What is 4Parents.gov?
You can help your son or daughter make healthy choices, including deciding to wait until marriage to have sex. 4parents.gov can help you talk to your child, pre-teen, or teen early and often about waiting to have sex, what happens as he or she grows, and other important topics.So 4Parents is a resource for parents to talk to their kids about sex? No.
It is a poorly conceived and designed site with content focused around why sex is bad, why sex is risky, and - if you don't heed your mother's words - why all contraception will fail you. Yes, seriously. Check out the Birth Control Chart and subsequent verbiage. In other words: this is an abstinence site.
Who is 4Parents.gov?
4Parents.gov is part of a national public education campaign to provide parents with the information, tools and skills they need to help their teens make healthy choices, including waiting until marriage to have sex.As noted, this site is actually about not talking about sex.
4Parents.gov is sponsored by the Office of Public Health and Science, Office of Population Affairs, and the Public Health Service. "Teen Chat," and "Parents, Speak Up!" guides are the result of a collaborative effort between the Administration for Children and Families and the Office of Population Affairs, Office of Public Health and Science.And you probably guessed this from the whole ".gov" thing, but this is a United States Government website.
What does science say about abstinence-only education?
From the AP:
The study found that while abstinence-only efforts appear to have little positive impact, more comprehensive sex education programs were having "positive outcomes" including teenagers "delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use."
...
A spending bill before Congress for the Department of Health and Human Services would provide $141 million in assistance for community-based, abstinence-only sex education programs, $4 million more than what President Bush had requested.
What's the big deal?
Abstinence-only education is and has been the focus of this administration from the beginning because of President Bush's repeatedly revealed religion-over-science agenda. As the above-noted and other reports have stated, abstinence-only ed does not work. But having sex before marriage is a "sin," so government websites that purport to help parents and government programs aimed at educating children centralize around the ineffective church tactic of ignoring reality and attempting to scare kids away from sex.
The problem is in the repetition, with Bush consistently Jesus-izing government spending at the peril - and sometimes direct interference - of real, hard science. The Administration is failing parents and their children across America. And they're doing it with our tax dollars.
And that should be a pretty big deal for all of us.
Write congress. Stop the spending.
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1 comment:
Thank you for this post...on behalf of my kids. Fortunately, I do no rely on schools, or worse- the .gov, to talk to my kids about sex. I'd rather not have a bunch of religious pundits, unwilling to "evolve" into the reality of years beyond 1952 tell my children that the pleasure their bodies feel is evil or belongs to another person or the "institution of marriage",which we can all recall is not sanctioned for gay folks. And what are gay teens supposed to do? Not have sex? Idiocy. Pure idiocy. If you (ok-not you reading this likely) insist that there is a god that created bodies with all those raging hormones (and no user manual,) why do you deny him (you know god's male) the pleasure of his creation here. Ok-I could go on and on, because I don't see the logic here. (Ok- I see the logic HERE. I don't see it in the .gov.)
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