit our West Coast relatives (by way of an aunt, uncle, and cousins in Little Rock, a “pro-life” conference in Omaha, a visit to Colorado Springs (I had to at least pretend to be interested in the USAF Academy–that was creepy) and another uncle in New Mexico. In the course of watching me check out prospective colleges (the only one I was really serious about being Caltech) and talking to her various cousins, she decided she had to put her interests first, to stay with the family and in school and go to college.
That, by the way, Dana, is the kind of rationality I’m talking about. It really doesn’t matter how much parents love their kids and do the very best, by their lights, by them–as they approach adulthood they absolutely have to know that their lives are their own, that right and wrong are not determined by the say-so of authorities but are grounded in rational considerations and their own best interest, which they are responsible for. I think Jesus had some words or other to say about children ultimately leaving and how this is the natural order of things. I never doubt my parents wished the best for all of us, but it is absolutely necessary to gain some perspective on the values handed down at home, no matter how well handed.
Also, despite their best intentions, my parents are in fact authoritarians, and really believe, as I suspect you do, that the only basis of morality is indeed the faithful replication of traditional memes, not something that is alive and solid and real. This is a malaise of conservatives in general, who are terrified that the moral order will collapse because their kids will breathe in some stray meme or other from an open window–fundamentally, because they don’t believe–ie have no faith in human sanity. There really isn’t any basis for morality in their view other than “doing what authority has said must be done;” it’s fundamentally antidemocratic.
But still–none of my sisters ever turned up pregnant until married (one did despite being on the Pill though, and my lesbian sister’s primarriage is not recognized by either law or my parents); none went to jail; none of us has been involved in anything evil or severely self-destructive, so far as I know. (Well, the youngest–one of another 2 that came after the above sequence–did some pretty dangerous things once, but I’ll respect her privacy…)
Nevertheless, I’d say I’m still socially crippled by my upbringing, and as for my first sister–my Dad sure did have a few of those incidents you are so proud you didn’t with her. And my Mom tried to set him up with a total creep in her desperation to prove she wasn’t gay.
So I wish your daughters the best, Dana, at any rate until they are participating in nuking San Francisco or something like that.
But anyway–we aren’t talking about your daughters or my Dad’s here, but girls who may have a much greater need for some alternative to their nuclear family. Or a perfectly good family, but still need some outside guidance.
It’s called living in a society.
Neither of them has ever come home staggering drunk, neither has come home stoned, neither has ever just not come home, neither smokes, neither drinks, and neither of them has ever gotten pregnant.
Oh, Dana. Dana Dana Dana. I was an ultra-nerd when I was in high school, and yet alcohol did pass my lips before I was 21. I tried cigarettes when I was about 12. Just because you don’t know what they’re doing at college doesn’t mean that they’re the perfect angels you think they are.
I don’t want any of them pregnant — and I don’t think that they ought to be screwing around at all. What decisions like this from the -of-so-caring school board do is to undermine (further) parental authority and parental teaching.
So if parental authority consists of, “Don’t bother me when I’m getting drunk in front of the TV,” and parental teaching is along the lines of, “Well, I got pregnant and had you when I was 14, so who cares what you do?” you’re perfectly fine with that, and the kids should have picked better parents?
They tried to pass a parental notification law here in California and it was defeated because they had a really good ad campaign: Look outside your bubble. As in, you may be a good parent and your daughter probably would come to you if she got pregnant. But what about those kids whose parents are abusive or neglectful? Why should they suffer because they have shitty parents?
Come out of your bubble, Dana. You may be the greatest parent in the world, but that doesn’t mean that every parent is exactly like you.
You know, from a woman who has no children, and who has referred to pregnancy as being “punished” for having sex, I find it hysterically laughable that you seem to think you know better how to rear children than someone who has actually done it.
Unwanted pregnancy forced on you by wingnuts like you, Dana, who clearly see pregnancy as a punishment or you’d be sanguine about “allowing” those of us who don’t want to be pregnant to do so in peace.
Obviously, desired, planned pregnancy is a joy, not a punishment.
We’re talking about what you want to do to other people who have sex you consider incorrect or illicit. You want them to pay with pregnancy they don’t want.
It’s you who makes pregnancy a punishment, not me. I want pregnancy to only happen to those who want it. I think pregnancy should be a joy, not a punishment for fucking. I’m the one whose actions back up the view that pregnancy is NOT a punishment—I think that pregnancy should be avoided if you don’t want it. It’s you who thinks it should be pressed on people who don’t want it who views it as a punishment.
Dana -
I think it is worth pointing out, as you don’t seem to realize, all parents are not as wonderful as you and all children are not as wonderful as yours.
Many, many parents can become overwelmed by the teenage years. Many parents are ill equiped to handle the sexual activity of their children.
Face it, everybody doesn’t lead the charmed existance that you or I do.
And this isn’t about “parenting”, Dana. You don’t need to be a parent or not to understand that children, even your own, are human-fucking-beings, not toys and not your goddamn property. You use property-style language to discuss your children. It’s fucking creepy.
“You know, from a woman who has no children, and who has referred to pregnancy as being “punished” for having sex, I find it hysterically laughable that you seem to think you know better how to rear children than someone who has actually done it.
A simple fact: whatever my wife and I have done in child rearing has apparently worked, while the bovine feces you spout on how to rear children, well it hasn’t failed yet, since you haven’t actually tried it yet.
But I’d guess that, if the Lord ever blesses you with children, you wouldn’t want to hand over your parental responsibilities and decision-taking to strangers.”
Gosh, it’s soooo lucky you have ME here! Unlike Amanda’s childless state and therefore resulting theoretical bovine feces theory on childrearing, I have two kids, which are from the sounds of it somewhere in the general age vicinity of yours.
Now, I generally don’t do this, considering it to be in very poor taste to post details about the life of somebody else without his or her explicit permission, but of course, since they’re my kids, clearly you at least, Dana, won’t see anything wrong at all with me posting their personal lives here. Or did you call up your daughters and ask first if it was okay before you hit the “Blaspheme!” button?
My older child is sixteen, an honor roll student (in Honors english, literature, social studies and Spanish) and associate captain of the high-school cross-country team. My younger child is eleven, also an honor roll student, in the advanced math and science placement courses and star goalie for his junior league hockey team. With the exception of a seventh-grade relationship that existed solely within the confines of school grounds and several platonic friends of the opposite gender and same age on MySpace for the older one, neither of my kids has even gone out on a date; the older one has made explicit statements on more than one occasion about waiting for somebody special(the younger one doesn’t appear to care one way or the other yet).
So, my kids clearly have been successfully raised by your previously stated standards? They compare well to your own at the same age, no? However, they have been raised on theories overwhelmingly similar to Amanda’s bovine feces ones (I’ll bet she’s excited to hear that her stuff does actually work, on real live kids!!). Oh, wow, the implications boggle the mind..!!!
1st-time de-lurker, just wanted to give a shout-out to Lisa KS, for one of those rare comments that actually made me say “damn right!” out-loud to my workplace computer.
And you know, I don’t fear “handing over my parental responsibilities and decision-making to a stranger.” So my kids will hear things that I don’t support? A lot? SO? Have I taught them to think carefully and logically and morally for themselves, to make the best and most reasoned decisions when I’m not around? Yes, and I can’t be around them 100% of the time, school being a really good example of this…but since I *have* taught them these things, I feel generally unjealous and unterrified of the influence of others. Why don’t you?
Dana:
My parents didn’t think I smoked, drinked or did pot in college either. I didn’t do those things in high school, because my parents were strict authoritarians who overdosed us with messages about eternal damnation, but once I got out in the real world I did what I wanted - and also completely abandoned the conservativism my parents tried to instill in me.
Now they’re the parents of an liberal, feminist atheist who has pre-marital sex. :Shrug:
GREAT point, Lisa KS. Somehow my parents slipped up and taught me to be a critical thinker on matters unrelated to religion. I started applying it to religion on my own, but anyway… if you’ve taught your kids to value and use their brains, they should be OK. Even if they end up enaging in behavior or following ideologies you personally dislike.
People like Dana are actually fairly amusing to me.
How infuriating it must be for him to watch the rest of the world live their lives outside of his sphere of influence. The world would be so much better off if he could just tell everyone what to do!
A legend in his own mind. *giggles* ^_^
I cannot comment on Dana’s daughters. I don’t know them under any circumstances, and I only know of Dana what he has shared here at Pandagon.
That said…
Having been born and raised in a very conservative protestant christian church, attended private schools operated by that church all through grade school and high school, I am supremely aware of the vast gulf between how kids (usually) want to appear in front of their conservative religious parents, and how they want to appear to their becoming-aware adolescent peers.
The first few times I realized that people who tried to be all pious around adults were often 180-degree opposites around other kids I was taken aback. I wasn’t that way and had a very hard time understanding why somebody would maintain such a split personality.
I later realized that it was very common, and probably a natural outgrowth of a very restrictive upbringing. The huge dichotomy between how we’re taught as christians to behave, how we’re espected to reject most of what the world offers as sinful, the huge and arbitrary lists of rules we must follow to remain faithful, versus the ways we are REALLY expected to act by society, the way our drives overwhelm our thin religious defenses, the way actual friendships and relationship REALLY work, etc. - I think there’s only so much doublethink that somebody can endure before it breaks many/most of them.
From these experiences I have come to the conclusion that parents who think they have and will maintain complete control over their children are delusional. Even if they appear to be perfect in front of you, they are most likely hiding their “true” self from you. If that is the case, it is the dysfunctional result of believing you are perfect and can keep your children perfect if you prevent them from being actual independent human beings.
Be careful what you ask for because you may not appreciate what it costs…
***
My daughter is 16. She is in many ways the center of our lives. I live under no illusions that she will remain a perfect little virginal, naive, innocent prototype of chaste femininity. I know she has sexual interests, I know she knows that a lot of the “moral” bullshit we propagate in this country is purely based on religious dogma and not true morality. I know she knows people drink - she knows I drink. She knows people have sex, and it’s not just because they want children. She’s asked about getting Gardasil - we’re scheduled to get it. I’m already debating getting her condoms, and getting some EC to have on hand. She’s not long from college and these might be the last chances we have to influence her life.
The thing we’ve always taught her is that she is valuable, she needs to have self-respect, she is in control of (and takes responsibility for) the decisions she makes. We can’t make all decisions for her because we won’t always be there and we won’t always know the answers, etc. She knows we think waiting to have sex is just a good idea, mainly because we’re also discouraging deep relationships right now to ensure she can get through college with the medical degree she wants. (If we had a son, we would have told him the same thing.) However, I am not stupid enough to think she never has a thought about sex, relationships, etc. I have tried very hard to NOT get involved with some of those aspects of her life because at some point they are not my business.
All you can do is give them a good start and hope for the best…
Dana, be careful what you assume about your daughters. I had an abortion at 19 during a summer between aerospace engineering semesters. Neither of my parents knows; my mother at least would not have been supportive. The mother of my at-the-time boyfriend did know, for practical reasons and because she was more likely to be supportive. Being in a demanding academic program is not protection against pregnancy, or against having sex.
I think they are trying to prevent the grandchild rearing duties of the parents.Seriously, Dana, just because something is available doesn’t mean you have to do it. Just because contraception is available doesn’t mean children will have sex.
But if they’ve decided (been coerced) into having sex, isn’t it better that they don’t get pregnant?
I’m also ready to call bullshit on your sophomore in college daughter not drinking, but even supposing it’s true–it’s not due to lack of opportunity.
Think about that, Dana. Your college-aged daughter has plenty of opportunity to drink, even if underaged. You believe she doesn’t, and perhaps you’re right. Even if you are, that just proves our point–access does not imply use (or abuse).
If you’ve raised your children “right”, your daughters will not be having sex at 12, even if offered (co-erced into) the opportunity. Your sons will not rape. It won’t matter that the opportunity is available, because they will choose NOT to.
But for kids who are not as protected and well-taught, or are simply more rebellious, what possible reason can you have for denying them easier access to BC? If they are going to have sex, better that they be protected from disease and pregnancy. Pregnancy can’t be anything BUT a punishment for a 12 y/o.
Eliminating it from school also doesn’t eliminate either the sex or the BC–it just makes it more difficult to obtain BC. And for a 12 y/o who is probably being coerced by an older male, an extra obstacle or two to getting contraception might be enough for her to go without.
Then you’ve got a pregnant child. Whoooo! But imaginary threats to your parental authority were avoided! It’s worth it then, right? Random pregnant 12 y/o (not YOURS, Thank God!) in exchange for your peace of mind that no one will challenge your parental authority and the theocratic method of BC (”Just say NO!”) remains primary.
Yhea Lisa KS! Good response to Dana.
I have 4 children who I would rate as above average (not perfect) and I also follow the Amanda thoughts. Furthermore - both of my parents (proof hippies are still living the dream) follow similar life guidelines.
According to The New York Times, the school’s own survey had found that “about” 5 of the school’s 500 students had identified themselves as sexually active. It’s been a while since I was in elementary school, but I still remember how to do percentages: 5 out of 500 is 1%.
I’m an adult now, but I like to think it wasn’t *that* long ago that I was in middle school…..Adolescent girls torture each other, and given that the cultural climate is more stifling towards sex than 10 years ago, I’m sure that there is a category of middle schoolers that aren’t willing to admit they’re sexually active. To their parents, to their classmates, or even on anonymous survey (because like, what if someone watched you fill it out?) And what about the girls thinking about sex, or being pressured into becoming sexually active? 1% is
To receive any services at all from the Health Department, parents must sign a consent form. But once that consent form is signed, the Health Department may provide contraceptives without notifying the parents. … Parents of greater means don’t have to worry, but the poor families are coerced.
You know, a lot of states (at least the one I live in!) allow adolescents control over their medical records and full medical privacy - even from their parents. So middle class kids, with health insurance, and a regular family doctor, can get contraception as long as their parents are allowing them to receive medical care. (I believe in WA the right kicks in at age 14, and was definitely part of our sex ed in my school.) The consent form you’re blasting as *waaaay evil* may even be something ALL doctors are required to complete in order to adhere to privacy laws.
And those privacy laws are there for a reason - are you really arguing that the safe space between a doctor and patient should be eroded even more just because some 12 year old doesn’t want to get pregnant? That’s awful.
Others have exhausted the “that you know of” angle here, so let me take on this assumption you have that the school here is usurping parental decisions, and in particular, yours.
First off, my understanding is that the program requires parental permission. If parents object to the provision of confidential contraceptive information, then they have every right not to approve their child’s participation in the program.
IOW, nobody’s forcing their kids to participate, though they don’t get to take advantage of the non-reproductive health care services, either. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Second, the parents who want to give permission to their kids to use the program have every right to do so without other, anti-sex and anti-contraception parents — parents who have the option of not allowing their kids to participate, mind — second-guessing *their* parenting decisions and vetoing the program.
So, where’s the usurpation of parental authority there?
Finally, if you have that much control over your kids, and you’ve raised them to do what you would want them to do, what’s to worry about? Are you more afraid that they’ll be offered birth control, or that they’ll accept it?
I get so exicted reading the comments I don’t say what I want to say!
The base problem with Dana and Malkin is the seperatist attitude. The idea that they alone should control what children learn. That they know what is best and appropriate for all. For sure parents should stand and support what they believe in for children. They should not expect that beliefs should become the core beliefs of everyone in a society.
Teach your children your goals, standards, moral values, whatever. Also teach them to be tolerant of other people’s beliefs, to use their own brain, and look both ways when crossing the street.
A good friend of mine was a substitute teacher for many years. He once had a girl in his classroom who was pregnant. She was NINE.
Skyscraper wrote:
But that’s just it: everybody could! Instead, we have created a society and culture which clearly undermines the efforts of parents. When you have people, including our wonderful hostess, saying that everyone ought to be free to screw around as they please, without any rules or restraints (other than consent), you create a situation in which children are receiving messages that tell them to be grown-up, they ought to be sexually active.
My good friends on the left seem to think that the way to prevent pregnancy is to make sure that eleven-year-old girls, who are already going through hormonal changes, take hormone-laden medication. Yet, fifty years ago, before birth control pills were available, before abortion was legal, and contraception meant, for the greatest part, having to ask the pharmacist for something he kept behind the counter, very, very few girls that age got pregnant, the illigetimacy rate was much lower and the divorce rate was far lower.
The facts are clear: not one thing that y’all have advocated has produced a positive result! You have more broken homes, more children who never knew their fathers, more girls getting pregnant way too young, more children living in poverty, more single women trying to rear children in poverty, more children living with step-parents, more kids being used as visitation weapons. Everything you have tried has failed!
Amanda has complained that we evil wingnuts are trying to tell women that they exist to please men sexually. But what is being advocated here is to have younger and younger girls prepared to please men sexually. Amanda has lamented that when a twelve-year-old girl is sexually active, it’s probably due to the manipulation of a boy (or maybe even a man) several years older, and I think she’s probably right on that, but then she continues to advocate policies that have the effect of having other adults tell said twelve-year-old girl, “You really shouldn’t, but if you are going to anyway, this’ll help.” You think that kids can’t see the hypocrisy of the wink and the nod we give them?
MikeEss you sound like such a great dad.
“MikeEss you sound like such a great dad.”
Thanks! (I’m not asking for a cookie, I swear!
I hope and try to be the best I can, but the real proof will be how it all works out in another 10-years or so. She’s got a lot of heavy-duty plans for her life and we’re trying as hard as we can to make it possible for her to achieve those goals.
She did tell me the other day, after learning about some of the more egregious indiscretions of some of her school peers, that she was glad we taught her her well. She’s not ignorant or naive, she just realizes that she has to make the choices and live with the consequences…
This really can’t be said enough. An option is not a requirement.
At my college, condoms were available not only at the student health center, but in a big envelope on the door of each resident advisor’s room. I never got to use them because I was in a major (undiagnosed) depression through most of college and didn’t date. But because I didn’t use them, does that mean they shouldn’t have been available at all?
Nobody wants any of them pregnant or screwing around. But, here’s the thing, they already ARE! See, it’s that nasty reality once again.
I just read a quote from Philip K. Dick: “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
See whether you believe or not, middle school kids are having sex and getting pregnant. That is a very BAD thing. So, yes, we should discourage them from having sex in the first place, but since we know (because of that whole reality thing) that a certain percentage will have sex anyway, we need to help them not get pregnant.
All that said, I’m not entirely comfortable with this solution. Hormonal birth control is not entirely benign. While it is frequently the right choice and it beats the hell out of unwanted pregnancy, it’s something that needs to be approached with full awareness of risks, limitations and side effects. Very few girls in their early teens are going to be able make a fully informed decision. Also, in the early teens, girls’ cycles haven’t stabilized yet, and they’re not likely to know what’s natural and what’s a side effect of BC. Then there’s the issue that many of them will forget to take them regularly, but won’t understand that they’re not still protected. That’s just a reality of being 13.
On a broader scale, we’re already bombarding our kids with chemicals in our environment, which is the most likely source of the earlier onset of puberty that we’re seeing across the board. So the hormones are messed up to begin with. I don’t think we should be too cavalier about adding more synthetic hormones on top of that.
Ideally, we’d be able to deal with all these issues in a straightforward manner and come up with good solutions that really work safely, but as long as people like Malkin are screeching away and distracting from real study of the problem, we wind up with decidedly imperfect responses.
The facts are clear: not one thing that y’all have advocated has produced a positive result! You have more broken homes, more children who never knew their fathers, more girls getting pregnant way too young, more children living in poverty, more single women trying to rear children in poverty, more children living with step-parents, more kids being used as visitation weapons. Everything you have tried has failed!
Ah, wrong again. The divorce rate has actually declined since the 70s, which means that your way—the stifling culture of the 50s—was the way that “broke homes”.
Also, this:
Dana assertion that “our way” has led “kids” to have children at younger and younger ages. Survey says:
Dana claims that “our way” is what leads children to live in poverty. Survey says:
Dana says that our way leads to unhappy and broken marriages. Survey says:
Dana claims that feminism and pro-sex philosophies have led to a surge in teenage pregnancy. Survey says:
Conclusion: Dana is full of shit. And if you want happier, healthier families and situations where girls delay childbirth until they’re ready and the divorce rate to go down, there’s only one solution.
Embrace “our way”.
I was just about to respond to that comment by Dana but you’ve got it totally covered, Amanda. The idea that “those things just didn’t happen” back then is baseless nostalgia for an “innocent time” that never existed. People didn’t talk about this stuff, but it happened. Girls who got pregnant were “disappeared” into special homes where they could have their babies in secrecy. Kids experimented with sex but as long as it wasn’t PIV then girls could claim that they were “technical virgins.” Read comments from doctors who cared for women dying of infection after botched back alley abortions. “Those things” certainly did happen back then, people just lived in blissful denial.
Dana:
Four responses:
A) Rates of teen pregnancy are currently at record lows. This fact can be traced directly to the very things that people like Dana decry so strenuously.
B) The concept of “legitimacy” as applied to children only has meaning to people who think of children as property and/or Virility Objects™ rather than as human beings.
C) Divorce is only a bad thing to people who think of their spouses as property and/or Virility Objects™ rather than as human beings.
D) The big problem with Dana’s “arguments” isn’t just that they’re wrong, it’s that they’re obviously wrong, and that it’s trivially easy to demonstrate their obvious wrongness. Nonetheless, I’m currently taking bets on how long it will be before Dana makes the exact same argument in another thread.
Thank god for the c/p function, eh?
On the basis of Dana’s frequent lying, condemnatory bullshit, and general assholishness, I feel quite comfortable calling him a bad father. Luckily, his kids probably picked up on his selfishness and rage issues, and they’re probably on their way to living non-assholish lives.
Dana, I was in the honors program in my high school. My best friend was almost valadictorian, one of the top students. Ran track, did swimming, diving, a total jock and pretty. She had a boyfriend. She appeared to be such a Pollyanna everyone thought they just held hands. Not only was that not true, she often cheated on him, and finally, during her freshman year of college, married some guy she met on the beach in Panama City while she was down visiting some OTHER guy (as in renting a hotel room-visiting) she had met during spring break, but whom she dumped (she told her parents she was on vacation with my family and took the bus to Panama City). Anyway, I assure you her sunday school teacher, parnets, and my entire high school would have fainted dead away if they had known about her VERY interesting personal life, which I am sorry to say ended in divorce after two years (duh). She lived in a lovely subrban home with a pink canopy bed, stuffed aninmals, and two married parents this entire time. BTW I only learned some of the more gory details from her ex-boyfriend to whom she confessed them years after the fact. Oh, she actually did not drink or do drugs - too much of a jock. PLEASE do not delude yourself.
We can only hope, Wally.
Actually, I’ve long since come to the conclusion that “selfishness” is way too weak a word for the worldview shared by Dana and his ilk. I much prefer to call it “militant” or “fanatical solipsism.”
I’m here today because in 1949 a nice Catholic girl from a good family in Brooklyn screwed around behind her parents’ back with a Jewish boy her age (15), and given their respective ages and religions, the respective parents thought it was a good idea to disappear the baby result of the union into a church adoption, where my grandparents got her and she spent the next 50-odd years wondering where she came from, while the Jewish boy got sent to military boarding school and the Catholic girl went on to have a family that never knew of their lost older sister.
I must laugh heartily at any notion that in the 1950’s (or at any other time), young girls did not have sex and get pregnant inappropriately.
Now, it’s quite possible that 9-year-olds getting pregnant is new, but that’s more to do with the age of puberty lowering for physiological reasons (obesity? hormones in our food? PCB’s in all our stuff? no one is sure yet.) In the past, 9-year-olds who were raped by their dads and uncles didn’t get pregnant from it because they hadn’t hit puberty yet. It’s not that the molesting of 9-year-olds didn’t happen in the golden age or even that the amount of it has increased (in fact, Freud came up with various whacked-out theories about women inventing fantasies of molestation because he just couldn’t believe how *many* fine upstanding Viennese middle-class women reported being raped by their fine upstanding middle-class fathers.)
Dana, I’ve seen the “your way” people terminate pregnancies for the second time and go right back to protesting against abortion. I’ve seen the children of the “your way” people say, out loud for the first time, that their stepdads fucked them before puberty. So the evidence that “your way” works in nonexistent.
Thomas:
You’re assuming that they’ve got the same goals we do.
In fact, the evidence is quite overwhelming that “Dana’s way” accomplishes exactly what he and his ilk want it to accomplish.
Dana’s latest infallible pronouncement reminds me of points I was trying to make re the authoritarian, “conservative” model of not just parenting but of their concept of humanity itself I hope I kind of made at least tangentially.
One thing I learned, despite all the conservative ideology I grew up steeped in, as the oldest brother of 3 sisters and 2 brothers (the 4th sister was born after I was in college) was that people are just inherently different from each other; we have different inclinations, different reactions, different strengths and weaknesses–it’s kind of like we’re all, you know, individuals. Here I’ve been, naive silly me, listening to all these self-named conservatives over the nearly 43 years of my life, going on about how they are all about the Individual. Can’t have national health because it would intrude on the rights and responsibilities of the Individual. Can’t have any kind of social safety net save the charity Individuals are moved to do, perhaps self-organized in churches or organizations they choose, by their Individual consciences, to support, ‘cause that would threaten the Individual. And on and on it goes.
Yet–this is quite aside from his howler about how much more serene it was back in Teh Good Old Days–he says, at #69:
Now just think about that a minute, Dana. What the heck do you think human beings are, cookies or something? Put in just the right ingredients, mix just so, cook at the right temperature for the right amount of time and voila, kids who become adults to order?
I quite agree that there is no need for the kind of evil we so often find in so many lives, that parents–with the proper support of a sanely ordered society–can help their children grow up happy and becoming the person they want to be. Heck, as a Creationist as well as Individualist you ought to be all over this–if you really believe that God is up in Heaven stamping out genuine Human Souls(tm) for every human ovum that merges with a human sperm, if you really like those Bible verses about “You know my heart and its ways, You who formed me before I was born, in secret of darkness, before I saw the sun, in my mother’s womb*”–then what kind of arrogance is it to assume that how the kids turn out is nevertheless pretty much a function of your parenting skill? (If so, we need to devote a major part of our educational curriculum to how to parent, stat…)
(*–actually that’s not Bible verses, that’s from the Catholic (circa late 1970s) hymn “Yahweh, I Know You Are Near,” which I fondly remember from childhood despite its squicky anti-choice implications–I think it’s based on some Psalm or other though)
It’s like I say–these modern so-called “conservatives” don’t believe in meaningful human individuality, don’t believe that we are, you know, people, just meme-enacting machines.
Good parenting clearly requires that a parent learns, humbly, who each of their children is, and is there to share their knowledge and offer protection and refuge and to listen as well as hand down pronouncements about How Things Are Done. Someday someone is going to turn each and every certainty we have upside-down, and be right to do so–somehow or other, the Universe won’t collapse when they do.
If all it took to be a human being living a worthwhile life was to memorize and emulate the Wisdom of the Forefathers, then of what use would be our free will or independent thought? Why shouldn’t we just be as mindless as hive insects, untroubled by doubt or conscience?
To return to the specifics of the case–however happy you might assume the Godly, undeviating folks back in Behluh-Land were living their scripturally pre-defined lives, that’s not modern America. That wasn’t Europe in the Middle Ages even. That wasn’t Palestine in the time of Christ. That place and time, in my opinion, never existed at all and would be a Hell for human beings if it did. In reality, we live in a complicated, confusing–and exciting-world where our brains are needed, and as I said before the time comes for any child, hopefully as early as possible, that they find themselves differing from the goal of becoming a carbon copy of their parents.
Do I think there is something pretty wrong when 12-yr-old girls need condoms and pills? Well, yeah, that’s my shoot-from-the-hip first reaction–but even in that moment I sure do recognize that lots of them would be better off with than without. And I cast my mind back to when I was 12, and remember that there were already girls I’d cheerfully have played around with sexually had I dared cross my teaching, and at least one of them (one whom now, looking back on it, I’d have been damn lucky to hook up with for life) gave me flirty hints she might like a little of that with me too–flirty, risky jokes and language if nothing beyond that. If I could just have felt free to talk to her about sex, that might have been wonderful. Both of us were smart, aware of what might be at risk–I do believe that hormones or none, we had it in us to avoid crossing dangerous lines. But I hardly know what would have happened; under fear of hellfire I didn’t dare try even to answer one of her jokes.
Now suppose I could have been open and honest with my parents about what I really felt and thought instead of constrained to give the authority-approved answers, which I knew pretty well–to the point that actually my religious ed teachers in Jr High (Catholic JrHS) rolled their eyes at how unhelpful all this dogma I knew was in a serious classroom talk? Suppose I had someone else instead I could talk to, who I had reason to think was both decent and happy in their decency? (But for all his authoritarianism, my Dad was real quick to denounce our priests and nuns and bishops if they were “too liberal” in his judgement…so much for respecting actual authorities, as opposed to Authority, eh?)
Well, I don’t think human beings are cakes or pies or cookies or precision parts that come off an assembly line, to be judged with calipers and melted down to scrap again if they come out out of tolerance. I don’t think a good human society can be designed to specification; the point is to nurture people as they grow, and see what they do, and remind them to respect the integrity of others as they would be respected.
Dana, I don’t profess to be Christian, I even think its basic premises must be flawed–but by golly I really think I’m more on the same page with Jesus here than you are.
I figure a lot of my strengths, such as they are, as much as my weaknesses, owe a lot to my parents’ upbringing. I couldn’t handle hypocrisy, not consciously, as a child, and I can’t handle it once I know I’m doing it now either. I never cottoned to the secret unwritten rules that contradict the proclaimed ones, about how people really are supposed to behave, and it has cost me–but I am comfortable looking in the mirror, faults and all. I was raised to believe in the truth, and holding to that I have come to figure that what my parents and you say you value is based on lies. But I still love and respect my parents. However dizzy I get, I still believe the world is solid.
And I figure that the Portland school district intends well for the kids, and that they will handle the ones who come to them with respect and integrity, and by all means they will encourage them to rely on their parents whenever that is best for them which will not be always. They will seek to engage them in age-appropriate dialogue that will cause them to reflect on their best interests and true desires, and this will probably lead the kids to be more intelligently restrained and careful in their actions than a thousand righteous lectures.
You want the system to demand the forms of righteousness, and then if all hell breaks loose on Earth at least it’s not your fault, hallelujah Jesus! The schools are trying to act rightly, however strange it may look.
If the kids’ parents’ authority is founded in real love, in respect and concern for their offsprings’ well-being as people and not as some kind of mimetic colonizers of the future–the kids will go back to them wiser and more trusting. If not–they need someone else to help, because it is too much to ask of anyone to be successful at anything.
Success is in the end a gift from God.
We don’t have to make any assumptions at all about Dana’s kids. Let’s take him at his word and suppose he and his daughters have a wonderful, open, simpatico relationship with not a hint of creepiness to it.
Because Dana’s grasp on reality and his ability to objectively report has been sooooo impressive so far…
Mark F.
*standing ovation*
seeker6079,
Point well taken….though I don’t believe that authoritarianism is limited to just the fundamentalist religious types…but exists among people with different perspectives on spirituality and across the political spectrum. The common theme is the overwhelming fetish for controlling others, following one set of rigid rules (religious or otherwise) will solve all problems, and a vehement intolerance for any dissent or questioning of cherished ideas and beliefs.
I made the comment about the increasing trend towards infantilization of American adolescents and young adults in many different areas. Friends and I have been dumbfounded at how the current crop of parents and the parental culture seems to believe adolescents and young adults are so feeble, immature, and unable to make responsible decisions without parental micromanagement.
One example are stories from TAs and current undergrads of how parents are increasingly getting involved in registering their young adults for college classes, grade disputes, and other areas that my friends and I would never dream of involving our parents in. We dealt with all of those issues ourselves and while the problems didn’t always get resolved in our favor, it was a learning experience that helped prepare us for life.
Another is hearing many parents, especially the middle/upper-class suburban set react with shock when they heard that my parents trusted me enough to take hour long public transportation rides in NYC unsupervised to/from middle school. Keep in mind that I found their cries of “that’s unsafe!” amusing considering their neighborhoods were far more sheltered and safe than the urban neighborhood I grew up in.
In short, I am dumbfounded at how there seems to be an increasing trend of parents who have so little faith in their own parenting skills that they cannot trust their own children to make sound responsible decisions without their overbearing supervision.
I haven’t read to the end of the comments yet, but I’d like to second what Emily said at 11:47 am, about middle school girls not filling out even an anonymous survey accurately. Sex, especially, is one of those things that’s just plain embarrassing when you’re still developing, and in our society where we don’t talk about it openly (we certainly talk about…all the damn time, but not in anyway that leads to a lack of shame on the part of 12 year olds). Even in college, I remember when I was first coming out (to myself), the first time that I marked lesbian on a survey was a huge deal! At the time I definitely made sure no one could see what I’d put…
Phoenician,
I’m getting pretty tired, it being an hour before my nominal bedtime and I still have to get something to eat then go home and eat it. So my mind is blanking out here, but isn’t there some kind of legal, rhetorical, or logical term, in Latin no doubt, for granting an opponent’s unreasonable premise and then proceeding to demonstrate that even so they would still be wrong?
This is all I meant by taking Dana at his word. As I think you might gather if you can wade through my verbiage, the situation he was describing sounded like a friggin’ nightmare waiting to happen, if his idyllic reflections aren’t unconsciously or consciously covering for some known crises he’d rather not admit to.
I’ve had to contend with some pretty spectacular examples of my mother’s selective memory re how she interacted with my baby sister (currently 21) in her time of crisis last year. She just conveniently forgets she said or did this that or the other outrageous thing.
She was always real good at selective listening too. Or whenever I’m making some good points on the phone, suddenly something is happening on her end of the line she has to attend to right away.
Well I should go easy on Mom; she is diagnosed with clinical depression these days. I just saw a bunch of people making shrewd, probably well-founded, but nevertheless speculative guesses as to what must be the situation over at chez Dana, and wanted to show we don’t need to make ourselves so rhetorically vulnerable to make valid points.
Dana - are you ever going to say something that is true?
Do you have a response to the fact that nearly every “trend” you identified in your missive turned out to be the complete opposite of reality, and that the evidence is clear that the things you think have failed have actually succeeded?
And while I’m seconding people, I’d like to second exholt at 3:45 pm too–I worked in a study abroad office (as a student worker) last year, and there were parents who came in with all of their son or daughter’s study abroad forms asking when they were due and what forms should be filled out, etc etc. I never would have dreamed of asking my parents to take care of that for me–it was my responsibility to get them in on time, and I did it. Sometimes parents would ask us to convince their kid to go to a different country than the one the student wanted (we would not do that). I really have to wonder about some parents these days, and whether these kids are going to remain being “kids” long after they have physically matured, because they’ve never had to make decisions on their own.
Mark, the phrase we use does have a Latin term: “Assuming arguendo your bullshit lying ‘factual’ assertions …”
In short, I am dumbfounded at how there seems to be an increasing trend of parents who have so little faith in their own parenting skills that they cannot trust their own children to make sound responsible decisions without their overbearing supervision.
In first and second grade, I used to walk to walk about halfway to school, meet up with my cousins, and we would walk the rest of the way together. I occasionally took the train by myself when I was 9 or 10 years old. At 15 and up, my friends and I would take the train into Chicago without adult supervision and do stuff.
Now, we were ultra-nerds (as previously mentioned), so we were doing stuff like going to museums and looking at architecture and shopping, not meeting up with boys and getting drunk. So our parents trusted us to be careful.
A couple of years ago, I had a boss who would not allow her 14-year-old daughter to cross Wilshire Boulevard by herself. Granted, it’s a huge, busy street that has a lot of accidents, but still, she told me that she couldn’t trust her 14-year-old to safely cross the street. She was just too young and immature.
That’s just sad.
You know, I didn’t really start looking for trouble as a teenager until my stepdad imposed a horribly restrictive curfew on me in a bout of authoritarianism. I never considered how that might have been a direct rebellion.
A couple of years ago, I had a boss who would not allow her 14-year-old daughter to cross Wilshire Boulevard by herself. Granted, it’s a huge, busy street that has a lot of accidents, but still, she told me that she couldn’t trust her 14-year-old to safely cross the street. She was just too young and immature.
That’s just sad.
Agreed. At 14, most of my classmates and I had to take long subway/bus rides to commute to school, work, volunteer centers, and just to hang out in NYC. By that age, we’ve been taking the subway/bus, crossing streets, and otherwise roaming the city by ourselves for years.
It is more laughable when we consider that 14 year olds were considered mature enough to take up some adult responsibilities as little as sixty years ago. Father was on his own at 12 years of age due to the death of both parents and the chaos of the Chinese Civil War. Both parents constantly emphasized that my father was far from a unique case during that tumultuous time.
It was probably a factor in their being lenient in issues of curfew and supervision while being strict in other ways.
In terms of sex ed, what I received in the early-mid-90’s was limited to a class on biology frosh year and health class junior year. Contraceptives were available and contrary to expressed fears of those against their availability in school, sexual activity did not skyrocket. Trust me, the mere idea of that would be quite laughable to us. What more can you say about a high school where winners of a national science competition get far more props than our athletes and where the student union canceled social events like junior proms due to complete lack of student interest?!!
Dana, others have already pointed out that your idea of a pastoral America where no one got pregnant outside of marriage is a sad and lonely myth.
An example:
My grandmother was raised by her grandparents and believed that her mother was her older sister. When my grandmother was born, her grandmother went to the hospital where she was and brought her back to their home. This was an Irish-Catholic family in Massachusetts. They raised her, loved her, and eventually she married and had children of her own.
Grandma was born in 1911.
So don’t believe that out-of-wedlock pregnancies never happened in the distant past. Unless you *prefer* ignoring reality, in which case, why do you post here?
Malkin’s interest in the sex lives of middle schoolers disturbs me.
She’s too old to be a pregnant 12-year-old herself, and she isn’t equipped for getting any 12-year-olds pregnant, but she could still get pregnant by a 12-year-old….
A word of advice to Graeme Frost: You don’t know where she’s been.
“and that the evidence is clear that the things you think have failed have actually succeeded?”
The success is where it has failed, in Dana’s eyes. They know their nostalgia for the “Golden Days” is pure BS. There are plenty who might buy it, but Dana knows better(especially now, snap Amanda!) The fucked up parts about the “Golden Age” are what he really longs for. When women were trapped by the first guy to get them pregnant(and how many of those men were probably actively trying to get them pregnant to limit their options?) and black and brown people knew “their place.” Those halcyon days are gone, and now he is stuck deluding himself as to how his “sweet little girl” isn’t doing what 99% of the population does. And going on to feminist blogs where he unequivocally has his ass handed to him(b/c he really thinks women were kept in inferiority for so long, b/c they “are” inferior, duh), and thinks he can get away with it.
Want to second Bethynyc with an example from US history:
In Grover Cleveland’s 1884 campaign for the White House, opponents attempted to scandalize his having an child out of wedlock with the campaign slogan “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?” He admitted paying child support in 1874. Fortunately for him, the voters didn’t dwell on it and elected him to his first term.
If we want to look outside of the US during the same approximate era, T.E. Lawrence and Adolf Hitler’s father were both the results of out-of-wedlock births.
Q: “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?”
A: “Gone to the White House, ha-ha-ha!”
Bull O’Really and now Malkin make such a fuss over this, and aren’t they the ones who always say that public education ought to be decided at the local level? How much more “local” can you get here? Since the voters put these city health officials in office, they must not have a problem with this. If they do, then they can just vote them out of office.
So what’s their problem here?
Because, Silver Fox, it’s only federalism if it gives a right-wing result. If a state wants to nullify it’s compliance with ADA, that’s State’s Rights. If the people of a state vote overwhelmingly to decriminalize medical use of marijuana, that is clearly a Federal issue. And will be as long as Republicans are as unreasonably strong in Congress as they currently are, still control the Executive, and their handpicked judges still dominate the courts. If that starts to seriously change–then it becomes State’s Rights again, except that states with foolishly liberal voters aren’t legitimate states and should be overthrown by Christian Dominionists.
You see, it’s all about principle with these people.
I have an almost identical story to Bethynyc’s in my family. My (step)father was raised by my grandparents in the belief that his mother was his sister. She was thirteen years old at the time of his birth in 1949. The father was said to have been a neighbor boy, but was actually my grandmother’s second husband; her children were all from her first marriage so, no incest, but incredibly evil and sad all the same.
Another story: my sister started menstruating at the age of ten. She first had sex at the age of 11, something she never mentioned until we were both adults. My parents and I never suspected at the time that my sister was sexually active–I know my mom didn’t imagine my sister had so much as kissed a boy well into my sister’s late teens–and my father would have KILLED my sister had he ever guessed. I mean, he would have literally beaten her to death. He thought he owned his daughters, and by extension their sexuality, and my sister was damaged goods, you see; can’t be having that, nosiree. I can (thankfully? seems misplaced in this context) only imagine how horrifying it would have been had my 11-year-old sister been forced to admit to our abusive and controlling father that she was pregnant.
I think it is impossible to assume that people as young as 11(!) are uniformly not having sex, or, in many instances, being forced/coerced into sexual acts. It ain’t pretty, but these sorts of situations seem more common than many people would care to admit. I’m saddened by the necessity for birth control in a middle school, but that changes nothing about the fact that I am glad that this option is available for those young people who might be making some bad decisions and/or be in truly terrible situations. At the very least those kids have a chance to reduce the additional risk of unwanted pregnancies.
That tired old bull about the innocence, purity and perfect morality of ages past is a myth, and I’m so VERY tired of hearing about what a perfect world it would be if we’d just turn back the clock. This sort of revisionist view of history in the face of all evidence to the contrary is simply sickening.
P.S. My apologies if this double posts; my navigator is acting kinda wonky.
Funny story about the “good ol’ days.” When I was in high school one of my friends got pregnant and they shipped her away to her aunts house and forced her to give it up for adoption. When I told my grandmother she said, “Well isn’t that a shame. That’s what they did to girls in my day. I thought girls had more choices now.” She was also shocked that teenage girls still got pregnant because she thought all the wonderful free birth-control would have stopped that. She had no delusions about the sex whatsoever.
double post apologies if this happens twice. that anti-spam thing is very hard.
Not from my grandmother, but from other ladies her age, I’ve been told that not only was it fairly common for teenagers to get pregnant, but it was sort of implicitly encouraged over the age of 15. The idea being that you were just wasting your time and parents money getting an education. Your best bet was to find an older man, get knocked up and then you’d be forced to marry him.
Dana: Neither of them has ever come home staggering drunk, neither has come home stoned, neither has ever just not come home, neither smokes, neither drinks, and neither of them has ever gotten pregnant.
Fairly evidently, then, both of your daughters know how to access contraception when they need it, and where to get an abortion if they need that. Good for them. I’m glad you’ve raised responsible, sensible young women who know that until they decide to have babies, they need to use contraception, and that they must not let you know if they get pregnant and decide to terminate. (That both of them know how to drink sensibly probably helps, too.)
So what’s your problem with other young women getting access to contraception?
Dana: And what this decision teaches is that no, sex among pre-teens is a really bad thing [wink] [nod], but if you must, here, we’ll enable you, and we won’t even tell your fuddy-duddy parents.
No: just as your daughters were enabled to have sex without getting pregnant, so too do these girls deserve the same. The school nurse will enable them to not get pregnant, and as you seem to agree (given your pride in your daughters) that’s a good thing. As for telling their parents, that would be absurd: I don’t suppose you expected to be told when your daughters had sex, or what contraceptives they used. All you needed to know was that they were sensible, responsible young women who used contraception and therefore didn’t get pregnant. (Quite possibly, of course, given the unlikelihood that you would be supportive, one or both of your daughters got pregnant and had an abortion, but if so, they managed without you.)
but still, she told me that she couldn’t trust her 14-year-old to safely cross the street. She was just too young and immature
I know this is a wild and crazy idea, but bear with me for a minute: Some children don’t all mature at the same level, and there are 14-year-olds who are very mature, as well as 14-year-olds who are immature. And–here’s the crazy part!–sometimes parents know this, and have an accurate assessment of their children’s maturity!
Yeah, yeah, wacky, I know. Let’s instead assume that when a parent says their kid is not ready for [whatever], it must just be because the child is of a certain age and the parent is overprotective. It couldn’t possibly be that the parent lives with that kid on a regular basis and knows what they’re like, or anything.
mythago
While I’ll admit my first instinct was to side with the “a 14-year old can’t cross the street alone!” crowd, having just spent several minutes last night at the library trying to prevent an food fight between a 12 and a 15 year old - started and repeatedly escalated by the 15 year old, no less - from coming to blows…
um, yeah.
Granted, bad parents exist. But often times the good reasons for certain rules aren’t immediately evident to outsiders. And teenagers especially are pretty notorious for acting more mature than most adults one minute, and like five year olds the next. (”He started it! Yeah, so? What are you, in first grade?) I’m all for letting kids have the chance to take risks (like letting them have pizza in the library after hours, which I’d never let some adults do) - there’s just no reason to let them take life threatening risks if one can prevent it.
And yeah, I realize that a 14 year old can get a learner’s permit in a few years. The whole thing about “life threatening risks” is that how life threatening certain risks are depends on the maturity of the person taking them. Thus why learner’s permits require parental permission.
I think the bigger issue is parents (and pundits) who define “life-threatening” as “exposure to ideas” and “experimenting with the unconventional” rather than “getting hit by a car.” In other words, it’s one thing to require adult supervision at teen events, it’s another to not let them have a decent amount of freedom in terms of choosing what those activities are.
And regarding the parents that try to micromanage their kids college schedules, that seems to be more of a control issue than anything to do with the parents underestimating their kids’ maturity. Unlike the 14 yr old who can’t cross the street by herself, the thinking seems to be that they aren’t capable of making any choices for themselves period, not that they aren’t mature enough to be counted on to make the responsible choice consistently.
There are lots of tweens at my library that have similar
) And this rule has as much to do with the fact that they tend to go in groups, and tend to be hyper focused on each other, and ignore practically everything else, as it does with individual maturity.
“crossing the street” rules. The “street” in front of the library is actually a sporadically busy highway with no crosswalk. When the school bus stops by the library, they are allowed to get out and come to the library by themselves, even though they are technically too young to be there unattended. They can even go between shops and stores along the street (There’s a cafe nearby that they go to a lot.) What they aren’t allowed to do is cross the street. (Which means they have to choose between the library and the new arcade.
“And what this decision teaches is that no, sex among pre-teens is a really bad thing [wink] [nod], but if you must, here, we’ll enable you, and we won’t even tell your fuddy-duddy parents.”
Um, NO.
As someone whose government defined job description includes strict rules about answering kids questions with facts, no matter what the parents want, it’s pretty clear to me that what this is about is respecting kids as people; establishing that my role is different from that of a parent - I’m there to to be an advocate for parents, but I’m there to be an advocate for the kids themselves, too; and making it clear to kids that I won’t ever lie to them, so that they learn to see libraries as places where they can come to for unbiased information.
This isn’t to say that I give the kids anything they want if the parents is right there saying they can’t have a certain book or movie or answer. What this means is that I should never lie to a child or refuse to let a child check a particular book or movie out myself, which includes acting as a surrogate parent if the parent requests it. “Don’t let Billy check out those awful Captain Underpants books when I’m not here, ok?” No, not ok. I’ll offer the kid something else if you are standing right there, telling them that they can’t have that. But if you aren’t there, and they ask for the book, I’m getting them the book. No matter what I heard you say yesterday. I’m not a babysitter.
I actually agree with some of the rules parents have tried to get me to help them enforce: “HW must be done before getting onto myspace.” But I think it would harm the kids more for them to see me as a non-neutral party than it harms them to have to be grounded and lose library visits in order to teach them priorities and time management.
I think the bigger issue is parents (and pundits) who define “life-threatening” as “exposure to ideas” and “experimenting with the unconventional” rather than “getting hit by a car.”
Sure. But I wonder how much the “rah rah independence!” crowd would keep cheering if the kids in question were experimenting with the Silver Ring Thing, or if the childfree Interfering Auntie, rather than bringing cool toys and Judy Blume books, was taking the kids to Jesus revival meetings behind their parents’ backs.
“You should be responsible for your kids and not expect the media/Internet/government to make the world safe for them!”
“Okay, then. I’m making decisions about what my kids can do at particular ages, and not asking anyone to make those decisions for me.”
“OMGWTF you are oppressing your kids FREEDOM 4 TEH CHILRENZ!!!!”
Fuck that, thankyew.
As someone whose government defined job description includes strict rules about answering kids questions with facts,
Do you mean the ALA rather than the government here?
I know this is a wild and crazy idea, but bear with me for a minute: Some children don’t all mature at the same level, and there are 14-year-olds who are very mature, as well as 14-year-olds who are immature. And–here’s the crazy part!–sometimes parents know this, and have an accurate assessment of their children’s maturity!
Mythago,
Although I agree that children do mature at different rates, part of that is dependent on the parents and the larger environment. If the parents and the larger environment perceives children to be incapable of learning how to start making responsible choices independently, that could very well become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
“Okay, then. I’m making decisions about what my kids can do at particular ages, and not asking anyone to make those decisions for me.”
“OMGWTF you are oppressing your kids FREEDOM 4 TEH CHILRENZ!!!!”
Fuck that, thankyew.
Some of the fears of your children getting involved with fundamentalist Christians are the exact same fears I hear from Conservative parents who fear their adolescent children will be corrupted by the teaching of evolution in high school science classes or by “evil Liberal indoctrination” at many universities. That is a patronizing view of adolescents and young adults that does not account for their agency, however immature they may be. Moreover, influences from teachers and other outside sources do not always impact the adolescent in a direct linear fashion.
Moreover, I am not arguing that children should have complete freedom….just that too many current parents seem to have such diminished expectations of what their adolescent children are actually capable of compared with their counterparts 15 or more years ago.
The legal and societal standards uphold this perogative of yours. Hopefully, the parents who use this perogative do not end up being part of the increasing trend of infantilizing/micromanaging parents whose children are burdening university faculty, staff, and even some employers. I’m still amazed at how many of the current undergrads I’ve talked with saw nothing “weird” about calling up their parents to resolve grade disputes, clean their rooms, or other matters that my friends and I dealt with ourselves.
BTW: Good use of invective to advance one’s point! /snk
exholt, in your ringing defense of children’s rights I think you kinda missed a couple of things:
Yes, overprotective parents can cripple maturity. But children are, well, children. Immaturity does not mean “your parents coddled you”.
My comment about fundamentalist Christians was not “fear”; it was noting that liberals tend to see “let your kids make up their own minds” and “subvert kids with new ideas” as running in only direction: getting a kid with a repressive, conservative upbringing to learn more and think about Good Ideas. But that door swings both ways.
And I’m guessing you’re not all that old, if you think of 1993 as the Good Old Days. I was hearing the same old kids-today-are-spoiled-rotten thing back then too.
I thought Dana’s comment praising the “moral values” of parents in the 50’s is pretty funny, considering what happened in the sixties when all of the kids who grew up in those homes started thinking and acting for themselves. Actually, I think most of these behaviors and views are direct reactions to what people experienced growing up under his model view of the family. Suppressing knowledge and action with dogma and shaming does absolutely nothing, in fact, it often provokes movement in the absolute opposite direction.
Dana says:
But that’s just it: everybody could! Instead, we have created a society and culture which clearly undermines the efforts of parents. When you have people, including our wonderful hostess, saying that everyone ought to be free to screw around as they please, without any rules or restraints (other than consent), you create a situation in which children are receiving messages that tell them to be grown-up, they ought to be sexually active.
Dana - I was speaking more of parents who are drug addicts, living in poverty, dealing with domestic abuse, whatever. I meant parents who are too busy with their own shit.
I meant charmed life in the sense that we have time and space to worry and wonder how these things affect our children.
Mythago,
Please stop conflating arguing in favor of children’s rights with my arguing against the increasing tendency among middle and upper-class American parents to have increasingly diminished expectations of their adolescent children’s/young adult’s capacity for being able to make responsible decisions and being able to think for themselves. All I am saying is that adolescents/young adults should not be patronized as being incapable of doing anything without micromanging parents around. Being that type of parent would retard the maturation process as the adolescent/young adult is not being given substantiative chances to start learning how to make their own decisions responsibly and to deal with the consequences that may result. While older generations have always ragged on the younger generation, it seems as if the adolescents and young adults are increasingly being seen and treated like young children rather than people in transition who need to start preparing to live and act as independent adults. In the case of the 14 year old whose parents won’t allow her to cross the street, I do believe that’s being overprotective as I still routinely see kids as young as 7-10 routinely crossing busy multi-lane streets in NYC without anyone raising a fuss of “OMG, that’s child neglect!! Call out Children’s services!!” Fortunately, this insanity has not yet affected most New Yorkers barring some wealthy poshy parents I remembered from middle/high school whose overprotectiveness had more to do with insulating their precious children from us lower-class riffraff than any actual concerns over safety or maturity.
Assuming the parents concerned were involved in their children’s lives and patiently explained their values over the many years into adolescence, a few courses in public school or university or limited exposure to a relative or neighbor with contrary beliefs would rarely have the power to completely turn most adolescents/young adults completely opposite to the way they were raised. Though this is admittedly anecdotal, most adolescent children/young adults I knew who grew up in liberal and/or agnostic/atheistic homes who were taken by a relative to a Fundie church or event ended up not only not adopting the Fundie beliefs, but ended up being more turned off from it as their worldview was greatly influenced by their liberal and/or agnostic/atheistic parents. The few I knew who did join the Fundie church/groups tended to have poor/nonexistant relationships with their parents.
In the context of parents fearing “indoctrination” in universities, I found most conservative oriented students would avoid classes dealing with Marxist theory, Feminism, or other courses they consider to be “leftist indoctrination” or professors with a pronounced reputation for being politically left. Heck, most conservative students I knew avoided applying to certain colleges/universities like the one I attended (Oberlin) for that very reason. Conversely, I’ve known many liberal oriented students who avoided taking Economics and certain Poli-sci courses because they viewed them as “right-wing indoctrination” or the Prof concerned had a reputation for being conservative
(*cough*Samuel P. Huntington *cough*). Also, i doubt you’d see these students applying to conservative schools schools like The Citadel, Liberty, or ORU. Heck, I had a classmate who turned down admission to Yale and a classmate who transferred from Berkeley because they both cited the increasingly conservative climate at both schools.
The few who took courses in opposition to their political beliefs such as my taking an advanced Marxist theory seminar despite my vehement anti-communist beliefs or a liberal friend’s taking Huntington’s course at Harvard rarely “converted” to the views of their profs. In our cases and that of several other similarly situated acquaintances, those courses either had little effect beyond more knowledge or reinforced the views we had before we took the course.
Good post. You make some great points that most people do not fully understand.
“Few things are more indicative of our mainstream media’s idiocy than the fact that right wingers have been allowed to wave the “family values” banner for so long despite this rather unseemly hostility to minor children.”
I like how you explained that. Very helpful. Thanks.