Right Message Taken Wrong

Last week, Dr. Shirley Price - PhD, trained counselor, and school board member - went to Hitchcock TX's Crosby Middle School to give an inspirational talk to 6th-8th grade girls. The talk was about avoiding distractions to success, such as drugs, sex, alcohol, guns and crime. A positive female role model sharing positive advice with impressionable young women? Sounds pretty good, right?? Not to everyone, it turns out.

You heard she mentioned sex, right? Well, that's what everyone's up in arms about. When Dr. Price mentioned sex in her talk, a few girls spoke up and admitted they were all under a lot of pressure to start makin' it. Price took the (golden) opportunity to urge the young ladies to wait until they were older to have any kind of sex, including oral sex. Some of the girls admitted they didn't know what that was, and that's where the poop hit the pinwheel.

Factual talk about sex only frightens children that have been taught to fear sex. DAD.

At least two parents called the school (and the newspaper, apparently) insisting that Price had gone into graphic sexual detail during her talk, and then the news started reporting that she had instructed the girls in how to perform oral and anal sex. Witnesses insist this is untrue, that she flat out declined to give performance instructions, but that girls in the audience did go into details with each other, and she did not stop them until they were finished talking.

Parents started screaming about how they should have been able to opt out of such a discussion and how their kids are permanently damaged and blah blah blah. None of them stopped screaming long enough to realize that the girls knew exactly what they were talking about, no instruction needed, or to remember that the grown-up in the conversation kept promoting abstinence, exclusively. Apparently that's the wrong kind of abstinence education.

Anyway, the school superintendent sent out a letter to parents apologizing for the incident, and Price herself has said that it was a "lesson learned on [her] part", and that "[it was the] wrong time to discuss it". While I agree that it probably wasn't the primo time or place to present the info, especially after asking the principal to leave (the girls weren't comfortable talking in front of her - and several adults stayed in the room the whole time), I'm still glad those girls got what they needed. And I love how Price apologized for the venue, but not the subject matter. Delicious.

There is definitely a right and a wrong way to talk to little ones about sex, and I think Dr. Price did it the right way, but probably at the wrong time, all things considered. You know what, though? I'm glad it happened. Those girls needed to talk about it, or they wouldn't have brought it up - or kept talking about it. And they had a trained counselor to help them do it! That's gravy, people, no two ways about it.