Sex Ed: The Missing Link

Marline Pearson

Smart Marriages Conference

Reno, Nevada

June 2003

Ignoring Teens' Romantic Lives

Introduction

I’m happy to be here and happy that this year’s conference is turning more attention to teens and young singles. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who will be speaking tomorrow, has written a book about how the society has ignored the romantic lives of young college educated women. Well, I want to go a bit younger and talk about teenagers. Their romantic lives have also been ignored—with a huge cost to them and to the society. And, I know, because I teach young adults at a community college in Madison, Wisconsin. Our students generally are not economically privileged. Quite a few, especially my single parent students, have been helped in various ways during their teen years—with GED, parenting, substance abuse or mental health issues, and sometimes, with their troubles in the criminal justice system. Despite their early hardships, most make impressive gains. But in over twenty years of teaching, what I’ve seen too much of—and what has motivated me to address basic relationships—is how easily their progress can get set back by failed or troubled relationships, or unplanned pregnancies. I see young mothers doing well in one of our programs only to be derailed by another bad or failed relationship. Or, even more commonly, just as a young mother is getting it together, she gets overwhelmed by problems with her child or children, now six, eight or ten, acting out the chaos of her earlier and troubled romantic life. And then there are the young men. Just as some of them are getting their act together in school but are not yet ready to enter the labor force, they find themselves burdened with child support payments. And far too many young women, who are on a path to educational achievement, are thrown off by an unplanned pregnancy. In short, their troubled or unstable romantic lives have a tendency to undo or set back their educational and employment gains, and even the gains they make with parenting.

And, so yes, I’ve developed a sense that there is a missing piece in our efforts to help young people succeed. That missing piece is helping young people succeed in their relationship lives.

The messages about sex they do receive as teens, and the messages they don’t receive about developing positive relationships—and for that matter, the messages they don’t receive about why marriage matters—set the stage for them to be snagged or derailed as young adults. Now, if you’re to address the romantic lives of teens, you inevitably need to talk about sex education because it’s the one place, sometimes the only place aside from the popular media culture, where teens’ romantic relationships are acknowledged and addressed. And we know that the popular media culture is not very helpful on that score.

Unfortunately most sex ed programs exist within a health framework—bio-reproduction, risks and protective information. It’s either, "protect yourself by waiting till marriage," or "protect yourself with condoms and contraceptives." In short, we teach young people about sex, but very little about its context—relationships. This is a generation that knows a lot about sex, but very little about building quality relationships and true intimacy. How can a teen make decisions about sex without exploring the emotional and relational context for sex, without a sense of the meaning of sexual love, and without a sense of how to build positive relationships? You can teach protective information and assertiveness skills, but do teens have a foundation, a basis for making those decisions and for wanting to engage those skills? On the other hand, if the message on sex is "wait ‘til marriage," then what about all the relationship development that comes before marriage and that lays the foundation for a good marriage?

My message is that sex education from both camps should highlight relationship education. Our programs need to have as much concern for the heart as for health. And we need to deal with bigger issues and deeper meanings if we’re to get at teens’ motivation for choosing wisely about sex and relationships.

To illustrate my point, I want to play two short clips from the critically acclaimed TV series My So-Called Life. This series is very edgy and revolves around the lives of three teenage friends in a big city high school. Angela, the main character, is confronted with decisions about everything—sex, drugs, school, and guns. She has a protective family and, by the way, she has parents who model a great marriage. She is also a virgin. Her best friend Rayanne is just the opposite. She’s sexually promiscuous, into drugs and alcohol and doesn’t do well in school. Her family is a wreck—dad’s abandoned her and mom’s an alcoholic. The duo also has a gay Hispanic friend, Ricky—who by the way is a virgin and believes sex is something pretty special. Here’s a scene from an episode where Angela’s mom has heard rumors about a note that falsely claims Angela is having sex with her boyfriend, Jordan. Mom is horrified. She doesn’t want Angela to have sex. We’ll listen in on their conversation. The second clip is at the doctor’s office. Angela is there for a flu shot, but is fishing around for some guidance from her trusted family physician. Her boyfriend Jordan is pressuring her for sex and she is ambivalent. PLAY.

What Angela really was hungry for was some help in exploring her feelings, her emotions, her relationship with Jordan, and what having sex might mean for it all. Instead, she was given zip... nada.... no help to make sense of it. Notice that her mother and her doctor immediately rushed to give her health information about sex. The doctor responds, "Angela, as someone who has known you since you were a baby, I advise you to use a condom and foam." Her mom says, "I don´t think you´re ready, but if you are, please, please, use protection." Angela´s sighs of exasperation show how out of sync they are with her concerns. Of course, she likes Jordan, she enjoys the kissing, the affection, she has powerful feelings of attraction and desire, but she doesn’t know how to respond to his pressure for sexual intercourse. The important grownups in her life missed an opportunity to respond to what she was really asking.

Now, I’m not against teens learning about condoms and birth control. I would never want my daughters to be as in the dark and stupid as I was. But I also believe the abstinence-only folks are correct to say that we have to be concerned about the messages we’ve been sending. What you give time and attention to sends a message. When teachers begin with "abstinence is the best choice"—and teachers of conventional sex ed do believe that—but then go on to spend 90% of the class time on bio-reproduction and protecting against the risks of sex, that sends a message. When parents’ conversations with their teens begin and end with "risk and protection" talk, that sends a message. Many teens think that we adults expect they’ll be sexually active.

I do think it is possible to give teens protective information without sending mixed messages. Furthermore, I think that the federal government is throwing away a golden opportunity when it insists that you can´t teach birth control or anything about condoms except their failure rate.

Please don’t think for a moment that I am trying to minimize health concerns. Horrible things are happening to our kids on the sexual health front. And many of us adults have our heads in the sands about it. I strongly urge everyone to read Dr. Meg Meeker’s new book, Epidemic: How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids. The earlier teens begin sex, the more partners, and the greater risk of disease and pregnancy. One quarter of sexually active teens probably has an STD. That is only a guess, because many STDs have no symptoms. These diseases are incredibly sexist—they wreak havoc on the female’s reproductive system. HPV, the disease adults and teens know the least about, is rampant and a pre-cursor to cervical cancer. Pelvic inflammatory disease, a result of many STDs, is a leading cause of increased infertility rates among young women. A young teen’s cervix is much more vulnerable to disease than an adult woman’s. I have a young student right now with cervical cancer. She says with anger, "Why didn’t my doctor tell me about this when she gave me birth control?" That’s all I’ll say. Read Meeker’s book.

Yes, we need to have thorough health education, but it’s not enough to get at what motivates teens in their early romantic relationships.

Now, I want to turn to what I see as the missing piece of sex education and of our conversations about sex in general with teens. Please realize that I’m going to paint with a broad brush—what I will say doesn’t apply to all programs.

I support abstinence education for teens. But some abstinence programs are locked into a health paradigm in the sense that the bulk of the time is devoted to STDs, how condoms don’t fully protect, and that the only way to be safe is to abstain. Also, in some programs, the conversation makes it sound like something magical goes into effect at the moment of marriage. My question is: Doesn’t this perpetuate a bit of a Cinderella myth? Remain a virgin, find your prince/princess-charming, deliver yourself pure/chaste and live happily ever after? Wait a minute.... These kids are savvy. They’ve seen and lived the wreckage of divorce and father abandonment. Many kids live in communities where marriage isn’t the norm. A third of all children today grow up with parents who never married—in some communities that may be upwards of 70% of the children. By and large, teens live in a culture of casual sex and casual connections, where nothing seems to last, even family bonds. Abstinence programs need to address the fact that news on the marriage front is troubling. It’s just not that easy – "wait till marriage" and everything will be hunky-dory. And, to be honest, marriage in and of itself doesn’t automatically deliver a great relationship or great sex. A lot of marriages don’t last.

Abstinence programs need to do a better job of addressing the crisis of marriage: its absence, its quality, why it matters, and how to improve marriage success. Abstinence programs need to pay attention to relationship building, relationship skills, and they need to expand the array of positive reasons other than health safety or the value of chastity to wait on sex. The value of chastity in and of itself – though strong among some kids, especially those embedded in certain religious communities—is not strong among lots of other teens. For many young people, there isn’t much stigma in finding out your girlfriend or fiancé is not a virgin. I’m not knocking it, but there are different communities and different community values. But more than that, there are positive reasons other than "abstinence until marriage" – to avoid "sex-too-soon," like how it often fails to deliver on intimacy and why it can work against budding romances. These reasons may be more compelling for some teens.

Now I want to turn to the limitations of conventional or comprehensive sex education. Let me tell a story to illustrate. It’s about two 18-year-old girls in a very respected youth development program targeting at-risk teens. These girls have been with the program for four years, since about age 14. They’ve received plenty of prevention education so they are knowledgeable about STDs, pregnancy, contraceptives and condoms. They’ve been educated about date rape and abusive relationships. They’ve had good drug education, help with school and with conflict with parents. In fact, these girls have been peer educators, even producing materials themselves. In short, they’ve had the best of what comprehensive prevention efforts and conventional sex education has to offer. They were considered success stories for this program. Well, both are now 18, pregnant, unmarried and in rotten relationships. This was a wake-up story for me—a liberal feminist—that we’re missing something. So what’s missing?

My conclusion is that these girls have no "North Star" for their intimate lives. By that, I mean no vision or expectation for good love, meaningful sex, commitment, marriage, or father importance. They have received little guidance on how to build quality relationships, and even worse, they have no vision of quality relationships. They’ve been taught what to avoid, what to say "no" to, and how to "protect" themselves. They’ve picked the idea up that sex is only a problem if it’s coerced or unprotected. They are basically clueless and confused about their expectations for intimate life. In fact, they live in a world of lowered expectations for sex, for love, for commitment, for males. Now, if the culture says sex is no big deal, marriage doesn’t matter, fathers don’t even matter that much, and they’ve never been encouraged to think about the meaning of sexual love and the power and potential of true love, then why not have casual sex and why not have a baby on your own? If most marriages are bad or fail, or are risky at best, or hardly even exist in their own community, then where’s the motivation to get a marriage together before children? Should we be surprised at all at casual sex and casual childbearing, given their models and the images and messages in the popular culture?

We need to ask ourselves what we are doing to help young people cultivate a "North Star" for their intimate lives and what are we doing to help them acquire the skills to pursue that star. I do believe that teens benefit from sanctuary—time and space free from sexual involvement—while they experience relationships, learn about themselves and others. The question is what are we really doing to provide sanctuary? The health framework for most sex education simply doesn’t offer compelling enough reasons to do other than what the popular culture says. And the culture shouts, "Do it!" everywhere. Health approaches don’t sufficiently challenge the prevailing cultural context for sexuality.

The power of cultural norms to affect teen sexual behavior is a huge piece of the problem we need to look at. Kids naturally seek rules of behavior and meaning from the culture around themselves—they act according to the expectations of their specific cultural environment. If we don’t help provide and shape these norms and expectations, kids will do it for them. And that’s what’s happening today. Teens’ cultural environment is more and more a product of their own making. Teens are reliant on their peers and the popular media for their sexual scripts. Of course, we’ve had a separate "teen culture" for quite awhile, but never before has teen culture been so separated from the general culture of adults. Some kids live in a world devoid of adults, making up their own rules and codes of behavior. Other kids have parents involved early on, but by adolescence, many parents step out of their way. And even those who stay closely involved often have little to say about the heart and soul of romance, sexuality, and love. When it comes to sex, we’ve shrunk from helping youth develop a resonant set of beliefs and values around intimate life. Moreover, many parents mistakenly believe they have little influence on teens.

Enough on what’s missing.Now let me suggest what we need. We need comprehensive relationship education. It would fill the missing piece in sex education programs. Comprehensive relationship education would include several themes lacking today. First I’ll list five themes and then describe what it would look like to address them:

1. The emotional and social dimensions of sexuality;

2. Relationship experiences and relationship building;

3. Communication and conflict management skills for successful relationships;

4. New tacks in pregnancy prevention that address the disconnect between marriage and childbearing and raise awareness about the needs of the child;

5. Marriage education that helps teens learn about thirty years of social science evidence on why marriage matters to children, its benefits, findings on marital success and failure, and the skills that improve marriage success.

The Emotional and Social Dimensions of Sexuality

First, we need new approaches to sexuality that highlight its emotional and social dimensions. Before I say more about that, though, let me first say that some teens will be sexually active no matter what. They have so many unmet needs and they are so unprotected and so unembedded in nurturing connections. But still, we’ve taken such a low ground approach with them. We mostly do damage control. I look at a program like Best Friends, a youth development and abstinence program that takes a higher ground approach with at-risk girls, and the results are stunning in terms of sexual postponement and positive development. Or Ron Johnson’s Rites of Passage with young males. Look, there is the great middle out there, maybe 75% of teens, who are ambivalent about sex despite the cues of the popular culture. The messages they get are: "Sex is no big deal," "Everyone’s doing it," "It’s a done deal" and, besides, adults expect it. To have a fighting chance to counter that pattern, we need really smart and energetic approaches and messages that are savvy. We need convictions and connections to pass these on to our teens. In short, we need to do more to help teens navigate the sexual culture and more concrete help to avoid sex-too-soon.

So how could we help teens become "sex smart" in a toxic sexual culture? First we need to confront what I call the sexual paradox... more sex, less joy. Young people are having more sex, but are they enjoying it more? That’s another matter, especially for girls. From all accounts, we’ve seen the dramatic emotional downsizing of sex. It’s about as special as eating pizza. Conversations with my students tell me they are facing a terribly alienating hookup culture. Should we ask ourselves why the hookup scene is accompanied by so much binge drinking? Might it be anesthesia for females who really still, even if only in their fantasies, want sex to mean something? Regarding this paradox, teens don’t need to take our word for it. We can use the voices of teens and young adults themselves who’ve "been there, done that." They have a lot to say.

We really could get down and explore the reasons—often unmet needs—that propel a teen into premature sexual involvement as well as the cultural scripts that pull their strings. We could offer help in figuring out what true intimacy is, how it’s built, what we know about sexual satisfaction, about the steps of physical intimacy, and the real differences between males and females’ biology and sexual arousal patterns. We also could be countering the pervasive misperception among teens that "everyone’s doing it." In fact, that 50% number thrown around is misleading. It varies by age. Our best estimates are 16 to18% for 8^th graders, rising to 55 to 60% of 12^th graders. But these numbers are going down. In my state of Wisconsin, the percent of sexually active teens has gone from 48% to 42% in the past several years. Furthermore, imagine how powerful it would be for a teen to learn that of the teens who are doing it, most regret. The surveys are pretty consistent on this matter of regrets. It might help the other half who thinks they’re square because they haven’t had sex. There’s a Dateline special Diane Sawyer did on the controversy surrounding Norplant in urban high school clinics. What’s amazing is the disturbing finding Sawyer announces at the end of this broadcast. She said that every single one of the sexually active girls they had interviewed regretted and wished she’d waited.

Listen to this quote from one of my young students: "Three out of four sexually active girls have been pressured or forced to have sex when they didn’t want to. Those who had sex, especially the younger ages 14 to 16, like my friends, go on to have lots of casual sex. They don’t have any concept of sex as something special. After awhile it makes them feel worthless. There is no pleasure. They aren’t enjoying it." By the way, she became a teen mother at 17.

I increasingly hear girls/young women talk about sex as something you just do. Get it over with it, get desensitized, so you don’t think or expect too much of it. Sad commentary.

I don’t think you can just give teen girls assertiveness/refusal skills, warnings about abusive relationships, date rape, and protection. This will only net a pseudo-sophistication. I’m reminded of a survey that said that the majority of sexually active teen girls said sex was, "voluntary, but unwanted." I sometimes think we have this mystification of teen girls. The culture dresses them up like 26-year-old femme fatales, and they appear sexy, sassy, and in-charge beings. But knowing what you really want, who you really are, what your values are, where you are going and confident assertiveness are the result of a developmental process that takes years. It doesn’t happen overnight.

We need to help teens think through what they want sex to mean, to be aware of the steps/stages of physical involvement and what each step means for their heart, not just their health, and then to establish their own boundaries and personal policies on sex. Then we want to help them become aware of risky situations, to practice skills and responses to pressure situations, to learn about mixed messages they send and faulty assumptions they make about partners. And finally they need to learn about the benefits of relationships not based on sex—and not just the "deliver yourself pure" upon marriage. There are a lot of benefits and freedoms from enjoying and learning from their own relationships right now. There’s a lot of pleasure from going slowly and enjoying the affection of the early steps of intimacy—it’s quite romantic. Listen to the words of one of my students—a 21-year- old electric bass player and lead singer in a rock band, with blue hair and pierced nose: "Leaving sexual intercourse out makes it easier to enjoy a relationship. It helps the searching process, or you might call it "elimination" process. Without sex, you can be yourself—it’s more comfortable. It helps you figure out faster what kind of person they are if they are right for you. You can also get out of a relationship easier—you’re not glued by the sex. Sex complicates things and confuses you. Sex just slows down everything if what you’re interested in is a good relationship. Besides the kissing, caressing and affection is really cool and romantic." This young woman is hip, she’s smart, she has boundaries, and she’s in charge.

Another theme is relationship education. What about helping teens navigate and try to make some sense of their attractions, infatuations, rejection, falling in love, breaking up and broken hearts? What about addressing all those "how-tos" that teens wonder about: What to say and what to do in the early stages of going out; how to really get to know someone; how to tell if someone likes you and how to let them know you like them; how to build a relationship; how to know if it’s time to break up; and how to avoid attachment to problem or abusive people? We often pooh-pooh those early experiences, namely crushes, infatuations and puppy loves, but they’re an important part of learning about love—filled with as much fun and joy as doubts and confusion. We know something about how one can fall in love without losing one’s mind and how relationships grow and change. We can give them some good principles for "smart dating" borrowing from the Parrot’s little jewel of a book Relationships or we can morph John Van Epp’s How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk program into a low-risk dating strategy for teens. We can teach teens the communication skills essential for good relationships. We could employ stories from literature to inspire like The Art of Loving Well anthology or another great compilation called All The Man I Need: Black Women’s Loving Expressions of the Men They Desire. We can also employ stores of wisdom from real people, real couples in our communities who know something about love over the long haul.

We can teach teens a basic package of communication and conflict management skills essential for relationships. Any number of programs here at Smart Marriages—PREP, Couples Communication, PAIRS—can be adapted for teens. In this way, we could help teens craft a "North Star"—a vision for quality relationships while they learn practical relationship skills.

We need fresh tacks in pregnancy prevention. Specifically, we have to squarely address the disconnect between marriage and childbearing. This may be the weakest link in our current thinking. One tragic consequence of possessing no "North Star" for intimate life is the growing disconnect between marriage and childbearing. It stems from a glaring impoverishment when it comes to understanding the benefits of a good marriage for children. One-third of all babies are born outside of marriage—almost 70% in the African-American community. Most of those babies begin and will remain disadvantaged in myriad ways. I think this is becoming a bigger problem than divorce, and there are more single mothers today as a result of unwed childbearing than as a result of divorce.

Go to any high school and ask teens what’s the reason teen childbearing is a problem. First, there are lots of kids out there that just don’t see it as a problem. For those that do, they will most often say the reason is because you are too young, you might not finish school, have a job or lack parenting skills. Nowhere is it a problem because you are not married. We need new tacks in pregnancy prevention that build a robust understanding of how and why a parent’s relationship—that is, a marriage— matters to a child. First, why it matters to get a marriage together before having a baby, and then why it matters to take care of that marriage. Child wellbeing is a powerful reason for postponing sex and thinking ahead to a future of marriage.

We need to put the baby’s needs at center stage in our discussions of pregnancy prevention. To help teens see the consequences of unplanned pregnancy from the child’s eyes and heart—not just that they personally will be stuck with child support payment for 18 years or lose their freedom. Teens need to learn how a parent’s relationship—its quality, its existence, its stability—all affect a child. And, we can tap into this generation’s own experience in doing do. Teens need to learn how various family structures such as going it alone as an unwed mother or father, divorce, father absence, cohabitation, or remarriage can impact children. In my experience, it’s become clear that my young adult students simply think that they’re screwed up—that their emotional, behavioral, rage problems or "chemical imbalances in the brain" are just a result of being personally screwed up, rather than having to do with the instability or broken bonds in their own lives.

It’s dishonest also to have young people think marriage is just one lifestyle choice among many, with equal outcomes for children. Or, that it’s just a vehicle for one’s own personal happiness. It’s dishonest to let young males think it’s easy to be a good father when you don’t live with your child and aren’t married to the mother. I’m not saying all people have to get married, but it’s dishonest not to disseminate the social science evidence that has accumulated over the past 30 years. We need to take the information from these last six years of Smart Marriages, package it and make it accessible to young people.

And it’s really an inexcusable oversight that teen parent programs don’t address relationships and build an understanding of how their love life will affect their child. We have to help teen parents get smarter, wiser, and more careful about their relationships. The children with the worse outcomes are those who have parents who take their kids on an emotional roller coaster with their love life—who drag their kids in and out of relationships, cohabitation, etc. Subsequent bad and/or unstable relationships also tend to undo many of the educational, employment and parenting gains some of these young single parents make.

If we could help teens navigate the sexual culture and help them wait until their twenties to make decisions on sex; if we could get them to adulthood and, along the way, encourage them to construct a North Star; and if we could teach real relationship skills to pursue that vision; if we could help them understand why teen sex or casual sex probably won’t deliver on the intimacy that they want; if we could teach why marriage matters for children and offer some sense of why marriages succeed or fail and why skills-based marriage education might help couples succeed, then we would most likely see teens choose more wisely and succeed more frequently in their romantic lives.

But so far, everything I’ve said about comprehensive relationship education falls into the realm of school or community programs. Until now, I haven’t talked about the most important teachers. They are parents. All the research shows that despite the weight of the culture, parents still can exert enormous influence. It’s parental connectedness that has been found to be the strongest protective factor for teens.

All the youth research and policy centers, liberal to conservative, say the same thing. Teens need to hear clear and consistent messages from parents they feel connected to and cared for. I think it’s probably true that many teens are hearing a mixed message from us adults—parents and teachers. When parents like Angela’s (in the film clips I’ve shown) are at a loss for what for what to say and only engage in discussion about risk and protection; when doctors only engage in a medical model, many teens conclude that we adults expect they’ll be sexually active.

This point about unclear messages has been underscored by the Add Health Study, one of the largest,most respected studies of adolescent health and wellbeing. The first report of this study underscored the evidence that a teen’s sense of connectedness to parents and belonging to family is the most important factor protecting them from risks of pregnancy. In teasing out family connectedness, about nine or so factors were listed as protective factors. One was parents’ disapproval of teens having sex now and of teens using birth control. By the way, the research outfit sifting through this data is far from conservative or religious. It is affiliated with the University of Minnesota. Their website is: www.allaboutkids.com. Their latest report concerns mothers’ influence on teen sex. Their top finding is that when teens accurately perceive their mothers’ disapproval of teen sex, it had a strong protective effect. The problem is many teens don’t accurately perceive their mom’s disapproval even when she does, according to their findings.

Now everyone says "talk to your kids about sex—early and often." The problem is many parents take that to mean bio-reproduction, risks and protection as in, "Oh, I better have the talk." But, organizations like the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy have gone a step further and said: "Communicate your values." Now for many parents, especially for the religiously involved, that’s no problem. But it is a problem for a lot of other parents—baby boomer parents who are ambivalent about their sexual values. We’ve gotten our heads screwed on straight when in comes to drug use by teens. Most parents hold a zero tolerance policy for their teens. But when it comes to sex—there’s ambivalence. Parents may want abstinence for their teens, but for young adults in their twenties, maybe not. And words like "chastity" and "purity" are just simply offensive to many adults. They seem to harken back to a time of a sexist double standard of sluts and studs.

Most parents sense something has gone horribly awry, but they don’t want to seem like prudes who want to turn the clock back on sex. Furthermore, many parents have had their own disappointments with love, commitment and marriage. That makes it hard to convey a coherent set of convictions. I count myself as having been one of those parents, not too long ago. They—We—need help. We are at a loss for what to say beyond "please, please be careful."

The sad upshot is this: Teens sense that we have little of soulful substance to say to them, and few convictions when it comes to sex and romance. Many teens are bored and uninspired by our messages that seemingly reduce sex to the sum of body parts, risks, disease, pregnancy or issues of superficial verbal consent. And, other kids, as they get older, may jettison what they feel is an idealistic, but vague, message about waiting until marriage.

I think many parents would welcome assistance. Concise, accessible resources (booklet-style) with talking points beyond health could help parents address the compelling themes of heart: love, intimacy, commitment, sexual meaning—and practical advice on how to build good relationships. These messages must not discount or deny this generation of parents’ own disappointments with love and marriage, but must point to a way for our children to do better.

In closing, I will say that I believe we must stop teaching our kids just about sex, as if it stands alone. We need comprehensive relationship education that inspires and helps our kids build relationships they can say "yes" to. We need to help young people find what most want—affection, respect, love, and connection. It just might lay the foundation for a culture of quality marriage, meaningful sex, and sustainable relationships in family life. I call it reaching for higher ground. On your table is a table of contents and description of a curriculum I’ve developed with the help of many people here at Smart Marriages that tries to do this. It’s called Love U2: Getting Smarter About Relationships, Sex, Babies, and Marriage. It will be available this fall. Thank you.

DVD and videotapes of the original keynote speech are available at www.iplaybacksmartmarriages.com. Order session 753-P3.

View samples and order the Love U2 curriculum at the Dibble Institute.