The library's copy of the book "The Guide to Getting It On" seems to have feet. Most every morning we find it somewhere else in the stacks. Maureen, one of my co-workers reported finding it in the cooking section and then subsequently in the mystery section. I find that ironic... they wanna get cooking but how to do it is a mystery to them.
Of course, we are talking about kids who are not mature enough to come to the desk and check the book out. There's no rule against it, and when you are at the age where you may start to experiment, you might as well have some kind of clue about what to do.
I do think that they like to look at the book together sometimes. I do sometimes hear giggling in the stacks in the after-school hours.
I realize that there are taboos and strictures placed upon kids. I think they are all bogus and that we do not serve children by sheltering them from reality. Perhaps restriction of information is really an excuse to be lazy in their upbringing, to avoid having to teach them responsibility in a responsible manner.
When I was a child, there was a book covered in brown paper on our bookshelf. It was one that a Baptist preacher had given my mother before she married. It was a little red book that discussed sex. I remember that on one of the frontispages was: "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."
My father told me, a few years ago, that he wouldn't have minded us looking at that book, but that book did disappear. Perhaps my mother saw me looking at it, or maybe my sister did. Or maybe my sister had it tucked away in her room for reference.
No, kids shouldn't be having sex until they are mature enough to handle it, but they do, anyway. They ought to know how to avoid pregnancy and disease.
Maureen recently found the book in the sports section!
1 comment:
Something I can get really angry about, if I think about it too much, is the lack of information on sex given to high school and Jr. high kids. The idea that information will make them promiscuous is ridiculous. This is definitly one area where what you don't know CAN hurt you. Adults need to put a little more faith in kids, and realize they will often make smart decisions, if they have all the information. No teen-ager I've ever met decided to have sex because someone told them how it works, what the disease risks are, and what it takes to get pregnant. On the other hand I DO know teenagers who have decided NOT to have sex yet, because of possible consequences they are not ready to handle.
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