Quote of the Day 7-16-10
In Kindergarten, the new curriculum proposes that those 5 and 6 year olds know the proper terminology for body parts, such as penis, scrotum and testicles. You see, it’s far more important that they don’t use the word “pee-pee” and that they are sexually knowledgeable and empowered, at age 5, than that they know how to spell their own names and count to 20.
~Lori Ziganto, discussing MT’s new public school “health curriculum,” Hot Air, July 14
Jul.16, 2010 12:47 pm |
Quote of the Day |
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
What was the organization that first went after “Joe Camel” because the cartoony character promoted smoking to young people? Where are they on these issues?
Kids in kindergarten should spend more time on basic kindergarten stuff, but I do think little kids should know what the real names of body parts are. It’s like how kids don’t need to learn baby talk, because you can’t grow up and speak baby talk – why tell a kid they have a “pee-pee” when you’re just going to have to tell them the real word later anyway?
Marauder,
The advantage of using cute, diminutive names such as pee-pee is that it protects the child from picking up on adult conversations in public places, or on the news.
If my child only knows pee-pee, then hearing a news report of Elena Bobbit cutting off her husband’s penis does not become an occasion of worry, trauma, or early distorted thinking about the nature of spousal relations. Such language tends to sail harmlessly over the child’s head.
You’re right Gerard! Also, one of the ladies on last Saturday’s webcast admitted that when she was pro-abortion, she and her colleagues deliberately worked to teach young children the ‘right’ words as a tactic to separate them from the familiar terms that their families used. That way, they begin at a very young age to see their parents as silly and outdated. This is how you groom young people for future abortion $$$. It is sinister and not for the benefit of children’s education. In fact, there should be NO sex education in schools as it exists now. Instead, they should go back to the way it used to be when it was covered in biology class and the students learned it in context. Right now what’s being done is sexual indoctrination.
Funny story.
My 5 year old was having a bit of a problem with grabing himself when he needed to use the restroom. Obviously this is a habit we wanted to break before kindergarten, so I explained to him that he should only touch his penis if he’s in the restroom, as it is a private part.
His response? Touch my peanuts? Huh? We’ll stick with pee-pee for now!
Sometimes even ADULTS don’t use the adult words for their body parts. People seem to think it’s ‘adorable’ that Oprah says ‘ my va-jay-jay’.
“..sexually knowledgeable and empowered, at age 5,”
Empowered? At age 5? To do WHAT, exactly?
Empowered to learn about sexual positions by age 10 and empowered after that to become promiscuous and repeat customers of PP.
Planned Parenthood is poised to teach sex ed in public school settings. We best get to know our school board members!!
Gerard, I actually was a little kid during the whole Lorena Bobbit thing, and nobody ever contextualized it to me that way. Just because a kid hears something doesn’t mean his or her parents have to leave the kid to his/her own thoughts about it. Also, I only heard about it after most of the media frenzy was over, because my parents simply didn’t have me around any non-child-appropriate conversations.
Besides, let’s say the kid hears it and asks what a penis is. Little kids ask what words mean all the time, so either the parent is going to have to tell them anyway or lie about it, the latter contributing to the mindset that there’s something secretive or forbidden about the mere fact of having genitals.
Ninek, I agree that schools should go back to biology-based sex ed, but I don’t think there’s anything essentially sinister about telling kids the real names of body parts. If people were just honest with their kids in the first place, pro-choicers would have one less weapon.
Pamela: Five bucks says she really means “vulva” half of the time, too…
Marauder, I have to agree with you. My parents mostly used accurate terms and I was not scarred by any of it. When I asked questions, I got answers – the answers grew more nuanced or informative as I got older, so it’s not like when I asked about sex I got a whole dissertation on foreplay, or something.
Conversations did not sail over my head simply because I didn’t know the words in them – that was, often, precisely the REASON I asked about them. I didn’t know what rape was. I heard it spoken. I found my mom and asked, “What is rape?” I was a child when the Bobbitt thing happened, and I imagine that if for some reason I did not already know what a penis was by then, I’d have simply said “What’s a penis?”
A friend of mine works at a daycare and it is explicitly written in their information that they use accurate terms for body parts. Some parents get angry about it, but the staff can’t be responsible for keeping up with each specific family’s preferred ‘fake’ term.
Hi Ashley,
Do you agree with the quote that says five year-olds should be sexually empowered? Do you have a clue what that even means, because I don’t.
The only power I can think of that a five year old has is to be a five year old.
Isn’t it logical to assume that the earlier a child is exposed to sexuality, the earlier he/she will partake when a bit older and risk becoming pregnant at an inconvenient time, and that this may lead to an abortion? This concern I have has nothing to do with sexual hang ups.
Where is the quote that says five-year olds should be sexually empowered?
QuOD
“In Kindergarten, the new curriculum proposes that those 5 and 6 year olds know the proper terminology for body parts, such as penis, scrotum and testicles. You see, it’s far more important that they don’t use the word “pee-pee” and that they are sexually knowledgeable and empowered, at age 5, than that they know how to spell their own names and count to 20.”
~Lori Ziganto, discussing MT’s new public school “health curriculum,” Hot Air, July 14
Yes, but that’s the writer’s [sarcastic?] interjection, not something written in the curriculum. The only actual example of the curriculum for kindergartners that I was using proper anatomical terminology, which I do not think is the same as making sure five-year olds are “sexually empowered.”
“I don’t think kids learning about their body parts counts as a “sexy” experience.”
Ashley,
I’ll give you that one. It all depends on the presentation and the presenter.
Regarding your other claim, I’ll ask you to consider how many teens in the Bible Belt are married teens? (Ages for legal marriage tend to be lower there, if I’m not mistaken.) I don’t think statistics for teen pregnancy generally distinguish between married and unmarried…
A resistance to sex ed (in schools) doesn’t mean a person ignores the issue in the home.
Could liberal states have the lowest teen pregnancy rates because they tend to have higher abortion rates? I think so.
“I think kids do NOT need to know about sex before they get to the lower end of puberty age. (Maybe 10?) Why do they need to know the details of something they’re physically incapable of doing? Can’t these people let kids be kids?”
I wouldn’t go out of my way to tell a five-year-old about sex, but a lot of them want to know where babies come from. I think people should tell kids the truth, but I also agree that little kids don’t need to know all about sex like your friend did. (I think “unusal level of sexual knowledge for the child’s age” is one of the classic signs of sexual abuse.)
My parents were trying to have another baby while I was in preschool and kindergarten, and seeing as I had half-day for both I sometimes went along on appointments. I think the conversation was something along the lines of, “Why are we going to the doctor?” “Because Mama and Daddy are trying to see if we can have another baby.” “How do you make another baby?” “Women have eggs and men have sperm, and if a sperm cell goes into an egg cell, another baby starts to grow.” “How does the sperm get to the egg?” “The father puts his penis inside the mother’s vagina, and then the sperm comes out and moves toward the egg in her body.”
To me it didn’t seem sexual, it was just how things worked. We had a whole series of books called “How Things Work” that explained how you could hear people on the phone or how plants grew from seeds, so it was kind of like one of those in my mind.
I don’t think giving kids sex education is necessarily grooming them to become abortion clinic customers in the future. I know that there are some crackpots who want kids to start having sex as early as possible, and any attempt to make them wait is shaming sexual “expression” or blocking “natural behavior”. But that doesn’t mean some very basic, elementary sex education (like teaching them they have a vagina or penis, that these are parts we generally don’t display in public, and that these things are what adults use to make babies) would be harmful.
To me, “sexual empowerment” at the kindergarten stage means being able to distinguish between affection and molestation. Sometimes kids are too little to understand that private parts are private and that they’re being violated – or, in the case of child perpetrators, that they are violating someone else.