Parents Chicken Out on Birds, Bees

Who needs a heavy-handed sermon? Let’s just talk casually about the birds and bees. I’ll tell you how I learned about them, and then you recall how you learned. By the end of that, I bet many of us will find some common ground.

I was probably 10 or 11 when, one day when we were alone, my dad started talking about something that made no sense to me. I didn’t realize this was The Talk, because I didn’t have any idea there was such a thing as The Talk. Maybe Dad thought I was wise beyond my years, but he should have known that the only thing that concerned me at that age were the National League standings.

But here he was, apparently explaining something of some importance. In a neat little irony, his biology lecture went in one ear and out the other.

Here’s why I know nothing registered: Two or three years later, while sitting in junior high health class, I was trying to figure out just how babies were made. For the life of me, I couldn’t put the pieces together.

By my calculations Dad was about half a decade early in explaining the facts of life to me. Years later, when I might have understood what he was talking about, the subject never came up.

My guess -- and my point -- is that parents are a lot alike when it comes to The Talk. They know they have a duty to do it, but they don’t want to. Dad soothed his conscience by figuring he’d told me when I was 10. He just neglected to tell me to take good notes.

The good news is that my small Nebraska town in 1960 didn’t have a teen pregnancy rate of 88 live births per 1,000 females. Unfortunately, Santa Ana does, according to statistics from the 2000 U.S. census and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That rate, while a considerable drop from the city’s 1990 rate, still greatly exceeded the national average.

So it matters that the Santa Ana Unified School District board decided 4 to 1 last week to add a comprehensive unit to its high school health instruction that will include discussion of contraception. A district spokeswoman says the instruction will not advocate contraception and adds that state guidelines specify that students be told abstinence is the only certain way to prevent unintended pregnancies.

But we all know what we’re talking about here. Hormonally revved-up teens will learn, if they didn’t know already, that there’s a way to have sex and greatly reduce the pregnancy risk.

I’m not one of those who clucks their tongue at parents who chafe at that being taught in school. I understand completely why they don’t think it’s a schoolteacher’s job to explain the birth-control option to their children.

But that’s why I told my little story. Perfectly fine parents somehow find a way to avoid the subject.

The birthrate figures for Santa Ana suggest that someone isn’t telling someone something. And I can’t think of anyone who benefits from teen pregnancies resulting from ignorance.

How about the morality issue? Is that a classroom function?

I’d argue, without trying to split hairs, that teaching teens about the mechanics of making babies and the science of preventing them isn’t a morality lesson. Teens still make the ultimate decision themselves, bringing to bear whatever moral or religious thoughts they have.

It’d be foolish to argue that awareness of contraceptive methods might not make teens feel more comfortable with experimentation. But that’s one part of the giant equation of whether it’s better for teens to know too much or too little.

We entrust teachers to instruct children about geography and geometry. Is teaching them the baby-making process any less important?

In an ideal world, parents would handle all this delicate stuff in the privacy of their own homes.

But in case you hadn’t noticed, that world still awaits out there on the horizon.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.