What Does Your Child’s Sex Ed Program Teach?
“Abstinence is not about not having sex.”
“Safer sex is one of the most dangerous activities that exists on the earth.”
“God loves sex more than you do.”
“Trusting a condom can kill a friend.”
These are just a few of the controversial statements I’m using to generate some parental brain-muscle when it comes to equipping our teenagers with some truth-filled messages about sexuality. They’re also sentences or phrases found in my classic best-selling book And the Bride Wore White, which re-releases this month.
Are you a mom who is blushing right now? If you’re the mom of a teenager, I hope you’re not blushing too much because you need to read this or your child could end up being propagandized by their public school’s health class, the untruthful messages on Jersey Shore, or The Condom Nation Tour.
The Condom Nation tour is currently rolling across the United States to stop in 40 cities to hand out ten million free condoms. The founders of the tour want to promote condoms as a method of reducing sexually transmitted disease. The fact is, most public school sex education programs will teach a lot about condoms. And a little tiny bit about abstinence. In fact, purity is an after-thought in a sea of scientific stats about the consequences of sex.
As a result many well-intentioned parents believe that the risk of sexually transmitted infections is so great that we have no choice but to give them condoms. And when I say parents believe this, I mean CHRISTIAN parents believe it.
Parents and mentors are in effect saying, “We hope you don’t have sex, but if you do use a condom!” What a double-message. I’m not offended at the thought of teaching teenagers about contraception, any more than I’d be offended about factually presenting other issues in an anatomy and physiology class. Teenagers—even your Christian teenager—need to know the truth about sexuality.
I’m just offended that we often water-down our resolve to encourage them to live a live of purity and abstinence in the process.
Let’s make sure that every teenager knows that “safe sex” is one of the most dangerous activities that exists on earth. Chlamydia is the most common sexually transmitted disease circulating today.[ii] If a teen gets it, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever even know they have it. Only a minority ever experience tell-tale symptoms … until it is too late. At that point, many girls will go on to experience pelvic inflammatory disease, which leads to infertility. No babies. Ever.
A condom will help to prevent chlamydia, but not all the time. Hope this isn’t TMI, but there are thirteen steps to using one of the things correctly. The end result is that they have a controversial failure rate in preventing any sexually transmitted infection. You can research it yourself on the internet to see how varied the estimates are, but they range from 18-30 percent. Those just aren’t good odds when you’re talking about the risk of never having babies.
The human papilloma virus (HPV) is another common viral sexually transmitted infection. It is so common that at least 50% of sexually active people get HPV[iii]. HPV is incurable and can be uncomfortable and embarrassing—it sometimes causes genital warts—but more important it is recognized that HPV is the only cause of cervical cancer.[iv] While other factors may make the risk of cervical cancer greater, HPV is considered “necessary” to acquire this type of cancer. Guess how much protection a condom provides against HPV? None. HPV is not spread by bodily fluids but by intimate skin-to-skin contact. How safe is that? It simply isn’t safe at all.
When and if the Condom Nation Tour makes its way through your town, or if your teens come home from their sex ed class in public school, make sure you take time to help them understand the failure rate. And remember, abstinence shouldn’t be an afterthought in your child’s sex education. It should be the primary objective. Because their future could be drastically altered by a sexually transmitted disease.
Adapted from And the Bride Wore White: Seven Secrets to Sexual Purity, Chapter 2, Revised Edition, 2012
[i] CDC. Youth risk behavior surveillance—United States, 2009,http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/ss/ss5905.pdf, MMWR 2010;59(SS-5):p20.
[ii] Chlamydia, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002321/, updated June 2010, retrieved October 12, 2011
[iii] Genital HPV Fact Sheet, http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stdfact-hpv.htm, updated August 2011, retrieved October 12, 2011
[iv] Kumar, Vinay; Abbas, Abul K.; Fausto, Nelson; & Mithcell, Richard N. (2007). Robbins Basic Pathology ((8th ed.0 ed.). Saunders Elsevier. Pp. 718-721, retrieved October 12, 2011
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:: Trusting a Condom Can Kill a Friend
Each chapter of And the Bride Wore White begins with a narrative of Dannah Gresh’s young love life, taken from her own teenage journals. She transparently shares her struggles and successes, her moments of pain followed by healing and the moments of triumph. This story-line grips the young reader while they learn statistically proven risk-reduction factors. The end result is usable “how-to-say-no” skills that can reduce the risk of a young woman’s heart being broken by sexual sin.
The greatest proof of its effect is in the lives of tens of thousands of young women who’ve embraced the book’s proven “How-to-wait” skills.
I’m going to buy that book!
Thanks for the clear message!!!
This is so true … we are sending out mixed messages and it’s just wrong. I only hope that I can give my children strong foundations when they’re teens … as a Mom who had a teenage abortion, has had cervical cancer (HPV??? Who knows) and married to a man who had his life turned upside down by a ‘mistake’ in his youth I hope that we can teach them from our mistakes and not hide like in embarassment as our parents did. Sex Ed is dangerous .. a friend’s daughter was even ‘taught’ about oral sex in one of her classes!!!!! That totally horrifies me.
@NatalieR Kids are sexually curious. It’s natural. I guarantee you that sex ed class is not the first time kids are learning about oral sex–even Christian teens. Kids, even Christian kids, are being bombarded with porn–boys and girls at very young ages. It’s far more extreme than anything when you were a kid. Anal sex is pretty standard in any porn movie these days–so kids feel that it is part of normal sexual activity. Not to get into politics, but one group whose teens tend to stay virgins until marriage more so than Evangelical Christians are Mormons. I’ve asked myself why–so I researched what they do differently. One, they teach their kids about sex themselves–starting an age 8. (There’s a book by the Eyres on how to talk to your kids about sex.) Utah schools still teach comprehensive sex education (not abstinence only as far as I can tell)–but parents and their church play a big part in augmenting that. Two, they have strict rules about dating–and allow it, highly regulated, beginning at 16. (Their church teaches kids rules on dating…such as…No kissing, but holding hands is O.K.; no lying on top of one another; be in a group, etc.) Churches even hold dances for the young people to encourage them to meet members of the same faith. 3) They encourage marriage. BYU has lots of married student housing. It’s not unusual for Mormons to get married while still in college.
Kids are curious about sex. If they can’t talk to you about it, they will talk to their friends. Realistically, they’re doing both. Christian teen girls have oral sex. Christian teen girls have anal sex–often times believing that these two things “preserve” their virginity, but allow them to explore their sexual desires and wanting to please their boyfriends. We need to look at things on a much larger basis than just sex-ed in schools.
I love this article! I represent the Family Matters Section of a bold new Christian Woman’s magazine, called Flourish. We would love it if we could publish this article in our next issue! Our next issue is entitled, “The Sex Issue”. The pages will be filled with sexual issues Christian women can and need to talk about with a God-centered focus. We are particularly interested in this excerpt for our Family Matters Section. So timely and important for today’s Christian families to be informed about. I would love to hear from you about this. Thank you so much!!!
Hi Cheri,
If you could send all the details in an email to momlifetoday@familylife.com , I’ll try to get you an answer asap! Blessings, Katie