Monday, September 17, 2012

The Horror

This year, JT is enrolled in a course called Values & Choices.  It's a class that combines health, sex ed, some character education and, near as I can tell, JT's increasing horror that anyone would say the words penis and vagina out loud and in the company of girls.

The funny thing is that he knows all this information and I'm not the sort of parent who is embarrassed about laying out the facts.  I want JT to like his body and know how it operates.  I'd like him to grow up and have a healthy sex life and I think honest information is the way to make that happen.

Even so, I'm finding that he's a bit of a prude.  Case in point: in the back of the Values & Choices book are diagrams of  human bodies, complete with vagina, uterus, penis and testicles.  He showed them to me and then shook his head in disappointment as he noted, "this sort of thing is really for parents, not kids."

I refrained from pointing out that the parents had clearly mastered basic anatomy in the process of becoming parents.   No 7th grader wants to have that image reinforced any more than necessary.

1 comment:

Nichole said...

Love it! Planned Parenthood has a sex ed class that they teach in the middle schools here, and when Dade brought his permission form home so he could take the class he said, "I know you'll sign it. Hell, you'd probably teach it. But, mom, you can't call private parts 'cash and prizes' in sex ed." Yes, my son uses "hell" as a normal conversational word, and yes I use 'cash and prizes' as code words for privates.