Ethics Kit Opens Doors Between Parents, Children

Aiming at enhancing communication between parents and children, health experts have developed a new kit to help them deal with sex education, substance abuse and other issues confronting young Americans.

The Talk Listen Care Kit, unveiled recently by the nonprofit Harvard Community Health Plan Foundation, is promoted as a sex education system for parents and children.

It forces parents to consider aloud their own ethics and values, and helps children, from ages 4 to 12, shape the responsible decisions they have to make in life.

At the same time, it is aimed at reducing the number of unintended teen-age pregnancies--which occur at a rate of 1.1 million a year in the United States--by making young people better informed about sexuality and its consequences.

“If you wait to hear the flapping of the birds’ and the bees’ wings, it is far too late,” said Dr. Susan Pauker, a pediatrician and foundation executive director, whose two teen-age children helped fine-tune the kit.

“The goal was to help parents and their children think about their values, and the messages they wish to be sharing on many issues, not just sexuality, and how they are going to relate to each other as time passes.

“The parents and the children provide the ethics and values. The kit provides facts about the issues and a structure to engage parent and child in the issues,” Pauker said. “If they understand values, it gives them a way to approach all kinds of issues you can’t even begin to imagine may come up in life.”

The kit, which sells for $9.95, has a flexible format allowing families to consider sensitive topics in their own way. It includes a parents’ guide to the kit and to talking to their children about sex; “Straight Talk,” a guide for responding to the natural sexual curiosity of children between ages 4 and 8; and “Let’s Talk About Sex,” a non-judgmental guide for parents and pre-teens to promote open discussions.

Also included are pamphlets addressing sex education, talking with children about AIDS, child sexual abuse, additional resource references, and the TLC Game.

The TLC Game is a family-oriented issues card game for ages 9 and up. Players draw cards from a letters deck and a situation deck. Players win by collecting the letters that spell out a selected word. Before drawing a letter, they must pick a situation card, and read the scenario.

Each participant then gets a chance to express his or her opinion without interruption, and the players learn each other’s feelings and beliefs. It forces everyone involved to be both a talker and a listener.

The subjects deal with honesty, winning and losing, alcohol use, sexual pressure and even messy rooms.

For example: “Phil’s dad said: ‘Clean your room by tonight or no TV.’ Phil said, ‘It’s my room and I can do what I want in it.’ Now what?”

Or this situation card on birth control: “Felicia and her boyfriend Tom are going steady. Felicia hasn’t decided if she wants to ‘go all the way.’ But she thinks she might want to. Should she get birth control ‘just in case?’ ”

Pauker says her children, ages 13 and 15, helped write the situation cards in “kids’ language.”

“The difficult thing is to take the very wonderful ideas and relate them to the children in a way that is not stilted or uncool. The game is something the children like to play and it instantly engages them in some pretty heavy issues.

Expanded Conversations

“When I used the game with my own kids, I was stunned to see how much more expanded our conversation was, particularly in the domain of values, than I had ever taken it before with them,” Pauker said.

“It also forces a couple--one of whom may be practical, the other idealistic--to look at each other and say: ‘What kind of message do we want to send to these youngsters we have created together?”’

One father told Pauker that he and his daughters sat at the dinner table one night for 45 minutes--far longer than ever before--because one card prompted a moral discussion they had not expected.

Pauker said the kit is easily adaptable for use by school nurses in classroom and community group settings. The foundation intends to distribute 2,000 free copies of the kit to inner-city schools, shelters, libraries and homes.

The kit also is available through mail or telephone orders to the Harvard Community Health Plan Foundation.