Where free-range babies come from

Day two at Rethinking Education and I'm already overwhelmed with ideas. Cruelly, I was forced to choose between sex and drugs before lunch, as two appealing sessions ran concurrently: a marijuana information talk led by former drug cop Barry Cooper of Never Get Busted Again fame and an unschooler sex-education discussion led by unschooled young adults.

While I hated missing Cooper's talk, I had to go with the sexuality chat, which confirmed my hope that being open but not pushy with information is the way to go in terms of healthy, holistic development. The most telling moment of the session came when "purity pledges" came up, and most of those present either hadn't heard of them or thought they might be some sort of religious thing. That gives me hope for the future.

Apart from being open about the nuts-and-bolts aspect of sex, anatomy, and contraception, veteran parents and young adults emphasized talking with children about the emotional aspects of sexuality and the potential consequences of sex, like what's actually involved in pregnancy and childrearing, so that teens have a lot of information to draw on when making sex-related decisions.

The lightbulb moment for me came when a mother of grown unschoolers talked about her ongoing communication with the parents of her then-young children's friends to make sure everyone was on the same page with respect to values and knowing what their kids were doing. That's so different from the setup I had as a teen, where my boyfriends' parents didn't know mine, there was no communication among the "grownups" and therefore a lot of anxiety and a lot of freaking out when I broke curfew. It seems like a little more work all along to maintain that extra channel with other parents, but worth it when everyone's development is in the balance.