When I was 16 with my brand new driver’s license I could not wait to take my sister and some friends to band practice and back that night. My mom was reluctant but agree with strict orders that I was to come home a certain way. And of course, being 16 with a brand new driver’s license, I thought I knew a better way to come home and ended up in a big car accident that sent one boy to the hospital over night. No one was killed or seriously injured although my mom’s car was completely totaled. My mom could barely talk to me for a few hours after the accident. I thought she was angry with me. She was. But I think the realization of how much worse it could have been kept choking the words down her throat.
Over the past 12 hours I have read some really ugly things online, and heard some idiot commentators on CNN rip Sarah Palin and her family apart, mocking them for their moral views and for apparently not instructing their daughter very well on how to avoid a pregnancy.
And most of it is a load of crap! I’m sure that the Palins, like most conservative, religious parents, try their hardest to instill values and morals to our children along with logic and a huge helping of common sense. And just like me with my “I know better than you” attitude, many kids decide that they’d rather try their own route, and make different decisions from their parents. That’s part of growing up. Having dire or difficulty consequences to those decisions are also part of growing up sometimes. Does that mean that we quit trying to instill these values and morals and just throw up our hands with the the “kids will be kids” mantra? That’s dumb. It would be akin to my mom just throwing me the keys to her next car without any consequences for wrecking her previous one!
But what really ticks me off is how the Palin Family Critics seem so smug in their assumption that if their daughter had just used birth control, she wouldn’t be pregnant. Of course that ignores tons of research and statistics that prove that birth control methods are anything but 100% effective.
With my oldest boys, particularly my 19 year old, I gave a complete teaching on sexuality and family planning. (My first son also witnessed all of my pregnancies and saw me give birth twice.) Of course I emphasized the church’s teaching on sexuality in marriage and the responsibilities of fatherhood. But I also touched on what some of the artificial methods of birth control were including the health risks and potential complications of particularly hormonal, barrier and permanent sterilization methods. I covered morality and ethics. I took a scientific and logical approach. I also talked about some of the emotional and psychological problems I saw in having a sexual relationship at a young age outside of marriage.
What he does with that information remains to be seen. I can’t be with him 24/7 nor would I want to be. But I know that he has enough information to make an informed choice and of course I hope that he sees the logic and the benefits in remaining celibate for now.
However, if he doesn’t. If he decides to go a different route like I did, it doesn’t mean the information that he received was worthless and faulty, just like Bristol Palin’s pregnancy does not mean that the training she received from her family was flawed. It simply means that even teenagers are human and prone to error. And sometimes those errors have adult sized consequences.
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