The More Things Change, the More Other Things Need to Stay the Same

It has been nearly 30 years since the publication of the first themed issue of Independent School on human sexuality education. We’ve published one every 10 years since. “New Thinking About Old Paradigms,” the fourth such issue, is our latest attempt at capturing “what’s happening out there” in our students’ lives and in school life around issues of sexuality.

As always, “what’s happening” is a product of what has come before, and the past decade has been one of phenomenal and unprecedented social change, much of it fueled by the explosion in new and powerful technologies available to both adults and children.

We are more connected than ever and, at the same time, more disconnected. Most of us, especially children, spend hours and hours a day communicating — talking, sending, gaming, texting, posting, networking, tweeting — and yet, remarkably, only a tiny portion of these interactions occur face-to-face. Most communication now is “mediated” through wires, wireless connections, and screens big and small. Just the number of different kinds of screens children sit in front of each and every day — cameras, laptops, cell phones, iPods, video games, television, and movies — is mind-boggling.

Concepts like intimacy and privacy, including sexual intimacy, are being redefined literally in front of our very eyes. Virtual sex is easily accessible over the Internet and on cell phones, through cybersex, texting, and “sexting.” Pornography, which used to be kept “over there” in our society, is now potentially available in our children’s bedrooms at any time of the day or night. The old adage, “It’s 11:00 pm. Do you know where your children are?,” has taken on an entirely new meaning.

In the last decade, marketers also succeeded in redefining childhood by hawking all manner of adult-oriented products, including sexually oriented products, to younger and younger teens and children. “Tweens” — a marketing niche consisting of eight to 14-year-olds, and often children as young as six — is a word now used in everyday discourse as if it represents a bona fide developmental stage, with the implication that what’s good for a 14-year-old is fine for an eight-year-old. If you doubt the power of this phenomenon, think about the youngest child you know of who has a cell phone. Even more revealing, what’s the youngest child you know who feels entitled to have a cell phone? Seven? Six? Five? The idea of a five- or six-year-old owning a cell phone five or six years ago would have been considered absolutely outrageous, if not insane. What did we as a culture know about children and their development with such certainty half a decade ago that we don’t know now?

As the rightful boundaries between the adult world and the child’s world have continued to blur, independent schools across the country have witnessed and dealt very directly with this growing confusion among parents and other adults — and young people themselves — about who children and adolescents truly are and what they need developmentally. Not surprisingly, two of the articles in this issue deal very directly with issues of limit setting and boundaries, “Seeking Balance: Children and Adolescents Online” by Judy McCleese and Sean McCleese, and “Maintaining Boundaries: Four Guidelines for Educators in a Teenage World” by Susan Porter.

I often wonder what history means to young people growing up in such a rapidly changing technological world. To remain connected and credible in the lives of children and adolescents, parents and teachers need to be able to convincingly connect the “old” and the “new.” In “Hook Ups and Hang Ups: A Primer for Faculty and Advisors in Talking with Students about Healthy Relationships,” Susan Perry and Al Vernacchio describe how adults can translate their “old fashioned” wisdom about relationships to fit online social networking and other technologically based ways of communicating and relating.

Two of the sexuality articles in this issue, Jennifer Bryan’s “From the Dress-Up Corner to the Senior Prom: Navigating Gender and Sexual Identity Development in the Pre-K–12 Setting” and John Peterman’s “When Chris Becomes Courtney: Preparing a Pre-K–8 School Community for a Transgendering Student,” remind us that most real change requires time, awareness, patience, and hard work. Ten years ago in most of our schools, sexual orientation and gender identity were not even recognized as identity characteristics requiring attention alongside issues of race, gender, religion, and ethnicity. Today, many schools are in the “enough talk, let’s roll up our sleeves and get down to the hard work” stage of institutional change in these areas. The Bryan and Peterman articles offer excellent blueprints for making our schools truly safe for everyone.

Juxtaposed against all of this fundamental change is an ironic truth: When it comes to providing truly comprehensive sexuality education, American schools, including many — if not most — independent schools, remain way behind the curve. Just in terms of teaching the basic “facts of life,” the majority of schools are from four to seven years late in teaching the earliest benchmarks of sexual knowledge. While the world of popular culture screams, “SEX!,” at every turn, the immediate adults in children’s lives largely remain silent. My article, “Pedagogically Speaking: Teaching Outside Pandora’s Box,” explores the reasons we are so “stuck” in such outmoded ways of thinking about sexuality education, and argues that the “new” paradigm we need is rooted in exactly the same fine pedagogical thinking we in independent education apply to virtually every other subject matter we teach.

Finally, it is significant that all of the writers for this decennial issue are practitioners working directly in independent schools. In past issues, most contributors have been “outside experts” in the field of sexuality education. These authors are “us”: two are independent school teachers, two are school counselors, one is a school head, and three are independent school consultants.

We are fast becoming our own experts, and that’s the best sign of real progress yet.

Deborah M. Roffman teaches sexuality education at The Park School of Baltimore (Maryland) and is the author of Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent’s Guide to Talking Sense about Sex (Perseus Books). She consults with schools nationally and internationally around sexuality education.