by 
In case I haven’t made a good enough case for you to get your children out of public school, here’s a new one:
TAMPA – Many Hillsborough County middle and high school students lead double lives – one for their parents and one for their peers.
In a districtwide survey, nearly half of high school students and one in five middle school students said they have had sexual intercourse, and a higher percentage of high school boys than girls reported being physically hurt by their “significant others.”
“I know that is happening, because my son constantly gets letters from girls who want to do sexual things to him,” said Paula Thomas, mother of five children ages 9 to 16. “It starts in the sixth or seventh grade.”
At school, the Citrus Park mother said, “They know to stay out of certain hallways because of the girls.”
Parents at the meeting, who often are involved in schools as PTA board members, said they didn’t know about the survey. Had their children been a part of it, Zimet said, they would have been asked to sign permission slips.
“There is no way I’d want [my son] to take that survey if he was in middle school,” said Camille Johnston, mother of children ages 7 and 10 who attend Nelson Elementary School in Dover. “But I’d want those results.”
Parents need that type of “eye-opening” information, the PTA leaders agreed.
“I’m a pretty involved parent, but I’m pretty ignorant about what the trends are,” said Sharold Allen, the county council president who asked Zimet to make the presentation. “This is so important.”
Now, having been a middle/high school student I know that children can tend to exaggerate what they have and haven’t done on surveys to impress their peers. There’s a lot of peer pressure to fit in. I also know that the girls were much more pressuring than the guys. Rumors about how “easy” a girl was or how they tortured you especially if you weren’t participating in the sexual scene make it easy for me to believe that more is happening than was happening in my small public school.
This again brings me to the question– are your kids still in public school? If so, why? Are you telling me that it’s more important for your kids to have an XBOX 360 and $60 games than it is for their education and well-being? And if enough people wanted out or went to homeschooling, the gov’t would be pressured to make such options affordable. Get involved, find out what’s going on in your school– get your kids out!
Being private schooled most of my life, I did have several eye-opening experiences when visiting public school (a small town one) with a friend. It was junior high, many years ago, and the talk among my friend’s friends was shocking. What they did with their boyfriends. Even then, the school allowed 3rd graders to have dances. (Rolling my eyes)
When I ended up in public school as a junior and senior, again in a small town school district, sex and parties was what it was all about. Some girls would get so drunk they’d have no ideas if the rumors about them on Monday were true…terrible rumors.
Guys don’t have to be the aggressive ones anymore, girls have taken the role upon themselves. Teenage boys have no hope unless really grounded in the Word.
In my day, it was mostly parties and drinking in the public school too. There was some rumors that a certain girl was easy or things like that. I stayed away from dating because I figured that everyone was doing way more than I wanted to do.
you know, i think it is so sad that girls prey on boys now.
I mean, how warped and twisted. A girl feels so pressured and is so influenced by our sexualized society, and she is so “liberated” by the feminist movement, that now they persue boys aggressively. This is not only going to hurt them in the long run (and likely the short run), but it makes boys less of a man. When girls and women take from boys and men the role of leadership (expressed here as pursuing the opposite gender) it belittles men, and they will do one of two things: They will be beaten like dogs and take it, becoming wussy and sissy and neer grow up to be real men, or They will have to become that much more aggressive to assert themselves over women. (And we wonder why rape – a crime of power not sex- is on the rise!)
Mrs Meg Logan
I think that you have a good point here– and Paul took to great lengths in the Epistles to keep men and women in the roles that they were given by God. Just note how many times Paul talks about leadership in the home or family. Note the fact that he spends time talking about men and women should wear, when they should speak, etc. These aren’t the sayings of some legalistic man (since he is the one that preached Christian Liberty), but the teachings of a man that wanted the best for men and women.
When the sexes get confused, society is loosing one of its best resources in the fact that there are way too many “chiefs” and not enough “indians”.
My opinion is that the girls are even worse than when I was in public school, if you can believe that!
My children are being home schooled again after three years in the public school system. I was appalled at the grief my 12 year old boy received from a couple of girls in his class! They even started calling the house…and I’m not talking about prankster type stuff that they used to do. One girl was extremely rude, demanding to talk with my son and when I said we did not allow girls calling our son at home, she hung up on me. Whenever she called after that, if I answered she hung up. (We have caller ID, so I knew it was her.) These same girls would hit him and call him names at school. Believe me, I spent a lot of time on the phone and in the office with the principal.
This past year of home schooling again has been wonderful! I do regret those three years, but I can’t go back and change them. Thankfully, my four oldest children survived very well and held their own with their Biblical beliefs and respect for authority.
When I was attending a small-town public school (actually two different ones) a couple of years ago, I didn’t really notice blatant things going on. But you could still see it….and I assume some bits of the conversations I heard probably mentioned more than they were saying at the time I walked by. The thing is, from my Junior High and High School years, I pretty much was on my own; I tended to make few friends. So I think I basically didn’t hear much just because the friends I had weren’t involved in boyfriend-girlfriend relationships or anything. So we would just hear hints of such things in passing. What’s really disappointing is when you go down to the elementary level and hear kids saying such suggestive, mature things when they’re only in 1st grade!
Children certainly have a way of picking up what they think the older kids are saying and they try to mimic their conversation and dress. That’s part of the reason that what is going on is so bad.
For me, I didn’t admit to even “liking” girls until I was older, and that’s part of the reason (I think) that I got harassed in High school. It started early in 7th grade with the note on my desk that no one would own up to (cute) and went to girls pinching my butt, etc. Not a fun experience.
I blame the media. Lol. I know it’s a cliche, but I really do. We are bombarded with SEX SEX SEX from waking up in the morning to our racy weather girls and on the commute to work with Hooter’s billboards along the way. Then there is flirting and sexual innuendo at work, waitresses with short skirts at lunch, less-than-half clothed perfume ads in the magazine we read in the doc’s office then back home again to prime-time tv and Victoria’s Secret commercials.
I blame the parents, too. If we don’t screen these things as much as possible from our lives and give our children something to fill the void Britney Spears and K-Fed become their parents. We’ve placed such a high value on taking it off for the camera and such a low-value on traditional womens roles — low teacher salaries, closing down Mom and Pop stores, the “old ball and chain” stigma attached to being a SAHM. It’s no wonder our girls think the way to win (a job, a boy, respect) is to be as popular (read:sexy) as possible.
My oldest daughter, aged 10, is on the cheerleading team at school. I was apprehensive at first and thought I would pull her from the team if they chose suggestive cheers or uniforms. Fortunately all went well until they cheered a game with the high school girls. :O They came back trying to do this sexy little hip thing and I refused to let mine do it — she could either sit that cheer out or do an alternative move. They did that cheer at a couple of games before the coach (whose daughter was trying the hardest to roll those…what? 11?…year old hips) decided they should all do the alternative move.
One person refusing to let our children be sexualized can make a difference.
What, besides pulling your kids from school, do you guys do? Do you turn off the tv after cartoons until the kids are in bed? Do you refuse to buy magazines with racy ads? Do you sign your daughters up for plenty of activites to keep them healthy and occupied?
I think you’re getting close, Heather. I think a bunch of things are working in concert to effect our children. I think that you’ve hit two of the big players:
The media is selling sex to children. They sell the clothing, the looks, the behavior and reinforce the concept that you should derive your meaning by sex.
Educators also do this, though, with the whole discussion about how “everyone’s doing it” and expecting children to fail. Children will attempt to meet expectations, and if we set low ones we can expect them to meet them.
But I think you fingered the real culprits. Parents. I’ve been reading through Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters and one of the things that is really impressing upon me is just how much power parents have in their relationships with their children. It’s much more than they figure, and it can overcome the media.
Just like your illustration, if more parents said “no” to things, I would think that you’d find that the market would dry up and we’d go back to normal selling. However, parents aren’t as involved in their children’s lives, there’s a whole segment that’s not involved when their kids are home, and they believe the lie that “kids will do it anyway.”
Yeah, the old “kids will do it anyway” gag. I think kids will be humans. Some will try illicit drugs and early sex and some won’t, regardless of what we parents try to instill. But I sure plan to stack the deck in their favor.
In a way, I think I’m lucky for having had the unsavory past I did so that I can a)perhaps recognize trouble signs in my children sooner and b) be able to steer them into activities and opportunities (that I didn’t have) that will keep them busy, give them a focus, and help them meet like-minded others. Sometimes it works against me, though, because I tend to want to keep them by my side rather than out into The Big Bad World. A friend of mine reminded me that I have to parent my children and not retroactively parent the kid I was.
What do you think would make parents become more involved in their kids lives?
Good question. I think that there’s a lot wrong with parenting today. I think that the roles have been switched around. We cart our kids here, there, and yonder to entertain them and wonder why they cannot do the normal things kids in other cultures can do. We wonder why they cannot find things to do, why we have to keep providing things, and we always want them to have a better life than we have.
There are so many common misconceptions that parents have that I don’t know of any one thing that they would have to change to become more involved– or less involved in trivial things and more involved in the things that are important.
I would suggest that it has to be a series of inner changes– changes in priorities, changes in the amount of time spent with the children doing bonding activities rather than team activities, changes in the understanding of what children are (they are not your buddy, they are not little adults, etc.), and changes in approach.
We’ve seemed to lost the whole concept of being a parent in just a few generations, and we have replaced it with something that’d be hard to overcome.
“We’ve seemed to lost the whole concept of being a parent in just a few generations, and we have replaced it with something that’d be hard to overcome.”
So what do you suggest? Just throw up our collective hands? My question wasn’t rhetorical — I really want to know how you other posters keep your children from getting the messages “the media” is trying to send. Do you censor programs? Reading materials? Music? Do you have your kids involved in outside character-building activities? Do you lead by example with your family and friends?
Definitely not throwing up our hands. What do we do personally? Well, with the ages of our children they are generally either a) don’t have many options that they are exercising or b) not aware of the sexual messages.
So, right now it’s build character mode, disciplining them to know right from wrong, and encouraging good relationships and finding good friendships.
As they get older, we will have to make sure that we monitor what they are doing and watching, as well as help them to learn to make good decisions about what they decide to fill their time with.