Jeff FeckeMy daughter lost her first tooth last night. She’s just shy of 5, and she handled it with at least the bravery level of a 7-year-old.  Already the kind of perspicacious daughter who is going to eventually convince me through logic and bravado that I actually want her to take my car on a Friday night, she left a letter for the tooth fairy asking her to leave the tooth (because it’s her first tooth) and also leave money (because hey, free money). 

Parents commonly lament that their children are growing up too fast, and I am no exception to that rule.  My daughter starts kindergarten in the fall, and I know that soon enough she’ll be starting middle school, then high school, and then college, and then on into the great world beyond the control of her mother and me.

The National Abstinence Clearinghouse was in town last week.  They were selling the idea that we must studiously avoid teaching our children that they have any choices about sex other than abstinence.  I think they’re well-meaning.  I think they really believe what they’re saying.  And I think they couldn’t be more wrong if they were advocating a ban on sunshine.  I know my daughter is going to be beyond my control someday.  Indeed, at age almost-5, she’s beyond my control at times already.  When she reaches high school, she will have her own life, and while she will undoubtedly make some really bad decisions — as I did — those decisions will have to be hers.  I can’t spend my life monitoring her every move.  It’s not practical, and moreover, it isn’t healthy.  If I declare that 15 is too young for my daughter to face a tough choice, how will she handle the tougher choices at 25?

I’ll make no bones about the fact that I’d prefer my daughter be abstinent through high school, for a variety of reasons, and I’ll tell her those reasons when the time comes.  But I also know the statistics: there’s a 50 percent chance she won’t be. 

And I absolutely won’t tell her to be abstinent until marriage.  For one thing, I wasn’t, and don’t regret my non-abstinence; for another, she won’t be.  Ninety-five percent of Americans engage in premarital sex.  I’m not going to try to get my daughter to shoehorn into the 5 percent who don’t.  She may choose abstinence herself, of course — but I don’t want her educated under the assumption that she’s in the one out of 20 who will.

This is not to run down abstinence — I hope my daughter chooses abstinence in high school and am agnostic as to whether she chooses it before marriage.  But that word, choice, is important.  You see, there are few decisions more personal than those surrounding one’s sexuality.  I am not only without any illusion that my daughter will necessarily make the decisions I would want her to, I am quite certain that she, not me, is the right person to make those decisions, even if she makes the wrong ones.

All I can do is ensure that if she makes a bad decision, the consequence won’t be motherhood, or disease or a surgical abortion.  And the best way to do that is to ensure that she, and any partner she may be with, knows enough about contraception to limit their risk.  It isn’t perfect, and it won’t guarantee happiness to her.  But nothing in life is guaranteed, no matter how much we may want it.  And asking for perfect decisions from our children and refusing to prepare them for imperfection is a recipe for disaster.