New deal in sex education

What Every Teenager Wants to Know

Bess, small-boned and dark and trimly sixteen, covered her face with her hands and sobbed, "I wish so terribly I hadn't done it! Why didn't anyone tell me the truth?"

Bit by bit her story unrolled. She'd been a lonely little girl, her father preoccupied with his business, her mother a conscientious woman lacking in warmth. Keith, her boy friend, was two years older, a head taller, studious, earnest and industrious too. In vacations he'd worked as a machinist and had managed to put several hundred dollars aside.

For a month of nights they had lain together on the warm sand in a little cove they had discovered and played was their home. To Bess it had felt immeasurably good, with a "comforting kind of goodness more than a sexy one."

" Keith was told by some of the fellows that if you took certain precautions nothing would happen." Only something had happened. Even though Keith had been ever so careful.

They were frantic. Keith had finally found out what to do. White-faced and with set mouth, he took Bess to a street corner one morning where, according to instructions, he left her to wait alone for the car that would pick her up.

Anxious, he huddled behind a nearby junk heap so that his nearness might bring her more courage.

Then the car had come with the man and the other girls. Five of them, jammed in. And they had driven across the border into a small gambling town to a dirty gray building where unspeakable fear had gripped her. The rumpled sheet on the operating table. The dirty looking hands of the doctor . . .

" Keith and I love each other and we want to get married as soon as we're old enough. But the memory of something like this twists in between us . . .

"We didn't know you could get pregnant that way. Our folks never told either of us much . . . My mother tried to give me the facts of life. But she left out the things I wanted most to talk about. She was afraid I'd go too far if I knew too much. But I think you go further when you don't know enough . . ."

Keith and Bess were not "bad." They were bewildered. Their questions about sex had never really been answered. Not because their parents hadn't tried. But because their parents hadn't known.

As one sees a goodly number of teen-agers and listens to their questions and wonderings, certain points emerge. In spite of the thought and time that many of us, as parents, have put into the matter of providing our children with sex education, they still go unsatisfied. Something is missing. Like Bess, they keep wondering and seeking, they know not what.

By taking into account what these teen-agers say, we become aware of omissions they would like to have mended, of areas they would like to have expanded, of emphases they would like to have brought out.

We discover that they are seeking something that we have not even thought of as a part of sex education.

Implicit in what they ask and tell us lie complaints that point to new directions they hope we will take.