Path To Adulthood Increasingly Perilous

I sat in on a high school math class the other day as two girls tried to figure out what was said during an exchange that had been bleeped out of the “Ricki Lake” show. One of the girls speculated that the missing words concerned oral sex.

She used crude language. Her voice carried. Yet no one even blinked.

Call it a dispatch from the front lines of children and sex.

Here’s another: I walked into the kitchen a few weeks ago and heard my daughter, 6 years old, innocently singing a pop song celebrating the joys of masturbation.

And another: I became a granddad last year, courtesy of a mother who was injudicious and immature and a punk kid who has proven invisible.

And one more: the 12-year-old girls who keep calling my house for my middle son, having bought his phone number at school.

Sex, it seems, is a flood. You want to hold your children above the waters until they reach maturity. But the waters are constantly rising.

JonBenet Ramsey, a dead 6-year-old in trollop’s clothes, convinces me of this. Randy sitcoms occupying what used to be called “the family hour” convince me of this. Popular music convinces me of this.

The other day, a colleague shared a lyric from a new song: “I’ll lick you, then stick you where the good Lord split you.”

The world, it seems, has changed. Or maybe it’s just me.

I wonder about that sometimes. Wondered after I went to a party the other night and heard the CD player yield a familiar sound - a guitar whining, Marvin Gaye groaning in need: “I’ve been really trying baby, trying to hold back this feeling for so long. And if you feel like I feel, c’mon, let’s get it on.”

I remember when that record was steaming up AM radio speakers, infuriating parents who took it as proof that we, the children of ‘73, were a wanton and despicable lot.

Now it’s a party song for middle-agers.

And I feel not unlike those parents who used drugs in the ‘60s and find themselves ill-equipped to warn children of the ‘90s about drug abuse. How can I, of all people, lament sex in pop culture? I, who so gleefully scorned bloodless puritans who thought Marvin Gaye was leading us all to hell?

The answer, of course, is deceptively simple. Parenthood changes things. Indeed, the precocious sexuality of children has always terrified adults. The cruel joke is that kids think you fear because you don’t remember how it felt to be 16 when truth is, you fear because you do.

Worse, the world we have made is harshly different from the one we once knew. This culture didn’t develop from that one; it mutated. These are rawer, cruder, colder times, and sexual promiscuity has become a knife’s edge of danger that would’ve stunned us back when we thought herpes and venereal disease something to worry about. Now we face a glut of unwanted, unparented babies that strains our social services, an epidemic of birth control by abortion and, yes, AIDS.

So if I’ve changed, the world has changed more. And the job of steering children to adulthood has become downright frightening. Some evenings I watch my boys, the scruffy ragamuffins of an afternoon of basketball, putting in quality time before the mirror, transforming themselves into icons of cool for a dance at the local community center. Few acts are more artless and yet more troubling. It reminds me that the clock is ticking on innocence and that my weapons are few.

After all, kids have always cherished notions of immortality over warnings of immorality, always allowed our words to whistle through their ears like wind through a tunnel.

But the price of misstep has never been so high. Nor pop culture so determined to trade upon their innocent prurience - and damn the consequences.

Which is why it has never been more incumbent upon parents to repeat ignored warnings and restate unheeded words. Again. Again. Again.

Because one day you must surrender your children to the flood. Before that happens, you ought to teach them to swim.

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