The main thing I'd do differently with teens

And the hardest thing to do as a parent

Jacob, Caitrin and I in 2012 smoking pipes on Easter as one does.

We all have parenting regrets. I was absolved of one of them this year from my oldest son. I felt bad that I never taught sex ed to my kids. I know, I know. Parents are supposed to. It’s better coming from us. Keep it natural, talk about it easily, tell them what you want them to know.

I didn’t.

Not for a lack of trying! I took my daughter for a “pre-puberty weekend” with the “official cassette tapes” that everyone told us to listen to. After two hours, the tapes took a turn and suddenly we heard hellfire and brimstone predictions of what would happen to my sweet girl if she ever made the mistake of fornicating.

I quickly punched my thumb on the eject button, hurled the tape into the trash, and drove us straight to the movie theater to see “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Much better use of our time and instruction for what a healthy, happy, genuine attraction relationship looks like!

And so I pivoted: I began borrowing sex ed books from the library and tossing them into my teens’ bedrooms. That was it. That was our entire sex ed program.

I asked my oldest the other day if I had done him a disservice. He said, “You did great! You gave us time to learn and you didn’t make it awkward.”

Ha! Who knew?

Except a little piece of me did know. I remember the feeling of being trapped into listening to information I felt embarrassed to discuss with my mother. My mom was trying to be honest and hip in the 1970s, but I was not ready. I educated myself when I went babysitting, hunting for The Joy of Sex on the bookshelves.

All this to say: I had regretted not being more proactive about sex ed and yet in the end, it worked out better from the perspective of my now-grown son.

And then it happened again. Another regret was overturned by a now-adult daughter.

My youngest wound up watching lots of documentaries with the rest of us when she was not yet ten years old. We watched films about the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the Ku Klux Klan, the Vietnam war and more. She had nightmares. I have told her many times I wished I had not exposed her to that level of human cruelty so early in her life.

Recently, in her late twenties, she told me she thinks differently about it now. She said many of the people in those films were children and they had no way to opt out of war, antisemitism, and racism in their real lives. She is glad she had an experience of revulsion and horror early because it has made her more aware of what people suffer today—she has an experience to correlate.

So there you go! Who knew? Perspective helps.

With all that in mind: What would I do differently if I were to raise teens today?