Postby Jason Toddman » Thu Jan 28, 2016 11:15 am
It depends upon what age you are talking about. It should be talked out in high school anyway, so that when they graduate they have a realistic understanding of the world as it actually is and not what parents, church, and state - and one another - may have drilled into their impressionable minds earlier on. Let's face it, we sacrificed childhood innocence in most places generations ago. And chances are kids are going to ask about it themselves sooner or later. When they do ask, they should get an honest and unbiased answer.
My mother grew up having no idea what to expect until her mother told her just before she was about to get married. She was so surprised despite already being 23 that she almost tired to call the whole thing off! That's how naive the women of the greatest generation were! Maybe some people think that kind of thing is desirable; I have my doubts myself.
Even *I* managed to have an innocent childhood until my pubescent years (if you discount getting tied up by my older brother a lot), with no knowledge whatsoever what gays or TVs were until i was 14. After I turned 14 though I got an education really fast! It's probably only good luck and the fact that sexual activities among teenagers wasn't quite as widespread back then as now that i didn't get STDs. I learned about sex by experimentation; as a lot of teens do. I didn't know beans about it before then; perhaps if i had I would have taken far fewer risks. I was lucky; others might not be.
I'm not really sure ignorance about alternate sexual life-styles is really possible anymore what with all the stuff one can see on TV and other media now that I couldn't growing up. These days the average 8-year-old already knows more about gender identity (if not about actual sex) than the average 18-year-old did a century ago (and this was when many people were getting married earlier than that!). Also too, kids should be taught to at least respect people regardless of their differences - not just race and religion but sexual identities as well. If only so that they don't embarrass themselves and those they are with by making some kind of ignorant comment out loud (I still blush with shame with what i said the first time i saw an actual black person - virtually non-existent where I grew up at the time - at the age of 10!
So unless you want your kids going out there with no idea what in the world they're going to face and what NOT to do if they don't want to get pregnant, I say yes - educate them about alternate life-styles but in a well-structured way so that obsolete moral judgments don't enter into it.
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