“Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool”
A really interesting article about what looks to be a really interesting Young Adult book.
I suspect that just the fact that I say “fuck” in the book is going to upset some people. I tried to be as honest as possible, and I’m sure some people are not going to be happy about it. I hope they realize it’s more valuable to talk about these things that actually do go on than to pretend they would never happen.
I talk in the book about the research I did when I first started experimenting with marijuana. I really educated myself. I talk about the pros and cons, and I think I portray educated experimentation.
When I was in the DARE program, there was a very cartoonish characterization of drugs. Everything was bad. They showed videos of a joint and a heroin needle chasing kids around a playground. So when I saw people smoking marijuana, and they weren’t evil or violent, I came to doubt all of that information. If you teach abstinence-only sex ed and kids see that some of their experiences are contrary to what they learned, they’re going to think that everything that was taught to them was wrong. It’s dangerous to give kids half-truths.
What are your perspectives when it comes to raising kids (whether you are raising them or not?) I mean, no one wants to sit a 5-year old down and talk about how some people snort cocaine off hookers’ backs or anything, but would you rather keep your child as innocent as you can, as long as you can, or do you agree with the quote above, that children need realistic portrayals or they’re going to discard all your warnings and cautions?
Lucy and I talk about the differences in how we grew up fairly frequently; though neither of us were on the extreme logical ends of protectionism vs brutal honesty, we certainly see the good and bad in each perspective.
I think the main problem is that you can’t foresee when your kids are going to be exposed to things. I think a better route is to make sure that they are 100% ok with coming to you to ask about things. For example, I recall with stark clarity when my sister asked my mom (and I was there) “why is ‘gay’ a bad thing?”
As long as they’ll ask you about what they’re learning from their peers, you’ve got infinite teachable moments. The hard part becomes gaining their trust (or the trust of their teachers or daycare ppl) so that the questions that they have are properly asked and answered.
So, I don’t think you should ever LIE to your kids when they ask a direct question. But I do think there are going to be times with the Full Nasty Truth is a bit too much. You can say “smoking is bad; it causes cancer” without showing them all the graphic pictures and reasons why.
I’ve been practicing watching my best friend get his heart broken. He’s gay, he never dated in high school and I know that he’ll have to go through some shitty relationships to get some practice. And even though *I* tend to hold a grudge against those people, I do try and help him get over it and through it as best I can. You can’t take away every bad experience, because that’s not going to help anyone. But as long as you are an active support person, that’s the best you can do.
Yeah, I think providing good support for someone, whether they’re a child or a friend, is basically the best you can do – help them see some good paths to walk down, and let them do the walking.
This is a hard question, given that it includes things like whether or not to teach your kids to make-believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the tooth fairy and whatnot. But I think tween-hood is hard enough without giving your kids additional reasons to believe you lied to them.
I intend to have “Our bodies, ourselves” and similar texts more aimed at younger ages lying around the house, do not intend to hide that I think sex and masturbation and enjoying each other’s bodies are good things for older people to do that can get out of control and have serious hazards, and that drugs are sometimes hazardous things that can be fun but that should be done by choice not by peer pressure or blindly because a doctor recommended it, or because the drugs are controlling your life – I’m not fond of a lifestyle that revolves around a drug habit (I’m including alcohol here) and I expect that to come across to kids I interact with.
Brian and I have chatted a little bit, for instance, about the question of being naked around our kids, if we have kids. My dad was as relaxed about being naked around my sister and I as my mom, and I think that helped me enter teen-hood without as much Mystery and Forbidden sense about the bodies of the opposite sex as some people had. Similarly with alcohol, we were allowed to drink in the house from a young age, so there was no sense of sneaking out back to try beer or whatever; I developed a taste for what I like without the thrill of the forbidden associated with it, and we listened to Bill Cosby skits about getting high, so there wasn’t really a stigma on that, either. (I grew up in Ann Arbor. marijuana was normal, even kind of boring). while I was in high school there were a bunch of issues with improperly mixed synthetic drugs, people dying and such, so I never messed with those. A friend of mine’s story about a really bad trip probably helped influence me there as well. But I’m never going to pretend to kids that I was never around that stuff or that I think anyone who does it is completely evil – as you say, I think that will only cost you authority in the end.
Admitting when you don’t know something is good too, but so is giving kids the tools to research something themselves – let them read or watch or listen to material about cultures and substances they’re interested in, but try to make sure they have a complete picture. Not a cartoon one, positive or negative.
I’m a huge fan of “Let’s look this up together”.
viva las informaciones
Ignorance is not innocence, and I don’t think it does any favors to kids to ask them to navigate the already-harrowing issues of growing up with bad or limited information.
My general rule is, “If you’re old enough to ask a question about it, you’re old enough to hear the truth about it.” I’ve found out that age-appropriateness answers itself, if you just answer precisely what you’re asked: My three-year-old, when she asked where babies come from, wasn’t looking for an answer about sex; she wanted to hear “they start in mom’s tummy and come out between her legs”. Ta-daa. (Later she asked how they got there, and I said “the dad puts them there.” She came back a while later and asked how, and I said “by having sex with the mom”. And she’s continued to ask for details at a pretty reasonable pace since then.)
It’s important for kids to feel like they CAN ask, and to have everything they ask about met with your best attempt at the truth. My kid is six and I’ve already had to say, “Well, that’s a hard question. I’ll do my best, and if you need more information I’ll help you look it up, okay?” That saved my butt when she went through her how-does-poop-get-made phase, where she wasn’t happy without technical terms even my (nurse) mom didn’t know.
Some topics are going to be hard for kids to ask about, and those need to be mandatory: Sex and drugs are probably the big ones. Many parents try to “get them over with” in one big speech (mine did), rather than giving out reasonable-sized chunks of information and keeping the door open for questions. This cowardly move pretty much guarantees that kids won’t learn what they need, when they need it, unless you’re lucky and another adult gives them the opportunity to ask.
Of course, in this day & age, a lot of the important guidance is going to come from the Internet, so I also think it’s important for parents to find and share good web-resources. Your seal of approval on Wikipedia, for example, is going to make your kid (even your teenager) trust that source more than most others. Overall, though, I think the ‘Net will be a huge asset to kids; if I could have looked up what Erowid had to say about Ecstasy, for instance, or what really happens when you report a sexual abuse, things would have been much easier for me; but those answers weren’t in libraries and adults wouldn’t tell you crap. My kid, thankfully, will have better access to information than I did. And I plan on being the parent that all the kids feel like they can ask rowdy and bawdy questions of; I’m not shy, and I’d rather have them embarrass me and educate themselves than do neither.
Re: viva las informaciones
Thanks for your comments on this! :)
My grandmother was quite direct, and tended to speak to me like an adult because I, too, spoke like an adult, and asked adult (as in, mature) questions. This was sometimes frustrating to my mom, who wasn’t prepared for it, but I’ve never been anything but grateful for that.
My stated goal in child-rearing is this: I want my kid to be able to walk down the street in Amsterdam and in Bangkok, any time of the day or night, and make intelligent choices. That means that they need to know quite a bit about what is going on, and why people are spending all that money to do that, and what the possible benefits and consequences might be. And empower them to make their own choice, whatever that may be.
This means that we’ve already discussed that marijuana and cocaine and tobacco change your brain chemistry and make you feel loopy. It’s not that different from nitrous oxide that they get at the dentist – which the dentist carefully controls because nitrous oxide can be bad in the wrong proportions. Because of mood disorders and allergies, we already have a strong background in the idea that what is perfectly fine for one person might be deadly for another. We’ve discussed whether or not playing with your brain chemistry is a good way to entertain yourself, because obviously lots of people think that it *IS* a good way to be entertained. We’ve discussed social pressures for drinking. We’ll have more discussions about why someone might pressure *you* to do something *he* wouldn’t do.
I fully expect that my kids will experiment with drugs, alcohol and sex at some point. Heck, they’d better. (I’m personally waiting for the study that shows that kids who have no sex at all as teenagers wind up with mental issues later in life – right, like that study will get funding…) I would just rather they know what they might be getting into beforehand, instead of plunging in blind.
Thanks for your reply!
I had decided from a pretty young age (we’re talking jr. high school) that if I ever had kids, I would want to be pretty honest with them in their education regarding sex and drugs. I’ve never done any illicit substances (or abused legal ones), but by observation I agree with what Friedman says above. If you demonize something, but then the kid goes out and tries it, that one isolated incident is going to make them question and eventually toss everything that was taught to them regarding that subject. Rather than subject my own kid to that, I’d much prefer to be open with them about those subjects.
Obviously, your child would need to feel like they can talk to you about everything and should be willing to ask, but when it comes to the actual curriculum in school, I would probably not sign any kind of form for the school to teach sex-ed to my child and opt for them to stay home for the day instead. Not because I find sex an objectionable topic to teach to children, but because I object to the abstinence-only policies. I’d rather sit them down and talk with them about it myself intelligently, let them know that this is something that can have a lot of repercussions, but if done properly should be a very positive thing.
It boils down to choices. If a kid feels like you’ve tricked them into behaving the way you want them to, they’ll lose respect for you and for your intentions. Showing them the possibilities and laying the choices at their feet gives them the responsibility of their own behavior, which will hopefully, down the road, help them to make more intelligent decisions.
That’s about where I am. I don’t know what I would do if and when it came time to sign a form for Sex Ed class. Not every class is abstinence only, but on the other hand, I think I could answer questions more accurately and appropriately than the instructor who has a few conflicting concerns (including how the parents would react to a frank conversation about sex, even after signing a form).
Thanks for replying!