This item was prompted primarily by a desire to tell as many people as possible what a wonderful movie Juno is, but to give it a little more intellectual respectability, we included a link to Ruth Marcus’ recent column on talking to her daughters about sex. And that’s when things got complicated.
She writes:
This is the conundrum that modern parents, boomers and beyond, confront when matters of sex arise. The bright-line rules that our parents laid down, with varying degrees of conviction and rather low rates of success, aren’t — for most of us, anyway — either relevant or plausible. When mommy and daddy didn’t get married until they were 35, abstinence until marriage isn’t an especially tenable claim.
Nor is it one I’d care to make. Would I prefer — as if my preference much matters — that my daughters abstain until marriage? No; in fact, I think that would be a mistake. But I’m not especially comfortable saying that, quite so directly, to my children, partly because that conversation gets so complicated, so quickly.
She moves on to the pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears, and then concludes:
And so the message I choose from Spears’s pregnancy–and the one, once I recovered my composure, I ultimately delivered, is this: It could happen to you–even if you’re the kind of “conscientious” girl who, as Jamie Lynn’s mother described her, is never late for curfew. And so, whenever you choose to have sex, unless you are ready to have a baby, don’t do it without contraception.
This is not only good advice, but probably all of the good advice one can manage in a 700 word op-ed piece. Still, there is protection and there is protection. Sexual relationship go awry in any number of ways less dire than an unwanted pregnancy, and young people need to be prepared for potential emotional as well as physical reprecussions. Such conversations are even more difficult to conduct with the necessary honesty and delicacy than The Talk. Yet they are so important, so worth having, that parents must be willing to have them badly.