NYACK, N.Y.
I DON'T have a great track record for talking to my four kids about sex. I've tried. Not as much as I could have, but I've tried. When my oldest son was in eighth grade, I decided it was time for The Talk. The family was vacationing on Cape Cod, and we were heading home in two cars. The three little ones rode with Mom, and Ben got to ride with Dad because we had something special to talk about.
It was a five-hour trip, and I'd planned to wait a bit, but Ben was eager to find out what his special treat was. So at Exit 6 of the Mid-Cape Highway I started, and we were done well before Exit 5. I've never seen him so uncomfortable and disappointed. "Dad, come on, it's fine, Dad, honest, Dad."
Maybe he was a little young. I would come back to it. But we never really did have The Talk that I'd long envisioned I would handle so much better than my own dad.
Oh, we talked here and there. I've made it clear to my three teenage sons that it's an extremely bad idea to get a girl pregnant, particularly if you don't plan to marry her. I've given them condoms: one year for Christmas discreetly wrapped in their stockings, another time under their pillows on their birthdays.
As for my daughter, who's still in middle school, if I get the tiniest bit close to the most innocuous hygiene issue like leg shaving, she yells, "Dad!" and rolls her eyes to high heaven, and all matters are immediately referred to Mom.
So when I heard about a sex education lecture for parents at the community center here, I figured I'd give it a try. It was sponsored by Planned Parenthood, along with local community groups, as part of a national pilot project called "Real Life, Real Talk." The program is being tried in three places — Tucson and Portland, Me., are the others — to see if there is grass-roots support for expanding comprehensive public sex education programs.
The time may be ripe. Over the last decade the federal government has spent $1 billion on abstinence-only sex education, and recent studies have suggested it's not working. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1997, 60.9 percent of high school seniors said they had had intercourse; in 2005, the latest year available, 63.1 percent said they had.
The number of states rejecting federal abstinence-only money (which requires matching state funds) has been growing, to 14 now, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Furthermore, a 2006 study in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine reported that 82 percent of 1,096 adults surveyed favored programs "that teach students about both abstinence and other methods of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases."
The speaker at the Nyack Center was the Rev. Debra W. Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Westport, Conn., who has been teaching sex education for 25 years, has written several books on the subject, including "Beyond the Big Talk," and has been interviewed by most of the major talk show hosts, from Oprah to O'Reilly.
Her message was that the Big Talk doesn't work, it's too embarrassing for everybody; that, instead, from the time your kids are little you should find "teachable moments" to discuss sex in a way appropriate to their age; that no matter what we parents want, there is a long and illustrious history of teenagers having sex; that teaching your child your family's values is even more important than teaching the nuts and bolts of sex; and that the parent must take the initiative. ("I've never heard a young person say, 'Mom, I'm thinking about sex, let's have a family talk.'")
The audience of 75 was virtually all women (apparently, most men have this squared away) and seemed particularly interested in the speaker's real-life examples. She said that when one of your kids yells, "That's so gay," you have a teachable moment. When you're watching "Grey's Anatomy" with your teenager, and the doctors and nurses start jumping into bed, you have a teachable moment: "Isn't it strange they never talk about using protection?"
Ms. Haffner discussed how she dealt with her own two children. When her daughter was a teenager, she said, she let her go into her bedroom with her boyfriend "for enough time to kiss and make out and not enough time to take off their clothes and put them back on." She said that while as a parent you may decide you don't want this in your home, consider the alternative: "If not in your home, where?"
Even as she spoke, many in the audience were living these moments. That evening, before Donna Schmidt left home, she'd told her 16-year-old son that while she was out, he was not to be in his bedroom with his girlfriend. They had to stay downstairs with his 13-year-old sister. Several times during the speech, she'd text-messaged her daughter to make sure her son was indeed downstairs. When Ms. Schmidt is home, she not-so-subtly sets bedroom limits. "I walk very heavily going up the stairs," she said. "I call up to them: 'Want to watch a movie? Want some popcorn?' "
Several parents interviewed in the days after the speech said they'd tried out Ms. Haffner's teachable moments idea, and it wasn't that easy. Susan Lovaglio has 14-year-old twin boys and went home that night determined to put what she'd learned into practice. "I was so full of information, I said, 'When I get home I'm going to have a teachable moment.'" First, her sons were fighting over the computer and she got bogged down dealing with that. Then, when she tried talking to her husband about their family values, "he said, 'Please, I'm watching the hockey game.' I guess it wasn't a teachable moment," she said.
The last time Christine Magnone tried to talk to her teenage son about sex, she said, "my son and husband looked at me like, 'Don't go there.'"
Several days after, I called my own son Ben, who's now a college sophomore. I asked if he remembered our talk at Exit 6. To my surprise, he did. I asked why it went so badly. "I hadn't been thinking about sex at all," he said. "I may have kissed a girl by then. I was scared out of my mind. I was thinking, 'God, can we just talk about something else?'"
He asked, "Didn't you try again?" I'd forgotten. When he was older, we had a brief conversation — measured in seconds, not minutes — when I'd said that just because you're the boy doesn't mean you have to know everything, it's O.K. to figure it out together with the girl.
We were laughing now about how badly this had all gone, and it made me remember my own miserable moment, when I was in junior high and it suddenly dawned on me that my mother had engaged in sex to have me. For a long while it was hard for me to even look at her, knowing her dark secret. I suspect this is why even good parents who work at teaching values each day tell researchers that they can use help from a trained educator or health professional when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts stuff.