Why is the South leading the nation in unwed births???

I can't believe that in the year 2005, there are STILL people who want to "put away" teenage girls who are pregnant and try to keep it some big secret.

Kick them out school! Send them to a relative in another state! It's a bunch of hooey.

Are we STILL so hardened towards women, even young women? I thought we were supposed to be hardened towards sin, not people.

Yes, teenage girls who are pregnant have fouled up. Yes, they have sinned most grievously. Yes, they have found themselves in a life-altering dilemma.

But to deny her an opportunity for a high school diploma is taking away ANY opportunity she has for taking care of herself and her child. She will be forever dependent on family, food stamps, welfare, and she will pass that tradition on to her children.

And nobody seems to expressing any concern at all about the boys. The boys who IMPREGNATE these girls aren't kicked out. They don't have to hide from the community. In fact, it's usually their "badge of honor". You know, " , good going, son!"

I taught school for over two decades and I, unfortunately, saw at least 15-20 students and/or former students become pregant before they graduated.

And not once, NOT ONCE, did their boyfriend pay a price of any kind. They were never asked to leave school, never suspended, never ridiculed, never made to feel ashamed, and certainly never made the brunt of vicious gossip.

As long as we are STILL, STILL allowing boys to believe that an active sex life automatically brings them into manhood and that "locker-room boasting" is where you separate the men from the boys, then we are NEVER going to have a significant decrease in unwed mothers associated with shame and reproach and children being bastardized.

Why is the South leading the way?

~Poverty

~Ignorance

~The church and fundamentally conservative families arrogantly believing that if you just tell children that pre-marital sex is a sin, that no teenagers will have pre-martial sex.

~The Good Ol' Boy Syndrome

~Girls having a lack of understanding that they can be anything that they want to be in life, that's it's alright to aspire to something worthwhile other than making a boy "happy" to "keep" him and thereby, with HIS approval, being found worthy to the world.

~And a GROSS lack of conversations between parents and children about sex, fidelity, and purity.

Our collectives heads are in the sand.

We want to brand our girls and their fatherless babies, but no one, not the church nor parents want to have a dialogue with young people and TEACH them anything about sex, because there is this puritanical fear that if you talk about sex with a young person that they will become curious and experimental.

Oops! Too late!

They already are curious. They have been curious since before puberty.

And unfortunately, many of them have longed passed the experimental stage of sex.

Peace-
Scarlett O.
<><

 

Well, contrary to what many fundamentalist Christians believe, sex education is NOT the norm in the public schools of America.

We, as educators, in the state of Louisiana CAN'T teach ANYTHING about application of birth control. And that's good.

By law, we cannot teach abortion as a positive thing or as a substitution for birth control. And that's good.

By law, we cannot teach homosexuality an ANY context, period. And that's good.

By law, we CAN teach the reproduction system and an abstinence program.

The Louisiana Governor's Program on Abstinence (Mike Foster, not our current governor) is one of the absolute best tools for teaching children and teens the truth about the harms of pre-marital sex and the truth about what teen pregnancies and teen diseases will do to your life.

It's not a scare tactic, but a truth tactic. Those always produce longer term results, because you can actually change a child's mind about casual and flippant sexual contact.

Scare tactics only work for a brief period of time. Because you only scare them, then fear eventually subsides and they are back to their old behaviors and beliefs.

I used the Governor's Program quite a bit in 7th and 8th grades. I wanted to use it in 5th and 6th, but our school district said no.

Here are some things that my students learned from the workbook:

</font>

• According to the CDC, only about 30%-40% of teenagers are sexually active, NOT all of them like the movies and rock videos portray.</font>
• Yes, penicillin cures some diseases, but not always. And even in the case of bacterial cures, long lasting effects such as sterility can sometimes not be avoided.</font>
• If they are getting their sexual information from their classmates, then they are in bad shape. Their classmates don't know any more truth about sex than they do.</font>
• Not only is it OK to remain pure, but it is smarter, healthier, cooler, and will make them so much happier in the long run.</font>
• In the 1970's, 1 out of 300 Americans had a sexually transmitted disease. And it was either one of two bacterial diseases.</font>
• In 2002, 1 out of 4 Americans have a sexually transmitted disease, (when you included HIV and genital herpes). And half of them are NOT curable.</font>

There is a whole lot more including how to keep yourself from getting into situations that lead to trouble, etc.....

Sex education is NOT teaching that anything goes.

Sex education in my state, BY LAW, can only be fidelity, purity, abstinence, KNOWLEDGE of birth control (NOT application of), and reproductive/health information that will save lives.

I have never had a parent protest what I teach nor complain. In fact, I tell my students that their best source of a confidante is their mother and/or father. Students have written me notes thanking me for informing them on health issues and taking the pressure to follow the "crowd and the world" off of them.

Ultimately, sex education should be taught in the homes. I still believe that.

Peace-
Scarlett O.
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LadyEagle,

I'll be the first to tell you that the NEA is an ungodly organization and I, as an educator, have no part of it.

But just because they are the largest teacher union and the most ungodly, doesn't mean they speak for the majority of teachers nationwide.

They don't.

They can rant and rave all they want to and try to implement policy and curriculums, but they really don't have that authority.

They, quite a long time ago, stopped having the interest of teachers and students at heart and have delved into the politics of education and its manipulation of politics in general.

The NEA does not represent teachers as a whole nor the majority of them.

Peace-
Scarlett O.
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No, the truth is that we have an epidemic of sexual activity amongst our precious young people.

Black.
White.
Hispanic.
Asian.
Native American.
Italian.
Korean.
French.........

And what are we to do about it?

Saying that, "Oh, those people sin worse that we do", is one of the most fruitless things to say in the area of sexual activity in children that I have ever heard.

I want sexual activity amongst ALL teenagers to come to a dead stop.

I don't care what color they are nor which race or culture has the highest percentage or sheer volume of unwed mothers and fathers.

I don't care one whit.

Peace-
S.O.
&lt;&gt;&lt;

 

You don't have to tell me that things aren't equal. My chromosomes are XX and you can better believe that I found that out that hard lesson a long time ago.

However, just because that's the way things are in this world, does that mean that we have to accept it or not challenge it?

I fully understand that girls should be taught to protect their virtue. And I agree with that.

But you know what? I believe that boys should be taught to protect their own purity, also. Boys should be made to seek out their manliness in their holiness.

I have seen far too many boys who are frightened to death that if they don't give the right "image" to their peers that they will be outcasts.

You know that playground game, king-of-the-mountain? The game where boys keep shoving each other down until one boy stands on the hill, the king?

Well, our boys out grow the playground, but not the game. As teenagers, they KEEP shoving each other down, but not necessarily physically.

They shove each other down by mocking each other's inexperience with liquor, girls, tobacco, drugs, and defiance of authority.

This is so cruel. I don't see how some boys make it out of adolescence with a sane mind.

Yeah, that's just the way it is, but it's wrong.

And we, as a society, need to treat it like it's wrong. Maybe society won't change, but maybe the lives of some of our boys can be changed when they are allowed to feel proud and justified of who they are as virtuous young men.

Would the world change? No.

But would it hurt to try? No.

Peace-
Scarlett O.
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Ah, how quickly they learn!



Good luck with your son and God bless him.

Peace-
Scarlett O.
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