I have been snowed under for the last week so here is a belated reply to your comment. While I agree with you in general, I have a couple of points to make:

Yes, the average age today’s kids start engaging in sexual relations may be comparable to the age children started in past periods, but I would argue that today’s kids are lacking other life skills to balance out sexual maturity. Kids who lived in past eras generally spent their days surrounded by people of all ages, which would have given them a complete education in all the other aspects of relations between the sexes: they matured early in more ways than purely the sexual one. Our kids are surrounded for a large part of the day with others of the exact same age and probably the same level of emotional, intellectual and social development. In fact, by putting our kids in schools we forcibly delay the maturation of many life skills to the end of the teens.

As for government legislating our morality, who is ultimately responsible? Let’s not forget that it is we, the citizens, who elect government officials, we give them the right decide on matters concerning us. Perhaps we need to take back some of the responsibility of regulating morals and by that I don’t mean vigilante action against transgressors. I mean that we should educate our children on the right way to live in society. When we talk with our daughter about the relations between sexes we discuss not so much the sexual act (she has shown no desire to talk about it) but other aspects: the need to share and to give of oneself, the need to understand and respect your partner, and the need to have more than just sexual attraction for a succesfull relationship. Jacqueline Wilson would consider these subjects too mature for a child of eleven and a half years. I’m not sure Emma is able to fully grasp what we say but we’ll keep talking along the same lines until she can.

*Applauds*

Information is the new evolution. Americans would like to maintain the innocence of their children, seeing it as some grand boon to their kids to keep them naive and poorly informed of the world they live in. To resist these changes is no less well informed or clear minded than to resist alterations to the structure of copyright law.

This is not to say that we should suddenly stop guiding our children but their development is going to reflect our culture in the future. A 12 year old with ‘three boyfriends’ is…well, why not? A girl being sexually active that age would be worrisome but a girl having friends who she’s intimate with isn’t bizarre and having three is just a sign of the steady drift away from monogamy that our culture has been taking.

Do we begin sheltering our children even farther, hoping to put the genie back in the bottle? Shame them into conforming to the last generation’s ideology where sex and the display of affection are concerned? We saw where that lead us in the 60’s.

I suggest as an alternative it is time to begin /truly/ informing them. Abstinence education has been shown to cause increased sexuality in children who are put through it just as D.A.R.E. programs have been shown to do nothing to decrease drug use. Accepting the changes is step one. They have happened and will continue accelerating. Period. This is not a trend we can reverse.

So what do you tell kids that age? God, if you tell them about sex honestly you’ll have teeny boppers screwing in the streets, right? Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria, right? Every time someone has declared the end of the world because of a cultural trend they’ve been right, haven’t they?

I think that honestly were it not for the mystique and danger surrounding much of sexual interaction, children would be less inclined to try it. No amount of sex education is going to change that we can’t stick our children in tiny boxes until they’re 21. The average age kids lose their virginity consensually hasn’t changed. It’s still about 14.8 years old. Same as it was a hundred and fifty years ago, same as it was during the middle ages, same as it was two thousand years ago.

It was only we, in the twentieth century, who criminalized sex at that age same as we criminalized the use of marijuana, the drinking of alcohol in the 1920’s, and a hundred other minor social issues in which the government should have no place. If a child is raped, that is time for the government to intervene, not when she sleeps with her boyfriend of the same age. If a man gets high and drives into a lamp post, that is time for the government to intervene…not if he does it in his own home. If a man and a man choose to love each other, the government shouldn’t give them tax breaks any more than a man and a woman who do. Period. It is not their place.

Every time we as a people have tried to legislate our morality it has /failed/. Keep this in mind.