.
…These are the parents who need parents. Unfortunately, they have children instead — children to whom they give a de facto green light for red-light activities not in the children’s best interests. Because just as virtue is no longer a cultural given, neither are “best interests.” Like society, parents just hope Junior will make “better choices.”
Based on what, exactly? The fabled “better choices” we hear about are inspired by neither self-respect nor moral grounding, once building blocks of bona fide parental guidance. All Junior needs these days, so the theory goes, is “information,” and plenty of it. In Fairfax County, Virginia, tenth-grade sex education students, for example, learn a most expansive definition of “abstinence,” ranging from, well, abstinence, to all sexual activity short of intercourse. They are then “advised to choose which definition best suits their individual values.” As one teacher put it, “We’re not endorsing anything. We’re just giving information” [15]. But “information” doesn’t tell the whole story. Remember the Spur Posse? In the mid-1990s, this gang of nice middle-class boys from Lakeland, California, had all the information they needed to practice “safe sex” when they competed with one another for the most “scores” — intercourse — with local girls. (The winner, on being arrested for molesting a minor, age ten, claimed a tally of sixty-three.) What, Posse members wondered, had they done wrong? “They pass out condoms, teach sex education and pregnancy this and pregnancy that,” one of the boys said. “But they don’t teach us any rules” [16].
Author Kay S. Hymowitz pinpoints exactly why preparing youngsters to embark on a life not so much well-lived, but based on “informed decision-making” is doomed to fail. “The decision-making model assumes that kids already posess the values, beliefs, and self-awareness that go into such decisions,” she writes. “Experts never seem to consider where the values, beliefs, and self-awareness behind these choices come from. Though these are all clearly a product of gradual cultural learning, experts act as if they are magically part of teen identity” [17]. They are not. But today’s grown-ups, parents included, have forgotten this — if they ever knew it.
[15] Brian McNeill, “Parents Hot and Bothered over ‘Sex Ed’: Under Proposed Curriculum Changes, the Definition of ‘Abstinence’ Could Include All Sex Acts Except Intercourse,” Connection Newspapers, April 20, 2005.
[16] Suzanne Fields, “Rape as Sport,” Insight on the News, May 3, 1993.
[17] Kay S. Hymowitz, Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future — and Ours (New York: Free Press, 1999), 171.
Diana West
“4. Parents Who Need Parents”
The Death of the Grown-Up
