“When I was just seventeen
I ran away from home,
To be with all the pretty people,
To be on my own...
… Have mercy.”
-
Annie Lennox
Exactly how many times do I need to stand in front of a room
and have someone tell me that they’re waiting until the so-called right moment to
talk to their daughters and sons about sex? Faced with statements like this, my
question is always something like “Waiting…
for what? The second coming? Proof of carbon-based life on a distant planet...?”
Let’s start with a basic Holy Grail kind of truth, shall we?
There is an enormous and inescapable role that positive, healthy sexuality
awareness plays in the development of children’s senses of self, self-worth, agency
and identity. And the fact is, today in the US
most kids don’t wait until they’re seventeen to explore their sexuality, the
hauntingly prophetic lyrics of Annie Lennox
notwithstanding.
Still, it seems to me that much of the Western world’s
population continues its damaging history of negativity and denial when it
comes to educating kids about sex - even to this day. Even when we know better.
Even when we swear that we’d surrender a body part, if only our children would
give in and learn to trust us, so often we betray them with falsehoods, lies of
omission and a dimwitted silence about their own sexuality - and ours. And so often the obfuscations come to no good.
